SIREN
(some poetics)
Marie Warsh, Shanzhai Lyric, (the voice of)Liliane Lijn, and Quinn Latimer
Géza, 306 Maujer
SIREN (some poetics), the book, is the final iteration of a multifaceted exhibition and publication project guest-curated by writer Quinn Latimer. Having started online in fall 2021, SIREN went on to include a live reading in Amant’s courtyard, a campus-wide group exhibition with 17 cross-generational artists, and an extensive public program in fall and winter. It now comes to a close in our bookstore this spring.
Co-published by Amant and Dancing Foxes Press, the book explores technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm. It figures language in manifold forms: score and script, list and litany, epic and essay. All, however, emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring or as some wild surfacing.
The New York launch of the publication will feature Marie Warsh on Bernadette and Rosemary Mayer, Shanzhai Lyric on theft and gender, (the voice of) Liliane Lijn on Crossing Map, and (the voice of) Quinn Latimer on technologies of myth and mouth.
Designed by Gaile Pranckunaite, SIREN (some poetics) features extensive photography by Adrianna Glaviano and texts and artistic contributions by Katja Aufleger, Patricia L. Boyd, Don Mee Choi, Bia Davou, Anaïs Duplan, Ruth Estévez, Sky Hopinka, Quinn Latimer, Liliane Lijn, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Aura Satz, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Jenna Sutela, Iris Touliatou, Christa Wolf, and Dena Yago.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are encouraged and drop ins welcome.
Marie Warsh is a historian, writer, and the co-director of the Estate of Rosemary Mayer. She helped to organize numerous exhibitions of Mayer’s work and has edited several books, including Excerpts from the 1971 Journal of Rosemary Mayer (2016 & 2020), Temporary Monuments: Work by Rosemary Mayer, 1977-1982 with Max Warsh (2018), and The Letters of Bernadette and Rosemary Mayer with Gillian Sneed (2022). In 2022, she started working with Soft Network, an organization that aims to develop and expands networks of support between contemporary artists, artist estates and foundations through the collective realizations of interdisciplinary exhibitions, resource sharing, and collaborative programming. From 2005-2022, she worked for the Central Park Conservancy where she was involved in various aspects of the history, preservation, and interpretation of Central Park. She has also written widely on the history of parks, playgrounds, and other landscapes and is the author of Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy (2019).
Shanzhai Lyric is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. An ever-growing archive of poetry-garments circulates in the form of poetry-lecture, publication, installation and archive.
This work has been presented in unofficial and official spaces that include Amant, Times Museum, INIVA/Stuart Hall Library, Women’s Art Library, Abrons Arts Center, SculptureCenter, Artists Space, MoMA PS1, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Printed Matter, Harvard (AFVS), Clearview Ltd, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Selected publications include essays in The New Inquiry, Viscose, The Serving Library, Capilano Review, Vulture and ArtReview Asia. In the fall of 2020, Shanzhai Lyric founded the fictional office entity Canal Street Research Association from which they continue to problematize the bounds of ownership and property through bootleg as method. The Canal Street Research Association has lived in various disused spaces along Canal street including a storefront (2020), an empty office building (2021), and a basement (2022).
Quinn Latimer is a California-born poet, critic, and editor based in Basel, Switzerland, and Athens, Greece. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg, 2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse, 2013), Film as a Form of Writing, with Akram Zaatari (Wiels, 2013), and Rumored Animals (Dreaming Horse Press, 2012).
Quinn’s writings and readings and moving-image collaborations have been featured widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; REDCAT, Los Angeles; the Venice Architecture Biennale, and Qalandiya International, Ramallah/Jerusalem. She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 (2015–17). She is Head of the MA at Institut Kunst Gender Natur in Basel, Switzerland.