Dr. Mkwesha is currently a researcher and teaches a Contemporary Research: Decolonising Knowledge at Helsinki University, Swedish School of Social Sciences, Centre of Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), Finland. Her PhD is on gender and the nation in Africa from Stellenbosch university, South Africa. She is an expert on representation and discourse analysis in African literature and culture and society. Her research interests are African studies, literary and cultural studies, race and ethnic relations, from a decolonial, postcolonial, black feminist and gender perspectives. She also teaches Black and African feminisms, African sexuality, Decolonial feminisms and Decolonising Development in Africa. She is also a social justice activist who founded Sahwira Africa International NGO working with migrant and Finnish youth on culture and arts from an anti/racist approach focusing on resistance, survival, thriving and transformation. She does anti/racism activism launching online petitions to influence policy and initiate discussions on representation and racism. She initiated and led successful campaigns against racism, discrimination, problematic and stereotypical representation of black people and Africa to advocate for change and influence policy in these successful online campaigns. She has worked in universities in Zimbabwe and South Africa as a lecturer and administrator. She is an African, Zimbabwean living and working in Finland.
Sasha Huber (1975, CH/FI) is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich, Switzerland. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland together with her family. Huber's work is primarily concerned with the politics of memory and belonging, particularly in relation to colonial residue left in the environment. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber is also claiming the compressed-air staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics, and started to refer to those artworks as pain-things. She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, aiming at dismantling the glaciologist’s lesser-known but contentious racist heritage. This long-term project (since 2008) has been concerned with unearthing and redressing the little-known history and cultural legacies of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), an influential proponent of “scientific” racism who advocated for segregation and “racial hygiene”. Huber has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, the 19th Sydney Biennial in 2014. Huber will start her first solo exhibition tour under the title You Name It. The tour begins at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam. The exhibition tour is commissioned by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto and Autograph in London.
Amalle Dublon’s writing has appeared in GLQ, Artpapers, and TDR: The Drama Review. They have exhibited artwork at Artists Space, NY, and ARGOS, Berlin. Amalle helped organize I Wanna Be with You Everywhere, a gathering of disabled artists, in 2019. They teach at the New School.
Sandraنور Wazaz is a DJ and artist working in video and installation. They were a 2020 fellow at Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability residency program and have exhibited at The 8th Floor, NY and Nook Gallery, Oakland, CA. Sandra lives in Brooklyn with their cat, Bean. This video is accompanied with an On The Waves with Sandraنور Wazaz playlist.
Mia You was born in Seoul, South Korea, grew up in Northern California, and now lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Her first full-length collection is I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), which Rachel Levitsky calls, “a companion, an aria to bodily discomfort and impossibility.” Lisa Robertson writes in The Brooklyn Rail, “That the gently derided ‘small drama of my suburban-middle-class-Korean-American life / makes poetry’ aligns You’s documentary project with mentors such as Mayer, Rankine, and Hejinian, and younger contemporaries such as Susan Briante.” You’s poems also have appeared as a chapbook, Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007), and an artist’s book, YOU (created by Thorsten Kiefer, 2004). She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the Universiteit Utrecht, after completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes essays and book reviews and has published them with Artforum, Bookforum, The Critical Flame, The Hairpin, Jacket2, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
AA Bronson (b. Michael Tims, 1946, in Vancouver, Canada) is an artist living and working in Berlin. He founded the artists' group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1969. For 25 years, they lived and worked together, exhibiting internationally, inventing new territories for themselves: performance art, video art, queer art, AIDS art. Since Felix and Jorge died of AIDS-related illness in 1994, AA has exhibited as a solo artist, often collaborating with younger generations. His work has addressed death, loss and mourning through performance and installation. Most recently he has returned to General Idea's AIDS works and continued in the context of a second pandemic.
Mercedes Azpilicueta is an Argentine visual and performance artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice has spanned theatrical mises-en-scènes and video installations, textile sculptures and drawing, sound works and 3D animation. With a particular interest in notions of the vulnerable or collective body, and the primal or dissident voice, her works have drawn inspiration from sources as diverse as Baroque painting, text messaging, medieval tapestries, street slang, and literary fiction, as well as singular figures including the Italian art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982), the Argentine-French performance artist Lea Lublin (1929–1999), the French futurist Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), and the Costa Rican-born Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas (1919–2012).
Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance, and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments.
Élisabeth Lebovici is an art historian and an art critic confined in Paris
Eloise Sweetman is a curator, artist, writer, and teacher. In 2018, she co-founded Shimmer with Jason Hendrik Hansma. This is a section of Intimacy as Embrace, Intimacy as Resistance written by Eloise in 2018.
Fayen d'Evie is an artist and writer living on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung country. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally, presenting collaborative projects that resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks.
Sofia Lo Bianco is an objects (sculpture and installation) conservator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), where she has worked since 2015. She complimented her training in conservation through a series of international internships including the Smithsonian and fieldwork for The Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology in Turkey.
Lizzie Boon is an emerging writer and artist-designer. Her practice engages with experimental writing and alternate publishing as a space for expanded perceptual translation, explication and distribution. In an often collaborative role, she considers the mutable and performative possibilities of writing and reading, particularly in the cross over of curatorial, published and conservation contexts.
Gordon Hall is a sculptor, performance-maker, and writer based in New York.
Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor, author of many novels and books about politics and urbanism. He was the Literary Editor of Nest magazine. The painting in the background is Woelv en hiver (12" x 12", 2005) by Geneviève Castrée. Reading from an unpublished novel, European Public Bathing, by Matthew Stadler.
Raqs Media Collective is a Delhi-based trio: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They make videos, high-tech objects, installations, and online projects exploring a world reshaped by globalization.
Isabelle Sully is an artist and writer. She is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, an imprint of Publication Studio Rotterdam, and assistant curator at Kunstverein, Amsterdam. This video requires the closed captions to be turned on.
Abdullah Qureshi is an artist, educator, and cultural producer. Through his research and production, he interrogates ways that queerness and resistance manifest within Muslim contexts.
Sarah Rifky is a writer and curator. She is the co-founder of Beirut (2012–15), an artists’ institution in Cairo; co-curator of the 2013 Jogjakarta Biennial; curator at Townhouse (2009–11); and agent for Documenta 13 (2012).
Using photography, sculpture, drawing, text, glass, video, and painting, artist Jason Hendrik Hansma explores the notions of the in-between, the liminal, and the nearly articulate. Jason is also co-director of Shimmer.
Niko Hallikainen is a performance poet and writer. Niko creates text-based solo performances that disrupt limits. This poetic essay deals with virtual love and features the track ’Dying’ by Australian duo HTRK. @lowincomeglow
Çağlar Köseoğlu is a poet and educator. He teaches literature, politics and postcolonial theory at EUC. His second collection of poetry, Nasleep [Aftermath], is forthcoming at het balanseer.
Alireza Abbasy, born in Tehran, Iran, is a Rotterdam-based artist, writer, engineer and the co-founder and editor of Sarmad Platform. He holds an MA in Fine Art from St. Joost Breda (2019) and a PhD in Technology Management from Delft University of Technology (2012).
Alaa Abu Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer. His practice is centred around developing and experiencing alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding intersect.
Ulufer Çelik (b. in 1992, TR) finished Bachelor of Architecture at Bilgi University in Istanbul and holds a MA from the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. She works with film, sound, poetry and performance. Her work was recently shown in ‘Fresh Myths, Different Times’ Exhibition in collaboration with Merve Kilicer at Corridor Project Space, ‘Sleeping with Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life’ Exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2020), ‘B’ Exhibition at Belmacz Gallery(London, 2019), ‘Quintessential Pirateness in the Age of Konijneneiland a.k.a. Coney Island Adventures’ at Rib (Rotterdam, 2019). She has participated in group shows at Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Vienna 2019), the Institute for Provocation (Beijing 2018), Litost Gallery (Prag, 2019), YellowBrick Gallery (Athens,2018). Çelik lives and works in Rotterdam.
Adelaide Bannerman is a curator based in London, and is currently in residence with Phytology Cultural Institute at the Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, planning a site-specific residency and public programme for the site between 2021-22.
She is editing and reading here extracts from their publication Viaduktens Avsked (Farewell to the Viaduct) and specifically, the letters exchanged between members of the artist-research group Hiroko Tsuchimoto, Alicja Rogalska, Malin Ståhl and Anita Wernström who since 2018 have been collaborating on a series of public art projects in Östersund, central Sweden. Their performance-practices critically consider public space, people, and movement and are commissioned by IntraGalactic arts collective in collaboration with Public Art Agency Sweden.
Dagmar Bosma is an artist and cultural programmer working around notions of queer failure and the residual. They are currently undertaking a masters degree in fine arts at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where they are also based. They read to you from 'P.U.F.', a text in process about the 18th century non-binary evangelist The Public Universal Friend, which is part of a larger ongoing investigation into figures of queer history and the written accounts on these figures. Please turn on the closed captions for this reading.
EN
Shimmer (Rotterdam) and PUBLICS (Helsinki) present Across The Way With... an informal online reading aloud program on intimacy in the public domain. Launched in May 2020, with a growing list of readers from Finland, The Netherlands and across the world.
ABOUT ACROSS THE WAY WITH...
In Lauren Berlant’s essay Intimacy: A Special Issue, she tells us that everyone thinks they know how to do intimacy, but it is something that is quickly misinterpreted. Intimacy is troubling, fleeting, and challenging to speak about— and more especially to enact. Shimmer and PUBLICS explore intimacy’s obscurity by welcoming words of artists, poets, philosophers, curators, and others from Finland, The Netherlands and around the world. To bring our guests and audience together through a multifaceted subject in a time where racism, war, and greed infiltrates our lives, public intimacy becomes a political act of openness. We intend to challenge intimacy and go beyond the conventional understanding of intimacy as ‘only’ the ‘personal’. Instead, the program considers intimacy as a means to re-think the community and how ‘we’ modern humans in a digitized society engage in the care of one another.
We’re thinking about the texture of the voice, the rhythm of a body, the poetic and artistic methods of writing and how these forms of intimacy can be ‘voiced’ publically. Together we will create a space that is both public and intimate, digital and analogue, distant and in proximity. We choose to create an online platform as a support for the act of reading aloud for others and with others. For the audience it is the intimate act of being read to, it is the intimacy of the texture of the voice, the rhythms of breathing, the digitised voice streaming to you. In this way, rather than creating a ‘reading group’ for discussion, we will create a space of the phone in the pocket, heard on the tram, the laptop taken to bed, at work, in the kitchen. We’re thinking about the platform as a resource, a place available to contemplate, to flesh out the possibilities of access, a site that goes beyond our networks, and walls.
ABOUT PUBLICS
PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Vallila Helsinki, known for its industrial working class histories and, more recently, for its influx of divergent artistic and academic communities. Under the artistic direction of curator Paul O’Neill, with program manager and curator Eliisa Suvanto, PUBLICS explores a “work together” institutional model with multiple overlapping objectives, thematic strands and collaborations. PUBLICS is a constellation of practices, projects and productions. As such, PUBLICS proposes the term “Public” as always plural—as a concept; as a group of people (imagined, actualized or real); and as a contested spatio-temporal location/discourse in the world. The on-going project strands of PUBLICS are: PUBLICS Library; PUBLICS Talks; and PUBLICS Events and Performances. These initiatives will evolve in time and in parallel with the project’s longer-term curatorial programmes, PUBLICS Public Art Commissions.
IN @publicsfi FB @Publicsfi W www.publics.fi
NL
Shimmer (Rotterdam) en PUBLICS (Helsinki) presenteren Across The Way With…, een informeel online programma over intimiteit in de publieke ruimte. Tijdens het programma, dat in mei 2020 voor het eerst live ging, worden voordrachten gedeeld door een groeiende lijst van lezers uit Finland, Nederland en de rest van de wereld.
OVER ACROSS THE WAY WITH...
In Lauren Berlants essay Intimacy: A Special Issue vertelt ze ons dat iedereen denkt te weten hoe intimiteit werkt, maar dat het iets is dat snel verkeerd begrepen wordt. Intimiteit is ongemakkelijk, vluchtig, en een uitdaging om over te spreken — des te meer om aan deel te nemen. Shimmer en PUBLICS verkennen de obscure kant van intimiteit door de woorden van kunstenaars, dichters, filosofen, curatoren en anderen te verwelkomen. In het samenbrengen van onze gasten en publiek middels zo’n gelaagd onderwerp, in een tijd waar racisme, oorlog en hebzucht onze levens infiltreren, wordt publieke intimiteit een politiek gebaar van openheid. Onze intentie is om intimiteit aan de kaak te stellen en voorbij te gaan aan de conventionele opvatting ervan als ‘enkel’ ‘het persoonlijke’. In plaats daarvan beschouwt het programma intimiteit als een middel voor het her-overwegen van de gemeenschap en hoe ‘wij’ moderne mensen in een gedigitaliseerde maatschappij deelnemen aan de zorg voor elkaar.
We denken over de textuur van stem, het ritme van een lichaam, de poëtische en artistieke vormen van schrijven en hoe aan deze uitdrukkingen van intimiteit openlijk ‘stem’ gegeven kan worden. Samen creëren we een ruimte die zowel publiek als intiem is, digitaal en analoog, op afstand en in nabijheid. We hebben ervoor gekozen een online platform op te zetten om de geste van voordragen voor en met anderen, te ondersteunen. Voor het publiek is het de intieme act van voorgelezen worden, het is de voelbaarheid van de textuur van stem, de ritmes van ademhaling, de gedigitaliseerde intonatie die naar je toestroomt. Op deze manier creëren we, eerder dan een reading group voor discussie, een ruimte van de telefoon in je zak, waarnaar geluisterd wordt in de tram, de laptop vanuit het bed, op het werk, in de keuken. We beschouwen het platform als toevlucht, een plek die beschikbaar is voor contemplatie, om de mogelijkheden van toegang uit te werken en te belichamen, een gebied dat voorbij gaat aan onze netwerken, en muren.
OVER PUBLICS
PUBLICS is een cultureel agentschap met een toegewijde bibliotheek, evenementenruimte en een leeszaal in Vallila Helsinki, dat bekend staat om de geschiedenissen van haar industriële arbeidersklasse en, meer recentelijk, om haar influx van uiteenlopende artistieke en academische gemeenschappen. Onder het artistiek directeurschap van curator Paul O’Neill, met programma-manager en curator Eliisa Suvanto, onderzoekt PUBLICS een institutioneel “samen-werk” model met meerdere overlappende objectieven, thematische lijnen en collaboraties. PUBLICS is een constellatie van praktijken, projecten en producties. Zodoende stelt PUBLICS de term “Public” altijd als meervoud voor—als een concept; als een groep mensen (ingebeeld, geactualiseerd of echt); als een tegensprekelijke tijd-ruimte locatie en discours in de wereld. De voort-durende projectlijnen van PUBLICS zijn: PUBLICS Library; PUBLICS Talks; en PUBLICS Events and Performances. Deze initiatieven zullen zich door de tijd ontvouwen, en parallel aan de langdurige curatoriële programma’s van het project, PUBLICS Public Art Commissions.
IN @publicsfi FB @Publicsfi W www.publics.fi
Dr. Mkwesha is currently a researcher and teaches a Contemporary Research: Decolonising Knowledge at Helsinki University, Swedish School of Social Sciences, Centre of Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), Finland. Her PhD is on gender and the nation in Africa from Stellenbosch university, South Africa. She is an expert on representation and discourse analysis in African literature and culture and society. Her research interests are African studies, literary and cultural studies, race and ethnic relations, from a decolonial, postcolonial, black feminist and gender perspectives. She also teaches Black and African feminisms, African sexuality, Decolonial feminisms and Decolonising Development in Africa. She is also a social justice activist who founded Sahwira Africa International NGO working with migrant and Finnish youth on culture and arts from an anti/racist approach focusing on resistance, survival, thriving and transformation. She does anti/racism activism launching online petitions to influence policy and initiate discussions on representation and racism. She initiated and led successful campaigns against racism, discrimination, problematic and stereotypical representation of black people and Africa to advocate for change and influence policy in these successful online campaigns. She has worked in universities in Zimbabwe and South Africa as a lecturer and administrator. She is an African, Zimbabwean living and working in Finland.
Sasha Huber (1975, CH/FI) is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich, Switzerland. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland together with her family. Huber's work is primarily concerned with the politics of memory and belonging, particularly in relation to colonial residue left in the environment. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber is also claiming the compressed-air staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics, and started to refer to those artworks as pain-things. She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, aiming at dismantling the glaciologist’s lesser-known but contentious racist heritage. This long-term project (since 2008) has been concerned with unearthing and redressing the little-known history and cultural legacies of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), an influential proponent of “scientific” racism who advocated for segregation and “racial hygiene”. Huber has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, the 19th Sydney Biennial in 2014. Huber will start her first solo exhibition tour under the title You Name It. The tour begins at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam. The exhibition tour is commissioned by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto and Autograph in London.
Amalle Dublon’s writing has appeared in GLQ, Artpapers, and TDR: The Drama Review. They have exhibited artwork at Artists Space, NY, and ARGOS, Berlin. Amalle helped organize I Wanna Be with You Everywhere, a gathering of disabled artists, in 2019. They teach at the New School.
Sandraنور Wazaz is a DJ and artist working in video and installation. They were a 2020 fellow at Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability residency program and have exhibited at The 8th Floor, NY and Nook Gallery, Oakland, CA. Sandra lives in Brooklyn with their cat, Bean. This video is accompanied with an On The Waves with Sandraنور Wazaz playlist.
Mia You was born in Seoul, South Korea, grew up in Northern California, and now lives in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Her first full-length collection is I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), which Rachel Levitsky calls, “a companion, an aria to bodily discomfort and impossibility.” Lisa Robertson writes in The Brooklyn Rail, “That the gently derided ‘small drama of my suburban-middle-class-Korean-American life / makes poetry’ aligns You’s documentary project with mentors such as Mayer, Rankine, and Hejinian, and younger contemporaries such as Susan Briante.” You’s poems also have appeared as a chapbook, Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007), and an artist’s book, YOU (created by Thorsten Kiefer, 2004). She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the Universiteit Utrecht, after completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes essays and book reviews and has published them with Artforum, Bookforum, The Critical Flame, The Hairpin, Jacket2, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
AA Bronson (b. Michael Tims, 1946, in Vancouver, Canada) is an artist living and working in Berlin. He founded the artists' group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal in 1969. For 25 years, they lived and worked together, exhibiting internationally, inventing new territories for themselves: performance art, video art, queer art, AIDS art. Since Felix and Jorge died of AIDS-related illness in 1994, AA has exhibited as a solo artist, often collaborating with younger generations. His work has addressed death, loss and mourning through performance and installation. Most recently he has returned to General Idea's AIDS works and continued in the context of a second pandemic.
Mercedes Azpilicueta is an Argentine visual and performance artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice has spanned theatrical mises-en-scènes and video installations, textile sculptures and drawing, sound works and 3D animation. With a particular interest in notions of the vulnerable or collective body, and the primal or dissident voice, her works have drawn inspiration from sources as diverse as Baroque painting, text messaging, medieval tapestries, street slang, and literary fiction, as well as singular figures including the Italian art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982), the Argentine-French performance artist Lea Lublin (1929–1999), the French futurist Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), and the Costa Rican-born Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas (1919–2012).
Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance, and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments.
Élisabeth Lebovici is an art historian and an art critic confined in Paris
Eloise Sweetman is a curator, artist, writer, and teacher. In 2018, she co-founded Shimmer with Jason Hendrik Hansma. This is a section of Intimacy as Embrace, Intimacy as Resistance written by Eloise in 2018.
Fayen d'Evie is an artist and writer living on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung country. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally, presenting collaborative projects that resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks.
Sofia Lo Bianco is an objects (sculpture and installation) conservator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), where she has worked since 2015. She complimented her training in conservation through a series of international internships including the Smithsonian and fieldwork for The Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology in Turkey.
Lizzie Boon is an emerging writer and artist-designer. Her practice engages with experimental writing and alternate publishing as a space for expanded perceptual translation, explication and distribution. In an often collaborative role, she considers the mutable and performative possibilities of writing and reading, particularly in the cross over of curatorial, published and conservation contexts.
Gordon Hall is a sculptor, performance-maker, and writer based in New York.
Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor, author of many novels and books about politics and urbanism. He was the Literary Editor of Nest magazine. The painting in the background is Woelv en hiver (12" x 12", 2005) by Geneviève Castrée. Reading from an unpublished novel, European Public Bathing, by Matthew Stadler.
Raqs Media Collective is a Delhi-based trio: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They make videos, high-tech objects, installations, and online projects exploring a world reshaped by globalization.
Isabelle Sully is an artist and writer. She is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, an imprint of Publication Studio Rotterdam, and assistant curator at Kunstverein, Amsterdam. This video requires the closed captions to be turned on.
Abdullah Qureshi is an artist, educator, and cultural producer. Through his research and production, he interrogates ways that queerness and resistance manifest within Muslim contexts.
Sarah Rifky is a writer and curator. She is the co-founder of Beirut (2012–15), an artists’ institution in Cairo; co-curator of the 2013 Jogjakarta Biennial; curator at Townhouse (2009–11); and agent for Documenta 13 (2012).
Using photography, sculpture, drawing, text, glass, video, and painting, artist Jason Hendrik Hansma explores the notions of the in-between, the liminal, and the nearly articulate. Jason is also co-director of Shimmer.
Niko Hallikainen is a performance poet and writer. Niko creates text-based solo performances that disrupt limits. This poetic essay deals with virtual love and features the track ’Dying’ by Australian duo HTRK. @lowincomeglow
Çağlar Köseoğlu is a poet and educator. He teaches literature, politics and postcolonial theory at EUC. His second collection of poetry, Nasleep [Aftermath], is forthcoming at het balanseer.
Alireza Abbasy, born in Tehran, Iran, is a Rotterdam-based artist, writer, engineer and the co-founder and editor of Sarmad Platform. He holds an MA in Fine Art from St. Joost Breda (2019) and a PhD in Technology Management from Delft University of Technology (2012).
Alaa Abu Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer. His practice is centred around developing and experiencing alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding intersect.
Ulufer Çelik (b. in 1992, TR) finished Bachelor of Architecture at Bilgi University in Istanbul and holds a MA from the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. She works with film, sound, poetry and performance. Her work was recently shown in ‘Fresh Myths, Different Times’ Exhibition in collaboration with Merve Kilicer at Corridor Project Space, ‘Sleeping with Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life’ Exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2020), ‘B’ Exhibition at Belmacz Gallery(London, 2019), ‘Quintessential Pirateness in the Age of Konijneneiland a.k.a. Coney Island Adventures’ at Rib (Rotterdam, 2019). She has participated in group shows at Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Vienna 2019), the Institute for Provocation (Beijing 2018), Litost Gallery (Prag, 2019), YellowBrick Gallery (Athens,2018). Çelik lives and works in Rotterdam.
Adelaide Bannerman is a curator based in London, and is currently in residence with Phytology Cultural Institute at the Bethnal Green Nature Reserve, planning a site-specific residency and public programme for the site between 2021-22.
She is editing and reading here extracts from their publication Viaduktens Avsked (Farewell to the Viaduct) and specifically, the letters exchanged between members of the artist-research group Hiroko Tsuchimoto, Alicja Rogalska, Malin Ståhl and Anita Wernström who since 2018 have been collaborating on a series of public art projects in Östersund, central Sweden. Their performance-practices critically consider public space, people, and movement and are commissioned by IntraGalactic arts collective in collaboration with Public Art Agency Sweden.
Dagmar Bosma is an artist and cultural programmer working around notions of queer failure and the residual. They are currently undertaking a masters degree in fine arts at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where they are also based. They read to you from 'P.U.F.', a text in process about the 18th century non-binary evangelist The Public Universal Friend, which is part of a larger ongoing investigation into figures of queer history and the written accounts on these figures. Please turn on the closed captions for this reading.
EN
Shimmer (Rotterdam) and PUBLICS (Helsinki) present Across The Way With... an informal online reading aloud program on intimacy in the public domain. Launched in May 2020, with a growing list of readers from Finland, The Netherlands and across the world.
ABOUT ACROSS THE WAY WITH...
In Lauren Berlant’s essay Intimacy: A Special Issue, she tells us that everyone thinks they know how to do intimacy, but it is something that is quickly misinterpreted. Intimacy is troubling, fleeting, and challenging to speak about— and more especially to enact. Shimmer and PUBLICS explore intimacy’s obscurity by welcoming words of artists, poets, philosophers, curators, and others from Finland, The Netherlands and around the world. To bring our guests and audience together through a multifaceted subject in a time where racism, war, and greed infiltrates our lives, public intimacy becomes a political act of openness. We intend to challenge intimacy and go beyond the conventional understanding of intimacy as ‘only’ the ‘personal’. Instead, the program considers intimacy as a means to re-think the community and how ‘we’ modern humans in a digitized society engage in the care of one another.
We’re thinking about the texture of the voice, the rhythm of a body, the poetic and artistic methods of writing and how these forms of intimacy can be ‘voiced’ publically. Together we will create a space that is both public and intimate, digital and analogue, distant and in proximity. We choose to create an online platform as a support for the act of reading aloud for others and with others. For the audience it is the intimate act of being read to, it is the intimacy of the texture of the voice, the rhythms of breathing, the digitised voice streaming to you. In this way, rather than creating a ‘reading group’ for discussion, we will create a space of the phone in the pocket, heard on the tram, the laptop taken to bed, at work, in the kitchen. We’re thinking about the platform as a resource, a place available to contemplate, to flesh out the possibilities of access, a site that goes beyond our networks, and walls.
ABOUT PUBLICS
PUBLICS is a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Vallila Helsinki, known for its industrial working class histories and, more recently, for its influx of divergent artistic and academic communities. Under the artistic direction of curator Paul O’Neill, with program manager and curator Eliisa Suvanto, PUBLICS explores a “work together” institutional model with multiple overlapping objectives, thematic strands and collaborations. PUBLICS is a constellation of practices, projects and productions. As such, PUBLICS proposes the term “Public” as always plural—as a concept; as a group of people (imagined, actualized or real); and as a contested spatio-temporal location/discourse in the world. The on-going project strands of PUBLICS are: PUBLICS Library; PUBLICS Talks; and PUBLICS Events and Performances. These initiatives will evolve in time and in parallel with the project’s longer-term curatorial programmes, PUBLICS Public Art Commissions.
IN @publicsfi FB @Publicsfi W www.publics.fi
NL
Shimmer (Rotterdam) en PUBLICS (Helsinki) presenteren Across The Way With…, een informeel online programma over intimiteit in de publieke ruimte. Tijdens het programma, dat in mei 2020 voor het eerst live ging, worden voordrachten gedeeld door een groeiende lijst van lezers uit Finland, Nederland en de rest van de wereld.
OVER ACROSS THE WAY WITH...
In Lauren Berlants essay Intimacy: A Special Issue vertelt ze ons dat iedereen denkt te weten hoe intimiteit werkt, maar dat het iets is dat snel verkeerd begrepen wordt. Intimiteit is ongemakkelijk, vluchtig, en een uitdaging om over te spreken — des te meer om aan deel te nemen. Shimmer en PUBLICS verkennen de obscure kant van intimiteit door de woorden van kunstenaars, dichters, filosofen, curatoren en anderen te verwelkomen. In het samenbrengen van onze gasten en publiek middels zo’n gelaagd onderwerp, in een tijd waar racisme, oorlog en hebzucht onze levens infiltreren, wordt publieke intimiteit een politiek gebaar van openheid. Onze intentie is om intimiteit aan de kaak te stellen en voorbij te gaan aan de conventionele opvatting ervan als ‘enkel’ ‘het persoonlijke’. In plaats daarvan beschouwt het programma intimiteit als een middel voor het her-overwegen van de gemeenschap en hoe ‘wij’ moderne mensen in een gedigitaliseerde maatschappij deelnemen aan de zorg voor elkaar.
We denken over de textuur van stem, het ritme van een lichaam, de poëtische en artistieke vormen van schrijven en hoe aan deze uitdrukkingen van intimiteit openlijk ‘stem’ gegeven kan worden. Samen creëren we een ruimte die zowel publiek als intiem is, digitaal en analoog, op afstand en in nabijheid. We hebben ervoor gekozen een online platform op te zetten om de geste van voordragen voor en met anderen, te ondersteunen. Voor het publiek is het de intieme act van voorgelezen worden, het is de voelbaarheid van de textuur van stem, de ritmes van ademhaling, de gedigitaliseerde intonatie die naar je toestroomt. Op deze manier creëren we, eerder dan een reading group voor discussie, een ruimte van de telefoon in je zak, waarnaar geluisterd wordt in de tram, de laptop vanuit het bed, op het werk, in de keuken. We beschouwen het platform als toevlucht, een plek die beschikbaar is voor contemplatie, om de mogelijkheden van toegang uit te werken en te belichamen, een gebied dat voorbij gaat aan onze netwerken, en muren.
OVER PUBLICS
PUBLICS is een cultureel agentschap met een toegewijde bibliotheek, evenementenruimte en een leeszaal in Vallila Helsinki, dat bekend staat om de geschiedenissen van haar industriële arbeidersklasse en, meer recentelijk, om haar influx van uiteenlopende artistieke en academische gemeenschappen. Onder het artistiek directeurschap van curator Paul O’Neill, met programma-manager en curator Eliisa Suvanto, onderzoekt PUBLICS een institutioneel “samen-werk” model met meerdere overlappende objectieven, thematische lijnen en collaboraties. PUBLICS is een constellatie van praktijken, projecten en producties. Zodoende stelt PUBLICS de term “Public” altijd als meervoud voor—als een concept; als een groep mensen (ingebeeld, geactualiseerd of echt); als een tegensprekelijke tijd-ruimte locatie en discours in de wereld. De voort-durende projectlijnen van PUBLICS zijn: PUBLICS Library; PUBLICS Talks; en PUBLICS Events and Performances. Deze initiatieven zullen zich door de tijd ontvouwen, en parallel aan de langdurige curatoriële programma’s van het project, PUBLICS Public Art Commissions.
IN @publicsfi FB @Publicsfi W www.publics.fi
Our program in 2024-2025 is supported by the Gemeente Rotterdam and the Mondriaan Fund, We're also supported by our community who often come together and support us in a variety of generous ways
Our program in 2024-2025 is supported by the Gemeente Rotterdam and the Mondriaan Fund, We're also supported by our community who often come together and support us in a variety of generous ways