Friday 15 September
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH

Screening 12–7pm
Talk/book launch 7–8.30pm
Book free tickets

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.

Our book of the month, with 30% off until the end of September, is Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Several Authors by Sarah Pierce.

Scene of the Myth, a major retrospective of Pierce’s work, curated by Rike Frank, has just closed at IMMA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Read Judith Wilkinson’s review for ArtReview here.

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.