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Royal Academy Schools, Life drawing room, 2013 (after "Elle preview" 2010). Photograph by Maciej Monday 22 April 2013 The Geological Society, Piccadilly, W1J
With Lucy Skaer, Angie Keefer, Nina Power, Cally Spooner and Natasha Soobramanien.
Reading in the Life Drawing Room is a one-day symposium concerned with the management of reading. Far from attempting to isolate writing as an autonomous (art) practise, the speakers address the linguistic 'poiesis' (making) as a model, or common denominator for constructions which may bind artistic practises to other things, places and professions. Language is a material that 'every one who ever has or is or will be living'* produces for the same means and ends: we all read, write, speak and listen to maintain the inter-dependency of our various occupations.
*'some time all of them will have the last touch of being, a history of them can give to them,'Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, being a history of a family's progress, 1925
This event is conceived and assembled by Jesse Ash and Will Holder.
'And You Were Wonderful, On Stage'. Cally Spooner Lucy Skaer’s presentations include the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, ‘The Siege’ at the Chisenhale and a major show at Kunsthalle Basel 2009, for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Recent shows have taken place at the Sculpture Center New York, Kunsthalle Vienna and the Metropolitan Museum, New York (with collaborator Rosalind Nashashibi). She lives and works in New York and Glasgow.
Angie Keefer is an artist, writer, editor, amateur engineer and occasional librarian whose speculative non-fiction traces circuitous routes through highly specialised information. Keefer is co-founder of The Serving Library and co-editor of The Bulletins, its bi-annual publication.
Nina Power teaches Philosophy at the University of Roehampton and Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of many articles on European Philosophy and politics and also writes about film, music and art for various publications, including Film Quarterly, Cabinet and frieze.
Using theory and philosophers as alibis to help her write, and casts of arguing characters to help her perform, Cally Spooner produces plotless novellas, disjunctive plays, looping monologues, and musical arrangements to write, then stage, the movement and behaviour of speech. www.motinternational.com/Cally-Spooner.html
Natasha Soobramanien is the author of Genie and Paul (Myriad, 2012). She contributed two chapters to Luke Williams' novel, The Echo Chamber (Hamish Hamilton, 2011) and together they are collaborating on a novel about the island of Diego Garcia, a British colony and US military base. Williams will be presenting Soobramanien's contribution to the symposium.