Design: Maeve Redmond
Following our ‘Detours’ event with author, curator, historian, and museum director, Omar Kholeif, they share a selection of books for our Room for Reading.
Kholeif, who has recently joined The Glasgow School of Art as Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice, selects books by Etel Adnan, Raymond Antrobus and Jean Fisher.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘Live Audio Essays’(2023)
Professor Kholeif notes, “I carry poetry everywhere. I believe it is akin to oxygen. Etel Adnan, who is known to many now as a painter, is someone whose words have deeply shaped my social imagination.”
Dr Kholeif has introduced Adnan’s influential poetry book titled, In the Heart of a Heart of Another Country published by City Lights of San Francisco. The volume served as a seat of inspiration for one of Kholeif’s largest group shows, In the Heart of Another Country, which began its journey at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg in 2022.
Watch a short film of Kholeif speaking about the exhibition here.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘Dirty Evidence’ (2022).
On recent influences —
“There has been an unwavering stimulus over the last five years or so and that is the poet, Raymond Antrobus. His book, The Quiet Ear: An Investigation into Missing Sound is a hybrid memoir and social history of deafness as it intersects with the performance of speech, race, class, and the politics of code-switching. It is as if he unspooled that book from deep within me. I won’t go into the personal details as to how his experiences interleave with my own here, but this volume is a testament to his talents. It is an act of resistance against ableism and erasure, as much as it is evidence of how the most harrowing facts of life can read so beautifully on the page.”
Watch Raymond Antribus perform a poem here.
On feeling one’s way through history —
‘“We live in an age of feeling, of an emotional politics. I have found myself for the last two decades concerned with how human expression is articulated between the interstices of time—experience through light, via fields of abstract colour. Two anthologies have guided me in this regard recently, painter Sean Scully’s incredibly generous book of writing, Inner, published by Hatje Canz and Jean Fisher’s collection, Vampire in the Text, published by Iniva. Both figures have much in common. They both studied fine art at Newcastle University a year apart; they both hold a strong interest with indigenous knowledge—Native American and African art history and literary forms, and finally, both served as kind and unexpected mentors to me.”
Read a selection of Jean Fisher’s essays here.
Details
In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.
Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.
