Book launch: That Fire Over There by Prem Sahib
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Friday 8 September, 6–8pm
Phillida Reid
10 – 16 Grape Street
London, WC2H 8DY
Free and open to all
Come and join Book Works and Phillida Reid Gallery for the launch of the new book by Prem Sahib, That Fire Over There at Phillida Reid, Grape Street on 8 September.
That Fire Over There takes fire as a metaphor for ideas around queer attachment, proximity, and personal and collective transformation. It also excavates the history of a real fire which in 1981 destroyed the Hambrough Tavern – a contested site symbolic of provocation and conflict against far-right groups in Southall, west London, where Prem Sahib grew up.
Prem Sahib will also have a new solo exhibition, The Life Cycle of a Flea, opening at Phillida Reid on 6 October 2023.
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Queen For A Day: screening and book launch at ICA
Friday 15 September
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
Coinciding with the release of artist Deborah-Joyce Holman’s book Queen for a Day, this event is a day-long screening of Holman’s Moment 2 (2022), followed by an in-person reading by Francis Whorrall-Campbell and conversation with the artist and Imani Mason Jordan.
Queen for a Day is Holman’s debut publication, staging a conversation between two of the artist’s films, Moment and Moment 2 (2022), and the work of cinema verité they take as a primary material: Shirley Clarke’s film Portrait of Jason (1967). One ‘queen’ of this title is Jason Holliday, the Black gay male subject at the centre of Clarke’s film with whom Holman wants to act in solidarity. Finding Jason captured by the extractive gaze and exhausting line of questioning of a white female director, Holman works to reproduce his words, rather than his image, placing them as looping samples of script in the mouths of two performers, Imani Mason Jordan (Moment) and Rebecca Bellantoni (Moment and Moment 2). The loop is intended to be liberatory, a way of paying homage to Jason’s utterances via repetition, and to render them abstract and opaque, allowing the new script – included in this book as a series of textual interludes – to function as camouflage.
The new publication features newly commissioned essays by Olamiju Fajemisin, Noémi Michel and Francis Whorrall-Campbell, and an interview with Holman and curator Cédric Fauq, who all offer close analyses of both works, opening up diverse ways of understanding Holman’s aesthetic strategies and politics of representation via film history, decolonial and queer theory.
Co-published by Book Works and Luma Westbau, with the generous support from ICA London, Arts Council England and the Swiss Cultural Fund UK.
Moment was shown at the ICA as part of Image Behaviour. Moment 2 was exhibited at CFGNY at SculptureCenter, New York City (2023), schwarzescafé, Luma Westbau, Zürich (2022) and Cordova, Barcelona (2022).
Queen For A Day will be available in the ICA Bookshop.
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September Book of the Month: Sarah Pierce
Sketches of Universal History… presents an interplay of voices, legacies, friendships and influences that make up an art practice. Conceived from a period of collaboration between the artist, curator and writer Rike Frank, with publishers Book Works and The Showroom, the book contains an interview between the artist and editor, and specially-commissioned essays by Melissa Gronlund and Tom Holert, and is designed by Peter Maybury.
Following the American sociologist C. Wright Mills’ suggested practice of filing the ideas that compel you, then periodically unpacking, shuffling and spreading out the contents in search of new connections, each section of the book proposes routes through ten years of material. Facsimiles of conversations, letters, clippings and other source documents, on events that range from student protests at Kent State University in 1971to student debates on the State of British Art in 1978; the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin; Charles Harrison’s letters from When Attitudes Become Form, poems by Allen Ginsberg, and Lucy Lippard’s photo captions on the work of Eva Hesse, all revealing processes of research and a continual renegotiation of the terms for making art.
The material is gathered from Pierce’s ongoing and expansive exhibition projects that use archives, performance, discussions, and installation with sound and video elements. Presented as a monograph, the book draws on Pierce’s own biography as an artist, her history and ‘progress’, as well as historical and counter-cultural references, and the proximities of past artworks, that frame her work.
In 2003, Pierce began using an umbrella term, The Metropolitan Complex, to describe her art practice as articulated through multiple voices and collective inputs. Much of her work stakes a claim on the incidental or peripheral conversations and gestures that surround cultural work, as the sites of dissent and self-determination. Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Several Authors by Sarah Pierce provides a comprehensive insight into the complexities and slippages between individual drive and institutional context. An abridged chronology reflects the community of curators, students, archivists, reading groups and artists who have been direct interlocutors in Pierce’s practice.
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Bookbinding and boxmaking courses starting in September
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The Book Works Studio will launch two new evening classes in September. Bookbinding for Beginners runs on Monday evenings from 18 September for eight weeks, and Boxmaking for Beginners is on Wednesdays, starting 20 September for seven weeks.
For more info or to book on either course please contact Jan Burgess – jan@bookworks.org. or 020 7247 2536.
![](https://bookworks.org.uk/app/uploads/2023/09/2023_Sept_Bookbinding.jpg)
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