“On Thursday 26 January, 7:30pm, AUX presents the second Art Writing event, following November’s kick-off. Curated by London-based collective KIOSK, who will remain “present” throughout the night via a Skype screening, the evening features art writing and performance from artists in the UK and the USA by Nightwatch, The Collect, The Original Copy, Bonnie Jones, and Helen Kaplinsky.

From London, Helen Kaplinsky is a curator and writer currently holding a curatorial fellowship related to the UK Arts Council collection, and who often curates programmes in collaboration with emerging contemporary artists in event-based, experimental formats. Bonnie Jones is a Korean-American writer, improvising musician and performer, working primarily with electronic music and text, interested in how people perceive, “read”, and interact with these sounds and texts given our current technological moment.”

http://www.kioskcollective.org/

http://www.voxpopuligallery.org/

The next Bristol Tertulia on November the 3rd at Spike Island, Bristol from 6pm will feature Reading for Reading’s Sake curator Helen Kaplinsky talking about her residence with art group psychoanalYSL at 501 Art Centre, Chongqing, China. Also Ella Finer (an artist who has featured in RfRS exhibitions previously) a doctoral candidate at Roehampton investigating interpretations of the female voice on record and Mercedes Aguirre, a Spanish classicist and short story writer will make presentations.

Helen Kaplinsky curated and commissioned a solo exhibition in China at Ceiling Space this summer with London/Berlin-based artist/DJ collective psychoanalYSL(Christopher Thomas, Benjamin Orlow and Joey Holder). This was part of curatorial residency in association with 501 Contemporary Art Centre, Chongqing and Chinese Art Centre, UK. The artists planned to exhibit an artwork, which responded to the market’s dependence on political cache in Chinese contemporary art; however, the project faced two levels of censorship from both hosts in China and platforms in the UK. The main commission was nine metre neon text which reverberates these prohibitions, using over-identification as a strategy.

Ella Finer will introduce her practice based in gender, sound and performance with an annotated extended play through a selection of records made during and alongside her doctoral study. Ranging widely in their content: from reformed broken vinyl to a chapter from her “audio thesis”, the records chart a process of experimenting with the relationship between the female voice and body. The talk will focus on how the voice may be handled or imagined as a tangible material, especially when in the attempts to preserve voice on record, it might be altered by the material of the document itself.

Ella Finer is a London based artist. Her MPhil (2008) at the University of Glasgow focused on the female body in photographic space, and culminated in the transformation of a theatre into a working camera and dark-room. Her current practice concerns gender and sound and the materialising of female voice and presence in Theatre. Ella’s recent projects include producing the Building Sound symposium (www.buildingsound.org) at the National Theatre, London; live and radio performances of her voice-scores A Play for Offstage Voices, Playing Host and 1974; and a live, choreographed voicing of her doctoral thesis: Material Voice in Pitch Black.

Mercedes Aguirre will speak as a university teacher and as a writer of fiction, comparing both styles of writing, but focussing on her last book of fiction and the way she has used Greek myths for the fictional stories which compose her book: ‘Mythical Tales of the Everyday World’.

“Aguirre’s latest work is a collection of short stories with echoes of classical mythology, a field in which she specialises. She employs remarkable ingenuity and originality, making the tales more than just a straightforward reproduction of classical models. Popular locations so often used in mythology, such as Argos, Athena or Troy, are cunningly transposed to the urban landscapes of romantic Madrid, gritty Bilbao or glamourous Los Angeles. The themes are undoubtedly contemporary, but also recognisable as issues with which classical heroes grapple. One can draw a parallel between the complexities of sexuality in The Race, set in Madrid in 2006AD, and the relationship between Iante and Iphis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, set in Rome in 8AD. Another allusion is to the struggle of women to assert their own identity in a male-dominated world, which is apparent in The Quest and Let Me Die For You. Aguirre has skillfully updated her theme to create an innovative, engaging, and entertaining collection.” Harriet Smart, InMadrid, August, 2011

FRIEDRICH ENGELS: THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND: Little Ireland, 1842-2011 Video/DVD, Rainer Ganahl, 2011 (image credit Phil Davenport)

The Rainer Ganahl show at Bury Transport Museum continues until June 19th 2011. Rainer has been busy as always adding to the documentation of his practice and has created a micro-site for the project ganahl.info/workingclass. It’s still under construction (so forgive spelling mistakes etc) but it gives an impression of his expansive, and often obsessive rate of production. Indicative of the font jumps and spelling mistakes you find on this site is a certain attitude Rainer takes toward production, a kind of anti-professionalization. The artist gets an idea and can hardly pause for a breath before it MUST be realised. Myself and Maurice invited him to undertake a reading seminar and we’ve ended up with an extensive body work which pulled with it a universe of various proportions, from musicians to painters, print-makers and chauffeurs. Everyone that helped to make this happen [Simon Flatley, Aliyah Hussain, Kirsty Marijewycz, Emma McClelland, Bill Campbell, Lowri Evans, Maria Dada and Sarah Kerrison] we salute you!

One of my favorite outcomes of the project are the songs with lyrics by Rainer and music by local Salford based artist Maria Dada

DIE INTERNATIONALE – (german pronounciation )
damned of the Earth
The State oppresses you !
stand up, stand up !

workers and unemployed
join the great party of ebay shoppers !
stand up, stand up !

The earth belongs only to men !
animals, plants and fish
you can go to reside elsewhere !

How much of your brain
have they consumed ?
How much of your money is left ?
These ravens, these vultures !

Spend it on ebay ! spend it on ebay
The screen will shine forever
The screen will shine forever
Stand up, stand up

And sing
DIE INTERNATIONALE (german pronounciation)
DIE INTERNATIONALE

post by Helen Kaplinsky

RAINER GANAHL press

'Ebay Engels', limited edition print, Rainer Ganahl, 2011 for Bury Text Festival

“On the lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin without a roof, piled with debris; the third stands so low that the lowest floor is uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. Here the background embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the ‘Poor-Law Bastille’ of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people’s quarter below.”

– From The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 by Friedrich Engels

The embryonic musings of what was later to become socialism, The Condition of the Working Class in England was written by the 22 year old son of an industrialist on his arrival in Manchester in 1842, the heart of the industrial revolution. Sent to run a factory in order to ‘stay out of trouble’, young Engels ventured out at night after his hours managing the factory to undertake a social investigation, prowling the mean, dangerous streets of Manchester’s poorest districts. Correlating industrialisation with the declining condition of the labouring class, Engel’s legendary account includes resonant descriptions of urban living in the nineteenth century documenting disease and poor sanitation resulting from rapid growth and exploitation. By the age of 24 Engels had completed the Condition of the Working Class. Originally published in 1844 in German, addressed specifically to German audiences, it was not published in English for another 47 years.

Reading for Reading’s Sake have invited Artist Rainer Ganahl (Austrian, based in NY) to be in residence in Greater Manchester from 18th- 22nd May 2011 as part of the Bury Text Festival. Ganahl will be hosting a reading seminar on Engels’ the Condition of the Working Classes over three days, culminating in a solo show where documentation of the seminar will be shown. The 3 seminars will take place on the following dates: Weds 18th May 2011, 18.30 pm-20.30 pm, Thurs 19th, May 2011, 2pm-4pm and Fri 20th May 2011, 18.30pm-20.30 pm at Bury Transport Museum. Reading seminars have been part of the artist’s practice for around 15 years and you can see some of the previous here.http://www.ganahl.info/reading.html

This is not an academic exercise for people specifically interested in the work of Engels, it is open to all aptitudes. No prior reading knowledge or advance reading is required. All reading will take place during the 2 hours sessions over 3 days. Participants in the reading seminar will be filmed and photographed as part of an artwork by Rainer Ganahl, and at the end of the 3 days will be gifted a limited edited print artwork by the artist in gratitude of contributions.

If you are interested in the reading seminar, please get in touch with curator Helen Kaplinsky at kaplinskyhelen@yahoo.co.uk with ‘Ganahl seminar’ as the subject.
The exhibition and seminars take place at Bury Transport Museum, Castlecroft Road, BL9 0LN

We also have opportunities to volunteer with the production of the exhibition. Please contact Helen with ‘Ganahl Volunteer’ as the subject for further information.

On the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of December 2010, Reading for Reading’s Sake presented an exhibition and symposium entitled UNFIXED at Flat Time House, the home and studio of the late British artist John Latham, 210 Bellenden Road, London, SE15 4BW. As a preview artists in the show, including Patrick Coyle and Ella Finer discussed their relationship to reading with curators Maurice Carlin and Helen Kaplinsky and John Hill from Flat Time House on Resonance FM.

Flat Time House, 210 Bellenden Road, London, SE15 4BW

Thursday 2^{nd –} Saturday 4^th December 2010

Privateview (including performances): 2. Dec, 6-9pm

PERFORMANCES ::: FILM ::: READING GROUPS ::: OFFPRINT LIBRARY ::: READING MOMENTS ::: INSTALLATIONS

Reading for Reading’s Sake is an ongoing platform for a discursive series of events that shift in geographical and conjectural location with each instalment; focused on reading, through artistic practice.

Flat Time House, the foundation and archive of late artist John Latham are, pleased to host three days of events organised by Reading for Reading’s Sake with David Berridge, Maurice Carlin, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Patrick Coyle, Ella Finer, John Hill, Helen Kaplinsky and Stefan Sulzer

For full programme scroll to end of post.

To read is to absorb, comprehend, determine and evaluate. These processes come to pass not only in the interpretation of a text, but in the perception of any given material. All material is data to be read, accordingly all material is privy to the particular positioning of a participant within a given time and space.

John Latham understood books as symbols of fixed knowledge. The printed word, inscribed for its purpose in a particular moment lays unchanged, whilst the universe moves on regardless. How can artists reactivate the fixedness of publications and make the words move with the universe?

David Berridge will be delivering a performance and workshop around his continuing delineation of reading as an active practice; a publishing device. Moving on from its earlier incarnation at RfRS in Salford, READING AS PUBLISHING explores how acts and moments of individual reading can be published, and what shifts occur as private moments of textual absorption are translated into public performances, conversations, stories, silences, and images.

Re - is an ongoing, iterative performance reading that presses on two writers – and two writing practices – coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text). For UNFIXED,Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a re-iteration of Re - that essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages.

Patrick Coyle will present a selection of recent findings from his ongoing Spellcheck Stamp project. The stamp is an analogue copyediting device which pushes the published word back into the site of production; the Microsoft word interface. Presented with the collection of ephemera, we are invited to imagine the reading event; a stamping moment.

Ella Finer will perform her script Playing Host, a score for live and recorded voices, where the distinct spaces of the mouth, the record and the air are imagined as scenes and sites which contour the voice into meaningful motions. Questioning their own dimensionality, voices ask how the spaces, which play host to them, carve and calibrate their advent into event.

As a member of staff in the Flat Time House Mental Furniture (education) Department, John Hill has taken this opportunity to deliver his particular interpretation of Latham’s work. An A to U of Flat Time Theory will take place in the Mind which showcases a permanent display of works demonstrating Latham’s Time-Base Theory.

The Reading Room, a project by Stefan Sulzer delivers apparently universal fables. The artist worked with a curator to make a subjective selection of fictional stories, made available in the form of articulation by actors. For British audiences subtitles highlight the pace of dictatation; the reading is fixed inside the camera frame, but displaced from confines of the library.

Contributors to the programme work with an attention to the publicness and privateness of any given reading moment and the activation therein. Certain discourses reappear across works in the show, most prominently: collectivity and singularity, text as score, pedagogy, haptic gestures, instruction and fallibility, displaced words, the mediation of one text with another, dissemination, dialogue, bodies of knowledge, publishing as performance, and the fixedness of the printed word.

Programme:

Thursday 2 December 6 – 9pm
6pm Launch of GO WITH ME Library of offprints* run by Helen Kaplinsky and Maurice Carlin
7pm Performances by David Berridge, Patrick Coyle, Ella Finer and John Hill

*An offprint is an excerpt from a larger publication. Please bring an offprint to donate to the library along with an instruction for reading to accompany this. Visitors are invited to borrow offprints from the library over the weekend. On Saturday afternoon there will be a discussion of readings made over the period of the show. Donations to the library will be taken throughout December

Friday 3 December 12 – 6pm
2pm Flat Time Seminar A discussion of John Latham’s theoretical writings with Flat Time House’s Mental Furniture Department
3.30pm Reading as Publishing Workshop and presentation by David Berridge

Saturday 4 December 12 – 6pm
2pm Screening of Stefan Sulzer’s project The Reading Room
3pm Re – (Unfixed) A reading by Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker
4pm GO WITH ME drop in reading group to return and discuss texts in the library

Events are free and open to all. To RSVP for a specific event and for reading lists please contactinfo@flattimeho.org.uk

Over the past year Reading for Readings Sake have organised a series of symposia focused on reading, through artistic practice. Over 20 programmed events have taken place at venues including Spike Island, Bristol, Islington Mill, Salford and 1 Thoresby Street, Nottingham.

www.flattimeho.org.uk

Maurice Carlin and Helen Kaplinsky invite you to participate in a reading of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The story of a young factory worker on a Saturday night in Nottingham will form the starting point for a wider discussion of inebriation, leisure time and the pleasure of consumption. Alcoholic drinks will be provided. This event is not appropriate for persons under 16 years.

Reading for Reading’s Sake is an ongoing platform for a discursive series of events that shift in geographical and conjectural location with each installment.

This talk is part of a series of events curated by YH485 press as part of their commission for Sideshow.

In October 2010, Sideshow will take place for the second time round supporting the prestigious British Art Show 7, “In The Days Of The Comet” curated by Lisa le Feuvre & Tom Morton, for its nationwide launch at Nottingham Contemporary, The New Art Exchange and the Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery.

Sideshow complements Nottingham’s growing artist-led scene and do-it-yourself attitude towards contemporary art. Sideshow is a unique city-wide event in Nottingham presenting a range of contemporary art exhibitions, ambitious new commissions, site specific public projects, artists talks, performances, screenings and music events in the artist-led spaces, studios and empty buildings of the city.

15 new artists commissions involving 100 artists from the UK collaborating with 50 organisations have been selected by Rob Bowman, Artangel, London; Lotte Juul Petersen, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Phil Duckworth & Ben Sadler, Juneau Projects, Birmingham and Kitty Anderson, The Common Guild, Glasgow.

Sideshow 2010 is co-ordinated and supported by Nottingham Visual Arts and funded by Arts Council England, Igniting Ambitions on behalf of the Legacy Trust UK and Nottingham City Council.

Find out more about their Bookmobile tour…. Please note this event precedes the Rotterdam VHS festival presented by Trade in the One Thoresby Street Attic.

6th of October, 2.15pm on Charlie Wooley’s neu! Radio at [space]129—131 MARE STREETLONDON E8 3RH

‘The Artists Assistant: Acts of Obedience’
Premised upon a contractual agreement, this work by Hammam Aldouri saw the artist employ curator Helen Kaplinsky as an assistant. The assistant was granted conceptual authority  and for the period of the exhibition gave instructions to the artist. In this case the assistant tasked the artist each week to read a given text in gallery space. Excepts from the readings will be played.

Discussion: Authorship, autonomy and role-play
Curators are constantly mis-trusted by artists for their heavy handed authorship of exhibitions, which can over-write the autonomy of artistic practices. Meanwhile artists increasingly operate in a curatorial fashion, ‘directing’ artworks and relying on teams of assistants and specialists. Despite this, artworks depend upon the brand of a singlular author.

For the full programme as part of WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION see:  TPW_Radio_SET

3rd September – 3rd October 2010

Opening Event Friday 3rd September 6-9pm.

Exhibition/reading room open every Fri-Sun 12-5pm, or by appointment.
See www.thepigeonwing.co.uk/events for new additions and full program of events.For their residency at The Pigeon Wing, VerySmallKitchen presents a month long exploration of how writing moves (or not) between the locations of WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION. Throughout September The Pigeon Wing will be both workspace and exhibition, offering space for a programme of exhibitions, readings, performances, research projects, libraries, and screenings, exploring an abundance of forms and practices at the interface of writing and art practices.