WEEK TWO

Collective Memory: Collaboration is Group Work
January 16-18
Friday & Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 7pm
Tickets are $12 ($10 students, seniors, & working artists)
Buy tickets now!

Discover the art of collaboration in writing projects, translation, visual art, and community organizing. January 16: Friday night talkback led by Terri Kapsalis, writer and performer.

NEW LINEUP OF ARTISTS EACH NIGHT:

Friday, January 16
Patrick Durgin with Jen Hofer, John Keene with Christopher Stackhouse, Laurie Jo Reynolds with Amy Partridge, and video by Temporary Services

Saturday, January 17
Tradeshow, Jen Hofer with Dolores Dorantes, John Keene with Christopher Stackhouse, and Jennifer Karmin with Mars Caulton/Joel Craig/Lisa Fishman/Krista Franklin/Chris Glomski/Daniel Godston/Lily Robert-Foley

Sunday, January 18
Tradeshow, Jen Hofer with Dolores Dorantes, Jennifer Karmin with Kathleen Duffy/Brandi Homan/A D Jameson/Lisa Janssen/Erika Mikkalo/Ira S. Murfin/Timothy Rey, and video by Laurie Jo Reynolds.

Jen Hofer, photo by Joshua Clover

READINGS

Local writer and Kenning Editions publisher Patrick Durgin together with Los Angeles-based poet and translator Jen Hofer read letters and poems from The Route (Atelos), a collaboratively written inquiry into synaesthetic poetics and the possibilities for political engagements as citizen-artists.

Jen Hofer joins Mexican poet and organizer Dolores Dorantes to read from Mexican, Guatemalan, and Cuban writing in translation. They also share work from Plan B, a cross-border collective literary endeavor.

John Keene, who splits his time between teaching at Northwestern University in Evanston and living in Jersey City, NJ, and Brooklyn-based Christopher Stackhouse read from their co-authored Seismosis (1913 Press), a collaborative poetry collection that features Stackhouse's drawings in dialogue with Keene's text. 

PERFORMANCE

Local poet, artist, and festival co-curator Jennifer Karmin, in a live improvised collaboration with 14 Chicago writers, performs Aaaaaaaaaaalice. This text-sound epic intersects language, place and (mis)communication with a 1963 Japanese textbook, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and Karmin’s travels through Asia.

Chicago artist and organizer Laurie Jo Reynolds develops projects that combine art, activism, and research. With collaborator Amy Partridge and others in the Tamms Year Ten project, Reynolds gives a performative lecture about the campaign to protest the Tamms Supermax Correctional Center in Illinois. 

Tradeshow is an installation and durational performance experiment juxtaposing movement, text, video portraits and 500 pounds of used clothing. Chicago-based Erica Mott, Taiwan-based Sheelah Murthy, and local collaborators investigate the invisible forms of human suffering upon which our economies rest.

VIDEO

In SPACE GHOST, a video by Laurie Jo Reynolds in collaboration with prisoners, the experiences of astronauts and prisoners is compared using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration, including sensory deprivation and the perception of time.

Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. Based in Illinois, they produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications with the strong belief that the distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant. Construction Site is a video documenting their outdoor project on an empty lot in Los Angeles with interactive structures they created from cast off materials.