New Title: Property Journal
Amy Ching-Yan Lam  |
‘Around this time last year, I had a birthday astrology reading where the reader said they could tell, just by looking at my chart, that I had run away from home when I was seventeen. They said that this year would be a revisiting of that event, but it would happen in a completely different way.’
From December 2021 to December 2022, artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam kept a record of each time real estate, property or housing came up in conversation. She called this the Property Journal.
Over the course of a year, neighbourhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mould appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturiser; as property organises people’s lives, it also overtakes them. What began as a simple framework soon becomes an index of precarity, told through the indignities, dread, and dreamscapes of what we’re able to call ‘home’.
Tender, fierce, and mordantly funny, Property Journal is a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Baby Book (2023, Brick Books), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry, and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022, Eastside Projects). From 2006 to 2020 she was in the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.
Property Journal is co-published with Richmond Art Gallery, Canada, with the support of Canada Council as part of our Co-Series, no. 25.
Pre-orders will be sent out in September 2024, and Property Journal will be published in November 2024.
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Ways of Recording roundtable hosted by Bleet Zine
Thursday 22 August, 2024, 6.30pm
Artwords Bookshop
2-4 Clarence Road, London E5 8HB
Free but RSVP.
Book Works’ Louisa Bailey and Gavin Everall will be taking part in this round table on DIY publishing at Artwords on 22nd August. The event is hosted by Bleet Zine and also features P Eldridge (Sissy Anarchy) and Sophie Seita.
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An Una Marson Celebration at Southbank
Thursday 22 August, 2024, 8pm
National Poetry Library, Southbank Centre
Tickets/more info.
Delve into the life and work of the pioneering Jamaican feminist activist, poet, writer and first Black BBC producer at this evening of discussion and performance with artist and Book Works author, Rosa-Johan Uddoh.
Uddoh was shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2022 for her film-making and was Iniva’s Stuart Hall Library Artist-in-Residence in 2020. She is a lecturer in performance at Central Saint Martins, and her first book, Practice Makes Perfect, was published by Book Works and Focal Point Gallery in 2022.
This event is in partnership with Southwark’s Una Marson Library and follows a walking event from the Una Marson Library to the National Poetry Library earlier in the day. There’s also a chance to view a signed edition of one of Marson’s books and hear perspectives from librarians.
Find out more about the walking event, which is one of two walks taking place in August (Wednesday 14 & Thursday 22 August) on the Southwark Presents website, or by contacting either the Una Marson Library or National Poetry Library.
Image: She is Still Alive! by Rosa-Johan Uddoh in Southwark Park. Artist flag co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries and The Bower (2022).
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Arrhythmia series launch at Camden Arts Centre
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Thursday 29 August, 2024, 7pm
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London NW3 6DG
More info/RSVP
An evening of readings, performance and audiovisual work to launch Arrhythmia, a Book Works open submission series. Roy Claire Potter and Alice Walter will read from their debut novels, The Wastes and The Medium, introduced by series editor, Katrina Palmer.
Arrhythmia is a new series, publishing artists and writers whose work explores ideas of being out of joint with the predominant social order, whether through disrupted trajectories, physical displacement, or political dissonance. We asked for experimental work that articulates a discontinuous sense of identity, and writing, or where the combination of writing and images in which the rhythm of the text is self-consciously questioned. Four authors have been commissioned – novels by Roy Claire Potter and Alice Walter are out now and will be followed by two new titles by Andrew E. Colarusso and Kamwangi Njue in 2025.
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Read an extract from our August Book of the Month
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I’ll get my coat – Usman Saeed and Sukhdev Sandhu (2005)
BOOK OF THE MONTH – AUGUST 2024
A writer, an archivist and a painter set out on foot to explore the landscape of Britain. Eschewing the heritage trail they walk the streets of Dalston and Stoke Newington, the cemetery in Ilford, and through Manningham, journeying after the Muslim vernacular across the landscape − mapping Asian history, culture and ruins in Britain.
I’ll Get My Coat is a collaborative artists’ book, the end product of walks and talks between Sukhdev Sandhu, Sara Wajid, and Usman Saeed. Two share a similar culture and similar memories, of being Asian Britons, of aspirations and shame. The other, a painter and fashion photographer from Pakistan, is drawn to the license and possibilities that Britain offers, to a glamour that the others find themselves rejecting for an anthropology of Asian ruins.
Published as part of Scape Specific, commissioned by Sara Wajid.
Read an extract on the Book Works website.
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