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For this iteration of Dear Reader, join interdisciplinary artist, Michelle Lopez, in a conversation of Ken Lum’s Commodities reading list in relation to his work.

Dear Reader is a programmatic series that follows the model of an informal book club to delve into Ulises’s quarterly reading lists through facilitated workshops, lectures, performances, and screenings.

Michelle Lopez is a sculptor and installation artist. As a builder, conceptualist, and manipulator of materials, Lopez inventively explores cultural phenomena, stretching to their limits multiple industrial processes. Lopez’s gimlet eye examines collapsed political and social structures by inverting cultural tropes through the process of building. Her installations—precarious assemblages of humble yet labor-intensive materials such as hand-twisted steel rope, pulled glass, bent wood, and street rubble—draw from the aesthetic languages and histories of industrialization, art movements, and the built environment to critique the ways in which dominant narratives, power, and authority shape space.

Lopez’s WHEN UNDER ONE SKY takes a similar approach and intervenes on the architectural site of North American Street through words. Recently installed onto the brick exterior of Ray Philly, the text-based public artwork employs language at the edge of the building to ruminate on the overarching sky as a future site of repair and collectivity.

The link to the reading: Introduction and Part Two of Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death, compiled by Yoel Hoffmann

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On the occasion of the publication of the book, The Future Is Present by Philip Glahn and Cary Levine, artist Kristen Neville Taylor, Ulises co-founder Ricky Yanas, and Glahn will discuss the relationship between art, technology, and the environment in their respective practices and research as well as the possibilities and challenges of what happens when artists and activists engage with the histories and continuities of progress, production, and utopia.

In The Future Is Present, Philip Glahn and Cary Levine tell the fascinating history of the visionary art group Mobile Image—founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in 1977—which appropriated emerging technologies, from satellites to electronic message platforms. Based in Los Angeles, this under-studied collective worked amid urban crisis, a techno-boom, consolidating media power, and ascendant neoliberal politics. Mobile Image challenged fundamental conventions of the public sphere, democracy, communication, and political participation, as well as notions of power, representation, and identity.

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Join us for the launch and reading of “The Seeds This Soil Holds,” a photo and poetry zine by Keesean Moore. The zine combines a series of poems with historical imagery harvested from the John J. Wilcox Jr. Archives, and embraces an understanding of the self as a composite being through diligent memory work.

Keesean Moore is a poet, artist and the owner of The Moore Vintage Archive in Queen Village, Philadelphia, PA.

Doors: 6pm - 6:30pm
Reading: 6:30pm - 7:30pm
Reception: 7:30pm - 9pm

Opening Reception: Friday, August 30, 6pm – 9pm
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Ken Lum’s exhibition Klump!—the second installment of Ulises’s year-long, three-part artists’ multiples series Commodities—opens on August 30, 2024, at Studio 105 at Ray Philly. Klump! combines and holds in tension two contrary artistic impulses. The white exhibition walls signify an endpoint to art as an uninflected surface, refusing all reference and representation to arrive at a condition of pure aesthetic experience. Small pictures of individuals punctuate the walls like musical notation.

This work is part of a series by Lum involving full-figure photographic portraits and text in the form of questions. He reflects, “I often experience a simultaneous engagement and estrangement from my environment. Rather than focusing on typologies, I look for patterns in social formations. While I enjoy life, I also find it emptying. These thoughts swirl in this work.”

Ken Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture and photography. 

Commodities considers the defiant and playful nature of the artists’ multiple through a series of projects/exhibitions and collaborative production with the artists Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Ken Lum, and Candice Lin.

For this iteration of Dear Reader, join us for a fun and intimate event of collective bookmaking using Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Algorithmic Book Composition (A-B-C) - Kit, produced as part of the Ulises artists’ multiples series, Commodities.

In the kit, participants will find several “algorithm determiners” such as a die, color wheels, and sides of jenga blocks, used to create a randomized output. Drawing on the history of Black performance and Fluxus scores, A-B-C offers participants a series of algorithms to determine the design, form, content, and distribution of their book composition. Rasheed’s selection of publications within the exhibition’s reading room will also support the bookmaking process.

In a recent interview with curator Ladi’Sasha Jones for Rasheed’s book, in the coherence, we weep, Jones asked about Rasheed’s relationship to play to which she responded, “Play, not as something frivolous, but as something that’s rooted in a chance, something that’s rooted in improvisation . . . You go into play, not knowing what’s going to happen. And that’s the exciting part. That’s the erotic edge of play. . . . I’ve already seen what the world can offer. I’m trying to see if we can play towards anything else.”

Dear Reader is a programmatic series that follows the model of an informal book club to delve into Ulises’s quarterly reading lists through facilitated workshops, lectures, performances, and screenings.

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The day’s first program will focus on designing a series of writing and mark-making prompts. We will take inspiration from the Dadaists, OuLiPians, FLUXUS, and childhood language games. Once we have some context, all participants will be provided with the support and resources to design one prompt/game to be played later in the day. We will end the session by making a 1-sheet book so that participants will have descriptions of other prompts to take home.

• Make a chance-based writing game using chalk-drawn hopscotch.
• Design a writing prompt in which participants must write using something other than a pen, pencil, or other traditional writing tool.
• Create a mark-making prompt in which participants cannot use their hands.

Participants are encouraged to sign up for both sessions, but it is not required. 16+ and if younger, please arrive with a guardian. Eventbrite registration is appreciated.

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The second workshop will be a game night modeled from the ones Rasheed experienced as a child. Participants are welcome to have snacks and socialize alongside playing games and responding to prompts designed by Rasheed and participants from the earlier workshop.

Participants are encouraged to sign up for both sessions, but it is not required. 16+ and if younger, please arrive with a guardian. Eventbrite registration is appreciated.

Join the 8th Eco-Social Series event, “What good is eco art without community?”  with visiting artists Keg de Souza and Alicia Grullon. Building on Grullon’s 2023 Hyperallergic article “What Good Is Eco-Art Without Community?” This night of presentations brings together two artists, Keg De Souza and Alicia Grullon, to share their work and observations about the field. Join us in welcoming them to Philly and continue the discussion from past Eco-Social events.

Eco-Social (aka Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing & Screening Series) is an event series and learning community that will convene seasonally in Philadelphia since 2023 where ecologically-themed artwork is presented and excursions taken.

Please hold your free seat by RSVPing.

The third annual BIG SUMMER BOOK SALE will feature an eclectic mix of bookstores, print collectives, and artist-run projects — from comics to wearable multiples, from self-published zines to discounted art books (care of Ulises) — as we celebrate printed matter among friends and family, in its many popular, social, and liberatory forms. 

25 Philly-based vendors plus a few out-of-town guests will share their print wares on Sunday, July 14th from 11am – 5pm at Icebox Project Space (1400 N. American St). Hosted byUlises, Icebox Project Space, and FORTUNEwith support from Fire Museum Presents and Penn Treaty SSD. Cash bar, free hot dogs rolling (while supplies last), and a raffle every hour on the hour. 

Vendors:

2C books / Marginal Utility
All Caps Studio
american grammar
Anchovy Studio
BlackStar Projects
BULK Space
BYO Printmaking Collaborative
Common Notions Press & Making Worlds Cooperative Bookstore
CYBORG MEMOIRS
First Last
Ginger Arts Center, by Students for the Preservation of Chinatown
H&H Books
Iffy Books
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
Leks Kamihira 
Lot 49 Books
Many Folds Press
No Arena in Chinatown Solidarity Group
Partners and Son
Pet Riso Studio
Reunion Poetry Festival
Second State Press
The Soapbox
Solita
Ulises
Vox Populi
Who Press’d Press
Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project

Poster and BSBS design by Nick Massarelli.

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Join Ulises on Friday, June 28 for a celebratory launch of Polly Apfelbaum: For the Love of Una Hale with music, drinks, and special custom objects by the artist .

This publication is a comprehensive document of Polly Apfelbaum’s 2020-22 ceramics residency at Arcadia University and resulting installations (exhibited in the spring of 2022) in conjunction with a curated survey of works by folk artist David Ellinger (1913-2003). 

The book features over 160 illustrations, including color photographs of each of the 63 ceramic works Apfelbaum presented as well as multiple installation views along with documentation of two wallpaper projects. Reproductions of 40 works by Ellinger are also included.

Texts by: Tessa Bachi Hass, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lisa Minardi, Ezra Shales, Jenni Sorkin, David Pagel and Jenelle Porter with a transcription of a conversation between Apfelbaum, Shales, Elizabeth Ferrell, Gregg Moore, and Rachel Geisinger. 

Edited by Richard Torchia and Katy Donoghue with an introduction by Torchia and an artist glossary by Donoghue. Designed by Conny Purtill, Purtill Family Business.

 Major funding provided by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

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On this night almost one year ago a small and strange book was released to the public…Please join us on June 6 to celebrate the anniversary of ALL EXITS: a collection of short stories by Lane Timothy Speidel.

On this special night, invited artists including Anne Ishii, Blanche Brown, KT Pe Benito, Kim Altomare, and others will take turns interpreting the book and its stories. We hope to see you for a night exploring raining clouds, flashlights in darkness, and secrets under skin. 

ALL EXITS contains observant aliens, ancient eels, missing cats, inter-dimensional doorways, and reflections that move on their own. Filled with insights and bizarre sensory description, decorated with charming illustrations and photographs of night, ALL EXITS is a little book that will walk through your mind like a mischievous cat - tipping over things you didn’t even know were there.

Also available to browse and purchase will be; Light Sleep: love poems written in between naps. A poetry zine about curiosity and surrender. Asking many questions, but ultimately willing to fall deeply in. There are sweet poems, silly ones, philosophical ones, and sexy ones. Wishing to question the boundaries of knowing, naming, sex, and both group and individual identity.

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Join Ulises for the launch of Al Mudhif: A Confluence, a catalog commemorating the installation of the first Mudhif built outside of Iraq at the Schuylkill Environmental Center for Environmental Education in 2021. Come enjoy conversation, readings, and Iraqi tea and sweets from the artists and people who brought Al Mudhif to life. 

What happens when you build a traditional structure from the marshes of Iraq in the woods of Pennsylvania? This is the story of Al Mudhif - as told by the artists, Iraqi refugees, Iraq War veterans, and other community members who brought it to life in 2021, at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia. 

Mudhifs have been built in Southern Iraq for at least 5,000 years, and are made entirely out of Phragmites reed, which grows abundantly in both Iraq and Philadelphia. In Iraq, Phragmites is a valued building material and indigenous to the area. In the U.S., it is reviled as an invasive plant. Touching on themes of displacement, war, radical hospitality, healing, reconciliation, cultural preservation, and contemporary art, this book lovingly documents the journey from harvesting materials to its final dismantling, and the lessons we learned along the way. 

Edited by Yaroub Al Obaidi, Sarah Kavage, and L.A. Enck. Introduction by Michael Rakowitz, Daniel Tucker, and Tina Plokarz. Book design by Saif Sarah Designs

Made possible with the support of the Velocity Fund.

DRAFT 04 Launch
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Join us for the launch of DRAFT 04, featuring Tag Christof, a New Mexican photographer who has been chasing Americana for over a decade now. His work focuses on the gritty imperfection that to him defines the texture of pre-digital American culture, which he grew up idolizing. These images were shot over a period of 5 years exploring the Southwest, both observing and participating in the culture.

This will be the fourth issue of DRAFT mag, a one-photographer-per-issue book that focuses on the process of unfinished or unseen projects of established artists. Each book contains an interview with the artist as well as 30-40 images. 

The books are published by IOTA Editions, organized by Ian Loring Shiver, and designed by Nick Massarelli. There will be shirts available made exclusively for the launch.

Book Launch: Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond
Saturday, May 11, 1–3pm
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Join Ulises to celebrate the launch of the publication “Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond,” issued in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, on view at Princeton University Library’s Milberg Gallery curated by Sal Hamerman and Javier Rivero Ramos.

The publication is a richly illustrated account of the life and work of  Carrión, a twentieth-century Mexican artist, and writer who reimagined what the book could look like, mean, and do; the event features a conversation between artist and curator Sal Hamerman, curator Camilo Otero, and Ulises co-founders, reflecting on Carrión’s legacy and resonance across the contemporary field of artists’ publishing. The conversation will be followed by an informal activity to create and send mail art, featuring artists’ stamps and postcards inspired by Carrión’s own contributions to the transnational mail art networks of the 1970s and 1980s. 

Sal Hamerman (they/them) co-curated the Carrión exhibition and is a Metadata Librarian specializing in rare books at Princeton University Library. Camilo Otero (he/him) is the Artist Programs Manager at the Center for Book Arts in New York City.

On Friday, May 3, from 6 to 9 pm, Ulises will reopen in its new home at 1525 N American St., at Ray Philly. Join us for the opening celebration and then again for a program with Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Come Play,” on Saturday, May 4, 5-7 PM. In this hybrid lecture-workshop-playtime event, Rasheed will offer autobiographical notes to contextualize the lineages of play that influence her practice.

The new location will integrate exhibitions, programming, and publications, presenting new offerings and incubating long-term initiatives that will open up opportunities for artists and publishing communities at a larger scale—a space gathered for publishing, ideas, and connection.

Inaugurating Ulises’s new location and kicking off our artists’ multiples series, “Commodities” in Studio 105, is a project by artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “— the soft technology of your poems split — s My body into 18: secreting,100 Stanzas ——— That Bow TOWARD no moons.” A self-described “learner,” Rasheed grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, and modes of [un]learning. Rasheed’s exhibition, on view May 3 - August 25, 2024, will focus on the erotics of play during the reading, writing, and publishing processes.

Ulises organized a reading room and installation as part of the exhibition, “speech lives in a series of daily attempts: artists & publishing,” on view at the Wagner Foundation Gallery in Cambridge, MA. The exhibition features artists, Joseph Grigely, Kimi Hanauer, Steffani Jemison, Adam Pendleton, Gabriel Sosa, and Ulises, who all make publications and establish platforms for publishing. This presentation marks the first exhibition at Wagner Foundation Gallery and celebrates the foundation’s grantmaking support of artist publications.

Organized by: Abigail Satinsky, Program Officer & Curator, Arts & Culture at Wagner Foundation

More information

Ulises is participating again in Multiple Formats: Contemporary Art Book Symposium and Art Book Fair at Boston University School of Visual Arts. We will have a table at the fair on Saturday the 23rd and will be doing a 5 minute rapid-fire talk about our work on Friday the 22nd. Multiple Formats weaves together conversations about artist books and higher education, pedagogical practices involving artist books, artist advocacy, and artist book distribution, collection, and access.

Thursday, November 30, 6:30 pm at Vox Populi! Ricky Yanas from Ulises will join Vox and Transformer for a panel discussion featuring Dave Kyu from Asian Arts Philly, Crystal Stokowski from Space 1026, Raúl Romero from the Vox collective, and Victoria Reis from Transformer DC.

The panel is organized on the occasion of Transformer publishing its 20th-anniversary retrospective book, this will delve into how artist-centered alternative art spaces support emerging artist communities and explore how these organizations can learn from each other and celebrate their shared values!

Come find Ulises at Press Play, a weekend-long fair of books, small presses, records, art, ephemera, and publications of all kinds at Pioneer Works in NYC. Saturday, December and Sunday, December 10: 12 - 7 PM

They’ve invited publishers, artists, musicians, labels, and their communities to participate in talks, performances, and workshops that showcase new ways of reading, listening, and creating culture today.

Press Play is organized by Pioneer Works and is free and open to the public.

Ulises is exhibiting at the Boston Art Book Fair located at the Boston Center for the Art (BCA) Cyclorama at 539 Tremont St. Boston. The event is free and open to the public on Saturday and Sunday. Friday from 6-9 there is a ticked Preview party. More info / tickets / exhibitor list all here

Ulises is co-hosting the Press Press launch of their forthcoming anthology Commune Diverge Shift Connect: Press Press’s Organizational Handbook co-published by Institute for Expanded Research in fall 2023. As part of this release that is just ahead of the collective’s 10 year anniversary in 2024, they will be in conversation for Vox Populi’s Teaching at the End of Times on Friday, September 29th at The Head & The Hand bookstore. At the event, collective members Vale Cabezas, Kimi Hanauer, Lo and Bilphena Decontee Yahwon will reflect on their collaborative relationship, methodologies, and practices with moderator Dana Bishop-Root. Attendees will also be invited to sit in conversation with another on kindred themes and asked to sit with the following: What are the conditions necessary for cultivating and sustaining ethical and compassionate frameworks for being with and cooperating with others in the world?

This event is part of the project, Teaching at the End of Times.

It’s almost time for this year’s BIG SUMMER BOOK SALE hosted by Ulises, Icebox Project Space, and FORTUNE with the support of Penn Treaty Special Services District!

On Sunday, June 25 from 11AM–5 PM at 1400 North American Ave all Ulises deadstock will be available for 25%, 50% and 75% off! Plus, there will be books, print, and all things adjacent from our friends:

All Caps Studio, The Erotic Project,First Last,The Head & The Hand,Icebox Project Space, Iffy Books, Iota Editions, Logan DeCarme, Lot 49, Many Folds Press, Multiverse, Partners and Son, Pet Riso, Philadelphia Printworks, The Print Party, Risolve, Second State Press, Seen, The Soapbox, Solita Zine, Sometimes Publishing, Space 1026, Who Press’d Press

Special guest RICE, tabling on behalf of the Save Chinatown Coalition

Come for the wares, and stay for the snacks, drinks, and sweet summer vibes provided by the legendary Rashid Zakat. Free hotdogs until 3PM (w/ vegan options!) and specially designed beverages from the FORTUNE team + A RAFFLE EVERY HOUR!

This event is free and open to the public.

Flyer designed by Nick Massarelli.

April 19-21, Ulises will be in Utrecht leading Ulises Friends School, a series of workshops that invite participants to investigate the generative potential of friendship. In simplest terms, Ulises is a bookshop and project space dedicated to artists’ books and independent art publications. In the truest terms, Ulises is a collection of musings, longings, and assorted activities brought together by a group of friends. This is to say that friendship is the medium, ethos, and structure of Ulises.

Ulises Friends School is a part of Ultradependent Public School (UPS) transforming BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, into a schoolhouse and a curriculum to learn what we really need to enact the worlds we really want.  Emphasizing study as a radically collective, public labor that lives in-between institutionalized hierarchies, UPS inhabits the edges between formal classrooms and everyday life.

All participants will have the opportunity to be included in a cumulative publication, a “Yearbook[let]” made over the three workshop periods.

Day 1: “With Friends Like These…”
Day 2: “Truth be Told / You Didn’t Hear it From Me…”
Day 3: “Let’s Stay in Touch”

Multiple Formats: Contemporary Art Book Symposium weaves together conversations about artist books and higher education, pedagogical practices involving artist books, artist advocacy, and artist book distribution, collection, and access. Intended to be an elastic and inclusive forum for discussions about artist book publishing, Multiple Formats pays particular attention to publishing by graphic designers, the use and creation of artist books in visual arts programs, publishing as a personal and collaborative process, and other topics of interest.

Keynote Lecture by Nontsikelelo Mutiti
Co-founder of Black Chalk & Co. and Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design at Yale University
March 16, 7:30 PM

Art Book Symposium
March 17, 2023
11:00 AM to 6:00 PM

Art Book Fair
March 18, 2023
11:00 AM to 6:00 PM

All events are free + open to the public.

Boston University, School of Visual Arts
808 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02446

Ulises will be in Boston for the Boston Art Book Fair, November 4-6 at the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts. It’s going to be wicked fun! Find out more here.

Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair takes place Oct 13-16 at 548 W 22nd St. NY. Find Ulises at table C42 and pick up a copy of Publishing As Practice!

Note that this year some fair days are ticked/require advance registration. Sign up and learn more about the NYABF here

Ulises in collaboration with Icebox Project Space and FORTUNE presents the Big Summer Book Sale! Come for the sale and stay for the snacks, drinks, and good afternoon vibes featuring DJ Rana Ransom. 

Books and prints and goods from our friends:

• All Caps Studio
• Amze Emmons
• Iffy Books
• Kamihira
• Justine Kelley
• Lot 49 Books
• Many Folds Press
• Partners and Son
• Pet Riso
• Risolve Studio
• Second State Press
• The Soapbox
• Solita Zine

There will be snacks, burgers, hot dogs, and vegan options. Plus specially designed toppings and beverages from the FORTUNE team.  Ulises deadstock will be available for 25%, 50% and 75% off!

Free & open to the public! Raffle every hour!

Please note: Food and drink will be served outdoors. Masks are requested while indoors. Icebox Project Space is ADA accessible.

First Last and Quickbooks are releasing a special edition collaboration publication featuring Mickey Aloisio & Ryan Skrabalak. A FREE publication about moving around, trucks and cars, donuts and dudes.

Ulises is excited to welcome Wendy’s Subway and Futurepoem, who will present readings by Vidhu Aggarwal, Mirene Arsanios, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Jessica Laser, and Ronaldo V. Wilson on the occasion of the 2022 AWP Conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs).  The program also includes a screening of recent videos by Wendy’s Subway authors JJJJJerome Ellis, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Shala Miller.

Recent/Forthcoming books:

• Vidhu Aggarwal, Daughter Isotope (The Operating System, 2021)
• Mirene Arsanios, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022)
• JJJJJerome Ellis, The Clearing (Wendy’s Subway, 2021)
• Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Flag (Futurepoem, 2022)
• Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts (Wendy’s Subway, 2022)
• Jessica Laser, Planet Drill (Futurepoem, 2022)
• Shala Miller, Tender Noted (Wendy’s Subway, 2022)
• Ronaldo V. Wilson, Carmelina: Figures (Wendy’s Subway, 2021)

 Location: Icebox Project Space, 1400 N American Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122

• Wednesday, February 24 (Opening & Preview) 
• Thursday, February 25–Sunday, February 28 (Fair Days)
• Saturday, February 27, 11am EST (Classroom Conversation)

This year Printed Matter Book Fair is going virtual, visit Ulises along with more than 400 exhibitors from over 40 countries. We’re excited to announce that our first book, Publishing A Practice: Hardworking Goodlooking, Martine/Syms, Bidoun, co-published with Inventory Press, is available for pre-order! Also, join the Ulises team for a Classroom conversation with Publishing As Practice residents, Clara Balaguer, Dante Carlos, and Kristian Henson of Hardworking Goodlooking on Saturday, Febuary 27 at 11am EST.

Portal to the virtual fair

Philly, we’re in a swing state and October 19th is the last day to register in PA, so check your registration status and plan your vote! To help spread the word, artist Jenny Holzer has created a series of animations some of which you can download here. Enough is enough is enough.

A Certain Kind of Space: How We Sustain Each Other was part of Common Field’s 2020 Online Convening. Watch the video here!

Building on previous convening dialogues, presenters ask each other and audience members: How do economics, location, size, and identity shape an artist collective and impact decision making? Who gets to take part? Given the long history of grassroots organizing by artists, why be an artist-run organization in 2020?

What does it mean for artistic spaces to survive the current capitalist economic system we work under? Members of artist-run collectives Grizzly Grizzly, Living Room Light Exchange, ‘sindikit, and Ulises openly discuss how organizational development in itself has become a creative practice, and how that informs their accountability to the artists and the communities they engage. Running an organization often means interacting with, and subverting, an economic system. What is the impact of working this way? This conversation places independent organizations from various geographic locations, which are negotiating different constraints, in dialogue to expand practical strategies for survival, stewardship, and conceptual engagement.

• Common Field Convening
• Archival Video

Register

Looking forward to participating in FORTUNE’s online panel with other QT/POC-run small presses and print spaces, including No Shame Distro, Sponge Gourd Collective, Endless Editions, and Other Publishing to discuss print resources and futures.

As we come together toward an uncertain future, we hope to ground ourselves in print as an act of resource-sharing, of radical gathering, of material resilience — something to hold on to. Join us as we connect with print collectives to share experiences and best practices for inspired, sustainable, accessible, and community-oriented work.

What are the strategies, sources of support, and print forebears on which we can lean? How do we continue to document this coming-together?

This program is part of FORTUNE’s archival practice during the Year of the Rat. Project support provided by The Velocity Fund administered by Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University with generous funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Representing Ulises for Sci-Fi Sunday at the PMA, poet and artist Anaïs Duplan will share some of his favorite passages from Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. The Sci-Fi Sunday reading series is in conjunction with the exhibition “Designs for Different Futures.”

Anaïs Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He now works as Program Manager at Recess and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Poetry at Columbia University.

The Intuitionist concerns the travails of Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman elevator inspector in a New York-esque city. The novel seizes upon an unsung wonder in our midst, the elevator, and sings its history, its technology, its romance, adding to the novelist’s solid research a scintillating pinch of sci-fi fantasy. The extensive guild of metropolitan elevator inspectors is split, it would seem, between the Empiricists, who plod through their inspections one material criterion at a time, and the Intuitionists, who take a more mystical, gestalt approach to the detection of safety flaws.

See you at the Odds and Ends Art Book Fair at the Yale University Art Gallery, Friday, December 6th, 11:30 am-4:30 pm — Free and Open to the Public!

We’re excited to be included in When the Whirlwind Begins at The Anderson Gallery at Virgina Commonwealth University. The group show, curated by students explores turmoil and disaster, but aslso new love and beginnings. The Anderson Gallery at VCU is an exhibition and program space for the VCUarts community. It supports experimentation, professional development and work across disciplines. Opening Reception: Nov. 8, 6–9pm!

Marie Alarcon, Anthony Campuzano, Alex Da Corte, Dufala Bros., Claes Gabriel, Erlin Geffard, Adam Lovitz, James Maurelle, Angela McQuillan, Kat Richards, Patricia Thomas, and Ulises

Poster by J. S. Wright

Join the Ulises team in celebrating our 3 year anniversary and a big move! The books and furniture are already gone, so bring dancing shoes. There will be drinks and movin and groovin as we embrace change and remember so many great moments in the old garage-turned bookstore. Tunes to move to by DJ Mier Mier Mier Mier Mier (Jamier Bieber Snell) & jay plus.

We are saying goodbye to our 31 E Columbia Ave location but are going to be plenty busy with pop-ups and planning a new spot, to open early 2020.

The School for Temporary Liveness is a week-long series of performances, workshops, talks, conversations and new formats for study inhabiting the poetic frame of a school. The School comprises three zones of encounter—The Classroom, The Library, and Study Hall—each of which engage different modes of viewing and participation.

Ulises will be participating as part of Study Hall, setting up a Reading Room on he 3rd floor and asking you to think about how might the performance of the body inform our understanding of the circulation of books? Ulises invites you to a room for reading and reflection open throughout the duration of the School for Temporary Liveness. Housed within the Study Hall, the reading room will gather texts that inform and extend from the School for Temporary Liveness’s curriculum and participating practitioners.

Ulises will also host a pop-up shop during select hours. Browse a selection of domestic and international titles—including independent art publications and artists’ books—on critical theory, embodied practice, Black radical thought and other concepts key to the School for Temporary Liveness.

The Reading Room is always open. Shop Hours: Wednesday, Sept. 25, 6–7pm; Friday, Sept. 27, 6–8pm; Saturday, Sept. 28, 4–8pm; Sunday, Sept. 29, 12-4pm; Wednesday, Oct. 2, 4-8pm.

This school is free and for the public. Anyone can be a student. STL is presented by University of the Arts School of Dance and has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Ulises Location: N37 (2nd Floor) More information (Hours, Access etc.)

Initiated in 2005, Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair (NYABF) is the leading international gathering for the distribution of artists’ books, celebrating the full breadth of the art publishing community.

Held at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, the 2019 NY Art Book Fair will host 369 exhibitors from 31 countries, including a broad range of artists and collectives, small presses, institutions, galleries, antiquarian booksellers, and distributors. Free and open to the public, the event draws more than 40,000 individuals including book lovers, collectors, artists, and art world professionals each year. With a commitment to diversity and representation, the fair will serve as a meeting place for an extended community of publishers and book enthusiasts, as well as a site for dialogue and exchange around all facets of arts publishing.

Books Books Books!

This a very particular moment of change for the art and museum field. Agitating around issues of part-time contracts, workplace safety, lack of benefits, and equity across different vectors, recent months have witnessed a wave of unionizing, landmark labor discrimination lawsuits, public salary sharing, and work for equity of representation of critics and cultural voices, amongst other highly visible and completely invisible work.

What comes next after this summer of struggle? Join the conversation, moderated by Michelle Fisher, on behalf of Art + Museum Transparency. She’ll be joined by New Museum’s Dana Kopel, Drew Ambrogi of Coworker.org, independent curator Chaédria LaBouvier, and Sara Ziff founder of Model Alliance.

RSVP, Free to attend! If you can, help us out by bringing a snack, or drink, or chair.

Current and former employees of art institutions started sharing the terms and salaries of their employment in a public Google Spreadsheet titled “Art/Museum Salary Transparency 2019,” started by Michelle. You can view the spreadsheet here and add your information through this form.

“The Blind Owl” Still with Ron Athey

Please join us for a screening of Reza Abdoh’s “The Blind Owl” along with an introduction by Bidoun Senior Editor Michael C. Vazquez. This will be the final program presented by Bidoun in conjunction with Publishing As Practice, an experimental publisher-in-residence project hosted by Ulises and funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Reza Abdoh was celebrated for his immersive and maximalist theatre productions, which drew on Greek myth, cable television, BDSM and fairy tales, and made use of unusual urban spaces and audio-visual media. Yet had Abdoh not passed away at the too-young age of thirty-two, he almost certainly would have become a filmmaker of renown.

“The Blind Owl” (1992) is Abdoh’s only complete feature film. Shot in and around East Los Angeles with members of his Dar a Luz theatre ensemble between performances of the play Bogeyman (1991), the film provides a curious counterpoint to Abdoh’s immersive, maximalist, adrenaline-fueled theater productions. Its narrative explores abjection, illness, and belonging through a diverse cast of characters, including sex workers, a diabetic mortician and his caregiver, and a blind man and his disabled transgender companion. The Blind Owl unfurls amid an atmosphere of melancholy that, although often moving, is wholly devoid of affect. The film’s slow, meditative pacing and contemplative posture have inspired comparisons to theater director Robert Wilson’s symbolist work, the films of Robert Bresson, and the 1960s American TV show, The Outer Limits.

Ulises is proud to announce our partnership with Common Field — a national network of experimental, independent, visual arts organizations and organizers — to bring the annual Convening to Philadelphia, PA from April 25–28, 2019. The Common Field Convening is an itinerant gathering that brings together 500+ local and national arts organizers to explore the state of the field of artists organizations and to share resources, knowledge and methods for artist-led, artist-run, and artist-centered projects, spaces and practices.

Over the past year, Common Field has worked with Ulises as part of a group of 14 local organizing partners as well as a growing network of 80+ Philadelphia arts organizations and organizers in order to connect the local contexts and conditions with the interests of the national Common Field Network.

As a platform for gathering the many artist centered organizations, the Convening recognizes the value of their contributions as a critical and central part of the city’s cultural fabric. It builds awareness for these practices that often take place in unique contexts, and serve and represent more diverse communities. Together we understand there is an urgency to gather around issues of social justice and equity, as well as practical needs and tools for many organizations in our network.

Find out more about the Convening and get your tickets online. Check out the program, presenters and full schedule. Follow Common Field on social media (IG | FB | TW) and sign up for their newsletter for regular updates.

Friends Center, Center City, Philadelphia, PA commonfield.org/convenings Facebook RSVP #CommonFieldPhilly

Please join Ulises for a publication release and reading event for “Conditioner” a new publication by artist Liz Barr through GenderFail Press. Barr will be joined by writers Meg Pendoley and Blanche Brown in a series of readings for the event.

“Conditioner” considers women’s sense of alienation from their bodies, caused by gender norms and beauty ideals, and the ways that the wellness and skincare industries either alleviate or exacerbate that alienation. Conditioner explores the nuances of the subject, accounting for the history of American cosmetics and skincare, as well as the ways that preceding feminist movements have addressed them. This is Barr’s second publication with GenderFail.

Liz Barr is an interdisciplinary artist based in West Philadelphia. She makes work about bodies and how we build them. Her zines can be found in libraries and bookstores in Philadelphia and elsewhere, including at Printed Matter, Inc.; Artbook at MoMA PS1; Quimby’s; and Ulises.

Meg Pendoley is a writer living in Philadelphia. She’s interested in queer homes (bodies, houses, neighborhoods), the boundaries they share, and how what happens there might be recorded and kept. Her work appears in Apiary, Cleaver, and Tin House’s Open Bar.

Blanche Brown is a poet from north Florida. She is finishing up temple’s MFA program and owns two oyster knives.

GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative that seeks to encourage projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity. GenderFail embraces failure as a site of cultural production. GenderFail has been apart of exhibitions, programs and events at MoMA PS1 (Long Island City), The International Center of Photography (NYC), Wendy’s Subway (Brooklyn), Studio Museum (Harlem), William College Museum of Art (Williamstown), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), EFA Project Space (NYC) and many others.

Join the first gathering of Communists Anonymous in Philadelphia, a celebration of the constitutive book “Solution 275–294: Communists Anonymous” (edited by Ingo Niermann and Joshua Simon, Sternberg Press, 2017), with Hammam Aldouri, Mark Johnson, Pavel Khazanov, Kate Kraczon, Marina McDougall Vella, Joshua Simon, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, and everyone interested in sharing their relations to communisms present, past, and future.

The members of Communists Anonymous (COMA) suffer from an incurable belief in communism. They don’t share any particular school, but they do share an extreme sense of empathy and justice, and therefore detest more or less any form of private property. Because there is currently no communist state in existence, acting out their passion would hopelessly distress them, at best curbing and stabilizing the brutalities of capitalist society.

COMA is meant to evolve into a worldwide cluster of self-help groups where incurable communists can discuss their recent temptations and relapses in the futile fight against capitalism. COMA’s “fearless moral inventory” challenges the historical manifestations of communism as being substantially incomplete in thought and practice and places communism again where it originates—in the realm of fiction. COMA believes that the most vital dialectics in human history are at play in fiction contradicting reality. Only as fiction can communism manifest itself again beyond doubt.

“Solution 275–294 Communists Anonymous,” Ingo Niermann, Joshua Simon (Eds.) Contributions by Santiago Alba Rico, Heather Anderson, Ann Cotten, Fiona Duncan, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Boris Groys, Elfriede Jelinek, Georgy Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova, Metahaven, Momus, Ingo Niermann, David Pearce, Frank Ruda, Georgia Sagri, Joshua Simon, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Timotheus Vermeulen

Join us for a book signing and discussion centered around the release of “Faith Wilding’s Fearful Symmetries” (Edited by Shannon Stratton for Intellect Books, 2018).

In keeping with Wilding’s own artworks, this book is a bricolage: memoirs and watercolors sit alongside critical essays and family photographs to form an overall history of both Wilding’s life and works as well as the wider feminist art movement of the 1970s and beyond. This collection spans fifty years of Wilding’s artistic production, feminist art pedagogy, and participation in, and organizing of, feminist art collectives, such as the Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse, Womanspace Gallery, and the Woman’s Building. Included are contributions by Faith Wilding, Amelia Jones, Mario Ontiveros, Irinaari Starkhova, Jenni Sorkin, Elizabeth Hess, Mira Schor, Keith Vaughn, Lauren Basing, Shannon Stratton and Daniel Tucker.

For this event, Wilding will engage in a dialogue with former student, Daniel Tucker, following an introduction by Shannon Stratton, curator of Wilding’s retrospective, “Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries.”

Shannon R. Stratton is an artist, curator, and writer. She cofounded the artist-run organization Threewalls, Chicago, and until recently the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

Daniel Tucker is an Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director at Moore College of Art & Design here in Philadelphia.

Details on the book, here

Image: Faith Wilding; excerpt from ‘Waiting’ performed at Womanhouse, 1972.

Please join Ulises for an experimental lecture/book launch by artist and writer Carmen Winant.

In lieu of a conventional reading or talk, Carmen will deliver a fifteen-minute original script over top of a video that she created — largely looking at the visual content of artists and medical professionals — that acts a compliment to her book, “My Birth.” The performance will probe the ways that we see and do not see the experience of childbirth.

A book of text and image, “My Birth” interweaves photographs of the artist Carmen Winant’s mother giving birth to her three children with found images of other, anonymous, women undergoing the same bodily experience. As the pictorial narrative progresses, from labor through delivery, the women’s postures increasingly blend into one another, creating a collective body that strains and releases in unison.

In addition to the photographic sequence, “My Birth”—a facsimile of Winant’s own journal—includes an original text by the artist exploring the shared, yet solitary, ownership of the experience of birth. “My Birth” asks: What if birth, long shrouded and parodied by popular culture, was made visible? What if a comfortable and dynamic language existed to describe it? What if, in picturing the process so many times over and insisting on its very subjectivity, we understood childbirth, and its representation, to be a political act?

In 2018, Carmen Winant participated in the group exhibitions Being: New Photography at the Museum of ModernArt, Another Echo at the Sculpture Center (NY), and a yet-to-be-titled show at the Columbus Museum of Art; solo exhibitions will take place at Miller Contemporary (NY), Stene Projects (Stockholm), and Cave (Detroit). Winant regularly contributes to Aperture, Cabinet, Time, The Believer, and Frieze magazines, and is at work on a book about the nature of practice.

The book “I Will What I Want: Women, Design, and Empowerment” accompanied a 2018 exhibition of the same name, which was presented in New York City and Mexico City. In it, design curators Jimena Acosta Romero and Michelle Millar Fisher explore the complex and contradictory role that design has played in shaping women’s reproductive agencies since the mid-twentieth century, through second wave feminism, to the non-binary intersections of the present.

The exhibition presents objects, interfaces, and clothing that has sought to qualify those who have uteruses, menstruate, and/or identify as women as independent and creative subjects in a material world mostly designed by men and for men.

The book invites the reader to contemplate, from their own perspective, the ways in which these designs have - sometimes for good and at others for bad - governed, shaped, and facilitated their embodied experiences.

The event is a chance to highlight some of the stories from the book, and engage in audience discussion of this project in the context of several other great recent publications in the same vein. There will be ten copies given away to the first ten visitors who claim them.

Image: Colette Omogbai, “Agony,” 1963. Oil on Hardboard

Join us on Sunday, January 27 from 2–4 pm for an illustrated lecture by Bidoun Senior Editor Michael C. Vazquez focusing on surrealist self-fashioning. RSVP HERE

The paintings of the Nigerian artist Colette Omogbai provoked extreme reactions in the early 1960s, with their vivid, impastoed colors and violently abstracted figures, which conjoined human and animal, life and death. Vazquez explores the contexts on this lost-found artist—given pride of place in Okwui Enwezoor’s 2016 Postwar exhibition—amid other 1960s surrealists in Nigeria, Lebanon, and the United States.

Michael C. Vazquez is a writer, editor and curator whose primary interests include cultural diplomacy, little magazines, music, intimacy, and food. He is a Senior Editor at Bidoun, an award-winning journal of art, culture, and ideas from the Middle East and elsewhere. Previously he edited Transition: An International Review, a magazine of art and writing about Africa and its many diasporas. He was curator-in-residence for the Delfina Foundation’s inaugural season on “The Politics of Food” and a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He collaborates frequently with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University, and with the artistic working groups Electronic Textures and Women on Airplanes.

For the third and final installment of Publishing as Practice, Bidoun will stage a partial version of its infamous Bidoun Library. Founded in 2009, the Bidoun Library is a presentation of printed matter, carefully selected with zero regard for taste or excellence, that documents the innumerable ways that people have depicted and defined — that is, slandered, celebrated, obfuscated, hyperbolized, ventriloquized, photographed, surveyed, and/or exhumed — the vast, vexed, nefarious construct known as “the Middle East.”

In addition to publications, the library will have on view a selection of trailers from the little known genre of Iranian-American “B Movies.” Produced mainly in Los Angeles in the years after the revolution, these resolutely un-canonical (and often un-watchable) low budget films feature mainly American casts with a few Iranian actors. They are the direct descendents of filmfarsi, the vernacular B Movie genre that dominated popular Iranian cinema before 1979, and which employed many of the same directors. Much, if not all, was lost in translation. Some of these films were exported to Asia; others have become cult hits among pulp connoisseurs. Seen together, they shape a schizophrenic picture of what these diasporic directors once imagined the formula for a successful Hollywood action film to be.

• Thursday, November 29, 7pm: Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary
• Wednesday, December 5, 6pm: Reza Abdoh’s Showtapes & Short Films

“Sleeping With the Devil,” 1988. USA. Directed by Reza Abdoh

This screening is at the ICA Philadelphia and is free and open to the public, though registration is appreciated. Register Here

“Reza Abdoh: Showtapes and Short Films” is the second of three film screenings presented by Bidoun in conjunction with Publishing As Practice. Bidoun—whose work as a nonprofit and former print magazine focuses on art and culture from the Middle East and its diasporas—is Ulises’s third publisher resident as part of Publishing As Practice. As part of their programming, Bidoun has organized a selection of video excerpts and short films by Iranian-American multimedia artist, Reza Abdoh.

With his beginnings in experimental theater, Abdoh later took to film and video art, incorporating the same raw energy and subversive imagery that propelled his notoriety as a playwright and director. The fiery intensity of his productions erupts from the erratic choreography and impassioned performances of his casts, fused with his volatile cuts and crude layering of popular culture and iconoclasm. Abdoh sourced and spliced a miscellany of visual motifs, ranging from TV and BDSM to American patriotism and advertisements. His maximalist aesthetic strikes with fervor, weaponizing the anger and alienation experienced by those affected by systemic racism and the AIDS crisis in the United States.

Compiled by his collaborator Adam Soch, the “showtapes” present segments of Abdoh’s most known theater productions, Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Bogeyman, The Law of Remains, and Tight White Right (1990–93). As the first video work made by Abdoh following his own HIV diagnosis, Sleeping with the Devil (1988) stitches together screen tests of a multilingual recount of reporter Geraldo Rivera’s interview with cult leader Charles Manson, and probes the potential for empathy through the inflection and delivery of the actors; while Daddy’s Girl (1991) is a lewd and twisted testimony of sexual abuse and violent revenge. The Tryst (1995), a portion of Abdoh’s unfinished second feature, closes the program with the sole footage that was edited by Abdoh before his death and later shown at his memorial, offering a glimpse into a film career tragically cut short.

Program approx. 60 min.

Video from the productions The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Bogeyman, The Law of Remains, and Tight White Right. 1990–93. USA. Directed by Reza Abdoh. Video design by Adam Soch. 25 min.

Sleeping with the Devil. 1988. USA. Directed by Reza Abdoh. With Luis Zaldivar, Ken Roht, Michael Whitmore, Anthony Cristian, Paul Durand, Ingrid A., Steve Oglesby. 12 min.

Daddy’s Girl. 1991. USA. Directed by Reza Abdoh. Cinematography by Adam Soch. With Tony Torn, Juliana Francis. 9 min.

The Tryst [excerpt from an unfinished film]. 1995. USA. Directed by Reza Abdoh. Cinematography by Tal Yarden. With Tom Fitzpatrick, Tom Pearl, Tony Torn. 7 min.

Free event: Ticket reservations are suggested

“Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary” is one of three films presented by Bidoun Projects in conjunction with Publishing As Practice: Bidoun, an experimental publisher-in-residence project hosted by Ulises and funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Bidoun——whose work as a nonprofit and former magazine focuses on art and culture from the Middle East and its diasporas——is Ulises’s third publisher resident. The evening will begin with a screening of “Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary,” a feature length documentary on the pioneering Iranian filmmaker, and conclude with a panel discussion with members of Bidoun.

Created by Reza Abdoh’s longtime video collaborator and archivist Adam Soch, this documentary builds a vivid portrait of Reza Abdoh through archival footage and recent interviews. Members of the Dar a Luz theater company chronicle the making of successive productions with Abdoh in Los Angeles, New York, and abroad. The film also features the artist’s family, evoking a childhood deeply altered by the history of Abdoh’s native Iran and an adult creative life in America, bearing the scars of the tumultuous 1980s—the decade of Reaganism, the end of the Cold War, and the AIDS epidemic that would eventually take his life. Traversing this cultural divide, Abdoh reflected in a 1994 interview, “I’m just an addict for American culture, and I’m obsessive about it, and it makes me angry. There is so much food for thought and observation in American culture…. I find it very powerful culture, and I like to critique it, and, in a sense, see where it’s heading and where it can go.”

Adam Soch, US, 2015. 99 min

Celebrate the closing of our second of three publisher residents for Publishing as Practice: Martine Syms has operated through Dominica Publishing. The event will launch with a workshop with LA/NOLA/NYC-based artist Mandy Harris Williams and continue with a set from beloved local DJ, Osagie OG. Discussion, beats, drinks, and snacks.

2PM Mandy Harris Williams will lead audiences in the workshop #BrownUpYourFeed - Getting Fed by Your Feed: An image says a thousand words and reifies hundreds of concepts. An image indicates tens of race, gender and interactive structures in how it is conceived, created, distributed and attended to. This talk/workshop asks us to examine why we follow what we do, and more importantly, how it is serving us. Many of us use Instagram with automaticity, not acknowledging that the images we are feeding ourselves work against our self esteem and value system. How can we design our followed media to sustain and augment our self esteem?

4-6PM+ DJ Set with Osagie OG.

Mandy Harris Williams is a theorist, multimedia conceptual artist, writer, educator, and internet/community academic. She is from New York and currently living in Los Angeles. In a nutshell, Mandy’s work seeks to get everybody the love that they deserve. She graduated from Harvard, having studied the History of the African Diaspora, as well as the mass incarceration crisis, and other contemporary black issues. She received her MA in Urban Education and worked as a classroom teacher for 7 years. She integrates a holistic didactic style in to her current creative practice. Her creative work has been presented at Paula Cooper Gallery, Navel Gallery, Knockdown Center and Women’s Center for Creative Work to name a few. She has contributed writing work to Dazed Magazine, MEL magazine, ForHarriet, and The Grio and is a frequent radio and podcast guest.

Image: Martine Syms presenting an Artbound episode titled The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, after her work of the same name VIA YOUTUBE

Bio: Artists’ Canceled Texts and the World Wide Web, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi in Conversation with Malcolm Harris

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi’s “Bio” (Inventory Press, 2018) is a hybrid work that reconfigures canceled text and the World Wide Web. The book captures a span of 365 days during which the artist updated the 160-character “bio” section of her Twitter account each day. While tweets are regularly captured by corporate data storage centers this “bio” section remains the only untraceable and non-archived part of the software’s superstructure. “Bio” ultimately left no record of itself, complicating the normative binaries of online/offline and digital/print. An experiment in erasure, self-deletion, and visibility in the expanded sphere of the net, “Bio” anchors itself in the wider lineage of artists’ canceled texts, but in the age of new data as “soft” power.

The work featured in the New Museum Triennial anthology, The Animated Reader: Poetry of “Surround Audience” (ed. Brian Droitcour), and is currently on view as a 365-day internet installation at Contemporary Journal (ed. Carolina Rito).

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is an artist, poet, and theorist whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. Prior publications include a translation of Waly Salomão’s Algaravias: Echo Chamber (Ugly Duckling Presse), nominated for a 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; the poetry volume The Distancing Effect (BlazeVOX); the artist publication Apparent Horizon 2 (Bonington Gallery); and the chapbook Alphabet of an Unknown City (Belladonna*).

Malcolm Harris is a writer in Philadelphia and the author of “Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials.”

Please join us for a very special presentation entitled “After Ulises (Carrión): Artists’ Books and DIY Publishing in & Around The Netherlands.” RSVP

As a project space for bookworks, Ulises Carrión’s “Other Books and So” (Amsterdam, 1975-79) was an experiment across contemporary art, poetry and experimental archiving. It continued a history that began with Fluxus in the 1960s and became the blueprint for a number of artists’ books and DIY publishing spaces, initiatives and projects in and around the Netherlands, from the 1980s until today. In his informal talk, Florian Cramer will reconstruct this history - and its contemporary overlaps with zine culture and media activism, - show excerpts of Ulises Carrión’s video works and, with a bit of luck, phone in a former collaborator of Carrión in the Netherlands.

Florian Cramer is a reader at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam, Netherlands, where he also volunteers for the DIY publishing and experimental arts venues & projects PrintRoom, De Player and ZineCamp. He wrote the afterword for Alessandro Ludovico’s “Post-Digital Print” and co-authored the zine “The Moral of the Xerox: Missalette” with former Ulises resident Clara Balaguer.

Image: Thunderclap, zine by Amy Suo Wu, that distributes the erased writings of Chinese anarcho-feminist, He-Yin Zhen (1886-1920)

July 22–November 4, 2018

Photo: Constance Mensh

For the second installment of Publishing As Practice, Martine Syms will front as Dominica, the publishing imprint founded by the artist in 2011 dedicated to exploring blackness as a reference, marker, and topic. For the duration of the residency, Martine will transform the Ulises space into a shop selling new screen printed apparel and feature select texts, visual materials, and programming produced by the artist and collaborators. Syms will refashion the Dominica and Ulises websites into in a digital storefront and live streaming platform in the style of an online Home Shopping Network. Publishing as Practice: Martine Syms considers the shop as a central aspect of independent publishing—not only a site of commercial transaction, but also a locus of social exchange.

Martine Syms is an artist and conceptual entrepreneur based in Los Angeles. Syms works across publishing, video, and performance to examine representations of blackness. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, Hammer Museum, ICA London, New Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions. From 2007-2011 she was the co-director of the Chicago artist run project space Golden Age, and she currently runs Dominica Publishing, an imprint dedicated to exploring blackness in visual culture. She is a faculty member in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.

• Sunday, July 22, 2–6pm Dominica & Friends Readings & Residency Kickoff

Martine Syms, still from “Notes on Gesture,” 2015

Join us on Sunday, July 22 from 2 until 6 pm to celebrate the kickoff of Dominica’s residency with readings by Diamond Stingily, Rami George, Rocket Caleshu, and Carolyn Lazard, followed by a DJ set with Yassir “Yaya V” Valentine. Drinks, snacks, and summer vibes.

Publishing as Practice is a three-part publishing residency, designed to explore publishing as an incubator for new forms of editorial, curatorial, and artistic practice.

For the second installment of Publishing as Practice: Dominica—the publishing imprint founded by Martine Syms in 2011 dedicated to exploring blackness as a reference, marker, and topic—will transform the Ulises space into a shop selling new screen printed apparel and feature select texts, visual materials, and programming produced by the artist and collaborators. Syms will refashion the Dominica and Ulises websites into in a digital storefront and live streaming platform in the style of an online Home Shopping Network. Publishing as Practice: Martine Syms considers the shop as a central aspect of independent publishing—not only a site of a commercial transaction but also a locus of social exchange.

Support for Publishing As Practice has been provided to Kayla Romberger by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

A Movie Evening with YOWIE and mustarrrrd at Ulises! RSVP

Join us for our first co-curated movie night! The theme is IN TOO DEEP and we’ll be showing “Walking and Talking” starring Catherine Keener, Anne Heche and Liev Schreiber. Free snacks and drinks while supplies last!

Hardworking Goodlooking (HWGL) was established in 2013 by The Office of Culture and Design (The OCD) as a publishing imprint and graphic design studio interested in decolonization of aesthetic voices, vernacular artisanry, and giving value to the invisible. Founded by Clara Lobregat Balaguer and Kristian Henson in 2010, the OCD is a research and project production platform out of Parañaque City and Brooklyn, for social practice in art and design.

Hardworking Goodlooking’s three-week residency will be an exercise in running a “mosquito press,” referring to the illegal presses of the Martial Law era (1972-1986) that were critical of the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. As freedom of the press is currently threatened under the regime of neoauthoritarian president Rodrigo Duterte, HWGL will organize a series of intimate talks (and potluck meals) to discuss the Philippines’ current political situation with Filipino academics. The content generated in these discussions—plus content mined from long-running research into ideological internet trolls—will be printed as an homage to the mosquito press format: compiled as the documentation/ephemera of collective radical action, quickly and precariously printed, critical of a dictatorial regime, distributed via informal networks, often at personal risk.

They Can Never Kill All of the Mosquitoes Reviving the Mosquito Press

• April 14-15, Deep Listening Forum + Potluck Discussions
• April 18-20, Open Studio Visiting Hours
• April 22, Deep Listening Lecture Performance + Mosquito Press Launch

Join Ulises for a group discussion facilitated by Connie Yu on the essays “Commitment as a Non-Performative” by Sara Ahmed, Andrea Long Chu’s rumination in the work “Study in Blue: affect, trauma, event” from Women & Performance, 2017, and excerpts from the book “The Undercommons” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.. RSVP The readings are available through the links below.

• Chu, Andrea Long. “Study in Blue: trauma, affect, event.” Women and Performance, 27.3, 2017.
• Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harvey. “The University and the Undercommons.” The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 2013.

Connie will explore the aporia of learning and teaching in and around institution toward what Sara Ahmed calls a “process of estrangement,” when what is strange about a given, taken, is relieved. Is it a real inertia in publicizing feeling (Chu) or professionalizing labor (Moten & Harney)?

Connie Yu is a writer living in Philadelphia, moving toward performance and attending to queer domestic labor, representations of the AsAm diaspora, alternate and constricted transmissions of information, the body and what it wears, and how to work from here. They are the Brodsky Gallery Coordinator at the Kelly Writers House, and a teaching artist at Center for Creative Works.

Join Ulises for a book launch and conversation for “Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa” with the publication’s editorial director Stephanie Baptist and designer Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

Àsìkò is an innovative program started in 2010, by the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria to redress the frequently outdated or non-existent artistic and curatorial curricula at tertiary institutions across Africa.

Each year a cohort of approximately 12-15 emerging African artists and curators join an international faculty of practicing artists, art historians, curators and writers, for an intensive thirty-five-day course of study in art and curatorial history, methodologies, and professional development. Moving between models of laboratory, residency, and academy, Àsìkò privileges experimentation over conventional approaches to art making and curatorial inquiry, encouraging participants to workshop ideas, proposals and projects for long-term development and implementation.

“Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa” chronicles six editions of the program: the first two editions having taken place in Lagos, Nigeria and the subsequent four editions in Accra, Dakar, Maputo, and Addis Ababa, the capitals of Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique and Ethiopia, respectively. The publication documents each unique but related iteration and indexes the work and reflections of the more than 70 cultural producers (from 15 African countries) who have participated in Àsìkò from 2010-2016.

Stephanie Baptist is an independent cultural producer, editor and writer. For over a decade she has collaborated with noted contemporary artists, organizations and individuals. She has previously served as Program Director for En Foco, a non profit photography organization and as Head of Exhibitions and Public Programs for Tiwani Contemporary an art gallery in London. Stephanie has edited a number of gallery monographs for: Rotimi-Fani Kayode, Simone Leigh, Njideka Akunyili, Mary Evans, and Barbara Walker. She has also been contributing editor for Another Africa and a writer for Contemporary And, both online platforms dedicated to contemporary art from Africa. She has an MA in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy from Goldsmiths University of London. Stephanie is the Curator and Director of Medium Tings, an apartment gallery and project space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born interdisciplinary artist and educator. Mutiti holds a diploma in multimedia art from the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in graphic design. Recently, she has been a resident artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Recess, and the Centre for Book Arts, both in New York City. In 2015, Mutiti was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in its inaugural year. Mutiti has participated in several group shows including “Salon Style” at the Studio Museum, a special screening for “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum, “Talking Pictures” at the Metropolitan Museum, and “THREE: On Visibility and Camouflage” at We Buy Gold. Mutiti produces project-based works, founding Black Chalk and Co with Tinashe Mushakavanhu, a collective of writers, artists, curators, and educators that initiate research-based projects that result in publications, archival projects, and events. As a collaborative team, Black Chalk and Co completed a residency at Keleketla Library in Johannesburg. Mutiti is currently Assistant Professor in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Frampton Tolbert, Deputy Director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy will present a talk on Design and Civic Engagement at Ulises. The talk will focus on the history of CUP, its mission and recent projects, along with ongoing initiatives.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to increase meaningful civic engagement. CUP collaborates with designers, educators, advocates, students, and communities to make educational tools that demystify complex policy and planning issues.

Support Workshop: 1:30-4:00pm at the ICA

Risograph Workshop: 4:30-6:00pm at the ICA

Please RSVP

How can we support ourselves and each other? This workshop looks at the ways in which we meet our needs for wellbeing in order to dream, practice, and work on any project. Support extends beyond the life of our projects, often shaping the ways in which we navigate the contradictions of living and working on independent projects. Join us for an attunement, discussion, and mutual connection from 1:30-4:00pm and for a Risograph workshop feature an excerpt from our forthcoming book from 4:30-6:00pm.

This workshop will be led by BFAMFAPhD collective members Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martinez Poppe, and Caroline Woolard. The workshop comes from the collective BFAMFAPhD’s pedagogical project, “Ways of Being.” We invite people from all backgrounds and identities to participate in our programming. This is a LGBTQIA friendly space.

“Ways of Being” is a multi-platform pedagogical project which offers practices of collaboration, contemplation, and social-ecological analysis to postsecondary visual artists, arts students, and arts educators. Ways of Being is for educators who wish to connect art to economy; for students who make artworks that reflect the conditions of their own production. Ways of Being is a book, a deck of cards, and a cutting-edge, interactive educational website. The interactive website with videos games will be finished by September 2018 and the book be in print by January of 2019. The publisher is Punctum Books.

BFAMFAPhD is a collective of artists, designers, technologists, organizers, and educators who work in the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. Concerned about the impact of debt, rent, and precarity on the lives of creative people, BFAMFAPhD asks: What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees? Susan Jahoda is a Professor in Studio Arts at the University of Amherst, MA; Emilio Martinez Poppe is the Program Manager at Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc), New York, NY; Caroline Woolard is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at The University of Hartford, CT. Core members not represented in this CV include Vicky Virgin, a Research Associate at The Center for Economic Opportunity, New York, NY and Agnes Szanyi, a lecturer and PhD candidate in Sociology at The New School, New York, NY.

Educator, artist, and publisher of Adjunct Commuter Weekly, Dushko Petrovich, will discuss life on the art and academic road in a round table with Jennie Shanker, Gregory Laynor, and Daniel Pieczkolon. RSVP

Adjunct Commuter Weekly was the first magazine to address the lifestyle needs and shared interests of a rapidly growing and increasingly influential demographic. Edited and published by Dushko Petrovich—who for a number of years commuted to teach at Yale, RISD, and Boston University—the inaugural issue of Adjunct Commuter Weekly was created entirely by current and former adjunct commuters. It had it all: news, opinion, interviews, features, fashion shoot, photo essays, games, syllabi, poetry, fiction, personal memoirs and advertisements for products of interest to the adjunct commuter. First published on July 30, 2015 the print publication was shuttered on August 10, 2015, due to the financial and time constraints of the adjunct commuting staff, but the original issue, and newer content were rebranded as ACW, which can be found at www.adjunctcommuterweekly.com.

Jennie Shanker is an artist and adjunct activist, initially working with the United Academics of Philadelphia on its city-wide organizing, and is currently serving as the VP of TAUP, the union at Temple University for FT and PT faculty, librarians and academic professionals.

Gregory Laynor, poet and scholar of media and performance, works as a medical librarian and humanities adjunct at Temple University.

Daniel Pieczkolon is an adjunct, poet, and activist. He currently teaches Writing courses at Arcadia University & Literature courses at Rowan University and works as an organizer for the United Academics of Philadelphia.

Join us for the launch of “Muriel Cooper” by David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesenberger along with a lively discussion between author David Reinfert, designer Mark Owens, and Katie Reilly, William T. Ranney Director of Publishing at Philadelphia Museum of Art. RSVP

“I guess I’m never sure that print is truly linear.” —Muriel Cooper

Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) was the pioneering designer who created the iconic MIT Press colophon (or logo)—seven bars that represent the lowercase letters “mitp” as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically dazzling and controversial first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972). She used an offset press as an artistic tool, worked with a large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books. More than two decades after her career came to a premature end, Muriel Cooper’s legacy is still unfolding.

Mark Owens is a designer, writer, and curator working between New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. He holds an MFA in graphic design from Yale University and an MA in English and literary theory from Duke University. For the past decade he has worked as an independent graphic designer, primarily for publishers and clients in the cultural realm. He is co-editor with Zak Kyes of the catalogue for the exhibition Forms of Inquiry at the Architectural Association, London, and his essays have appeared in Dot Dot Dot, Visible Language, Grafik, PIN-UP, Bricks from the Kiln, and Experimental Jetset’s recent monograph, Statement and Counter-Statement.

David Reinfurt is 1/2 of Dexter Sinister, 1/4 of The Serving Library, and 1/1 of O-R-G inc. Dexter Sinister started as a small workshop on the lower east side of Manhattan and has since branched pragmatically into projects with and for contemporary art institutions. The Serving Library publishes a semi-annual journal, maintains a physical collection, and circulates PDF texts through its website. O-R-G is a small software company. David currently teaches at Princeton University and his work is included in the permanent collections of Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. David is the 2016-2017 Mark Hampton Rome Prize fellow.

Katie Riley is the current William T. Ranney Director of Publishing at Philadelphia Museum. Before coming to Philadelphia she held positions as Director of Publications at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg, and Editor of Scholarly Publications at the Art Institue of Chicago.

How do we read? Why do we read? With whom? When and where?

What happens to our bodies when we read out loud? Who do we become and how does reading collectively transform the act of reading to oneself? Through a series of reading exercises Sepake Angiama will explore the relationship between reading out loud and the body. RSVP

Sepake Angiama is an educator and curator whose interest revolves around critical, discursive education practices and the “social framework.” Most recently she was the Head of Education for Documenta 14 Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece where she co-initiated with ifa ‘Under the Mango Tree; sites of learning’ bringing together at artist-led schools, libraries and initiatives with a focus on radical education practices, indigenous practices and the global South. Currently she is a bak (basis voor actual kunst) fellow where her research ‘Her Imaginary’ addresses intersectional feminism, brutalist architecture and science fiction. Sepake joins us amidst ‘All Good Things Must Begin: A conversation between Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler’ her research residency at SBC Gallerie in Montréal.

Join us in celebrating our fourth quarterly season, Education, with a party and back-to-school sale! The festivities begin at 6:30pm. Warm libations and PB&Js will be provided along with a special DJ set by Rana Ransom. RSVP

Sale Sale Sale: 15% off select items all weekend long!

“Education” considers the ways non-traditional approaches to learning and instruction by artists, researchers, and organizers can effect social transformation. This quarter, Ulises examines the enduring legacies of self-organized and experimental pedagogies. Ulises will probe the broad, urgent challenges to access, power, and value within and outside educational institutions today. While publications are instruments of both self-directed and institutional learning, Ulises celebrates their radical potential to upend knowledge and challenge understandings.

Education Programs

• January 27, 2–3:30PM, “I guess I’m never sure that print is truly linear:” Q&A Launch of David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesenberger’s book, “Muriel Cooper,” along with a lively discussion between David Reinfert, Mark Owens, and Katie Reilly.
• January 28, 2–4PM, “Reading Out Loud” Through a series of reading exercises Sepake Angiama will explore the relationship between reading out loud and the body.
• February 3, “Adjunct Commuter Weekly:” Round Table with Dushko Petrovich,founder of ACW, who will discuss life on the art and academic road in a round table with Jennie Shanker, Gregory Laynor, and Daniel Pieczkolon.
• February 8, 1:30–4:30PM, Workshop and Riso Printing with BFAMFAPhD
• February 10, 2–4PM, Frampton Tolbert, Deputy Director of the The Center for Urban Pedagogy will present a talk on Design and Civic Engagement. The talk will focus on the history of CUP, its mission and recent projects, along with ongoing initiatives.
• February 11, 2–4PM, Book launch and conversation for “Àsìkò: On the Future of Artistic and Curatorial Pedagogies in Africa” with the publication’s editorial director Stephanie Baptist and designer Nontsikelelo Mutiti.
• March 13, 6:30–8PM, Dear Reader: Study in Blue, a group discussion facilitated by Connie Yu on two essays selected from Sepake Angiama’s Reading List.

Contributors

Pablo Helguera

“Arlington Heights Suite,” 2017. Collage on paper, 15 works, 9 x 12 inches.

“Perhaps the greatest fallacy in theories of human communication is that statements have to have a causal correlation, that our innermost anxieties have a standard verbal equivalent, and that we can only explain a experience through the narration of a logical sequences of events. The overwhelming evidence is that there is no final explanation to any incident, no correlations between them, and that our attempts at understanding any given sequence of events are at best provisional and at worst, hopeless.” —Pablo Helguera, 2008

Caroline Woolard and Susan Jahoda, of BFAMFAPhD

“Ways of Being:” Introduction Text by Caroline Woolard and Susan Jahoda of BFAMFAPhD Design and illustrations by Emilio Martinez Poppe of BFAMFAPhD

BFAMFAPhD is a collective of artists, designers, technologists, organizers, and educators who work in the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. Concerned about the impact of debt, rent, and precarity on the lives of creative people, BFAMFAPhD asks: What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees? BFAMFAPhD creates reports, pedagogical tools, and movement syllabi. Find out more at BFAMFAPhD.com.

Dushko Petrovich

“Adjunct Commuter Weekly” was the first magazine to address the lifestyle needs and shared interests of a rapidly growing and increasingly influential demographic. Edited and published by Dushko Petrovich—who for a number of years commuted to teach at Yale, RISD, and Boston University—the inaugural issue of “Adjunct Commuter Weekly” was created entirely by current and former adjunct commuters. It had it all: news, opinion, interviews, features, fashion shoot, photo essays, games, syllabi, poetry, fiction, personal memoirs and advertisements for products of interest to the adjunct commuter. First published on July 30, 2015 the print publication was shuttered on August 10, 2015, due to the financial and time constraints of the adjunct commuting staff, but the original issue, and newer content were rebranded as ACW, which can be found at www.adjunctcommuterweekly.com.

Sepake Angiama

Sepake Angiama is an educator and curator whose interest revolves around critical, discursive education practices and the “social framework.” Sepake has served as Head of Education for Documenta 14 Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece; Director of Education for Manifesta 10, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Curator of Public Programmes at Turner Contemporary, Margate, England; and Public Programmes Coordinator at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Education Reading List

1. Joseph Beuys and Volker Harlan, “What is Art?: Conversations with Joseph Beuys,”
2. Audre Lorde, “Your Silence will not Protect You”
3. Soren Hansen and Jesper Jensen, “The Little Red School Book”
4. Zygmunt Bauman, “On Education”
5. Nancy Dupree, “Ghetto Reality” and “Letter to Young Sisters”
6. Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” “Pedagogy of Hope,” “Education for a Critical
7. Consciousness,” and “Pedagogy of the Heart”
8. Augusto Boal, “Rainbow of Desire”
9. Jacques Ranciere, “Ignorant School Master”
10. Ivan Illich, “Deschooling Society”
11. Silvia Franceschini & Valerio Borgonuovo, “Global Tools 1973-1975: When Education Coincides with Life”
12. Francisco Ferrer, “The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School”
13. Sony Devabhaktuni,‎ Patricia Guaita,‎ Cornelia Tapparelli, “Building Cultures Valparaiso: Pedagogy, practice and poetry at the Valparaiso School of Architecture and Design
14. John Dewey, “Art as Experience”
15. Radical Education Forum, “Radical Education Workbook”
16. Bell Hooks, “Teaching to Transgress” and “Teaching Community: A pedagogy of hope”
17. Grant Kester, “Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art”
18. Heidi Zafia Mirza, “Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why black women succeed and fail”
19. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples”
20. Sara N. Davis, Mary Crawford, and Jadwiga Sebrechts, (Editors), “Coming Into Her Own: Educational Success in Girls and Women”
21. Maurice Stein and‎ Larry Miller, “Blueprint for Counter Education”

Please join Ulises, in partnership with Graduate Studies at Moore College of Art and Design, for a combinatory lecture with multidisciplinary artist and educator Pablo Helguera organized in conjunction with Ulises’ current quarterly theme “Education.” This performance workshop, which incorporates aspects of public speaking and education, consists in the collective writing and presenting of a co-authored lecture. No previous experience of any kind is needed. Different versions of the Combinatory lecture have been presented at the MUAC, Mexico City, Neon Gallery in Bologna Italy, Museo del Hombre in Gran Canaria, and many other locations.

Please Register here. Seating is limited. Event is free.

Pablo Helguera (b. Mexico City, 1971) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in New York City. Working in performance, photography, drawing, installation, lectures, and musical composition, among other diverse media, he creates artworks that investigate topics such as history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory, and the absurd. Helguera’s projects often blur the line between pedagogy and politically engaged art, raising the question of how educational methodologies can contribute to Social Practice, and vice versa.

Join Ulises for a book launch and conversation celebrating the release of “Words, Books, and the Spaces They Inhabit” (Sternberg Press, 2017) a new publication by Mari Shaw and the first in her series “The Noble Art of Collecting.”

Mari will be joined by Sarah Hamerman, an art librarian working at the Whitney Museum and MoMA Libraries, and scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English Literature, Penn.

Sarah will present on the legacy of artists’ books and artist Ulises Carrion, the namesake of Ulises bookshop who figures prominently in Shaw’s book, while Jean-Michel will speak briefly about Walter Benjamin whose ideas on book collecting are an organizing element in Shaw’s publication.

With examples of unexpected collectors and serendipitous outcomes, Shaw investigates the obscure desires that shape art collecting and the public goodwill that results from it. What was lost when the scrolls in the ancient library of Alexandria were destroyed? How did Catherine the Great’s collecting change the way we think? How do Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com expand our appreciation of books as objects? Though the ways we communicate and live vary, history has been created, recorded, and preserved in writing. Words and the spaces that contain them are crucial to an empathetic understanding of our world.

RSVP HERE

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK

“We are all tied to more than one country. The multilaterally shaped phenomenon of migration cannont be solved unilaterally, or else it generates a vulnerable reality for migrants. Implementing universal rights is essential. The right to be inlcluded belongs to everyone.”

Join Ulises for a group discussion facilitated by Nora Elmarzouky on two timely essays by artist Tania Bruguera: “Dignity Has No Nationality” and “Migrant Manifesto.” RSVP HERE

READINGS:

• Dignity Has No Nationality
• Migrant Manifesto

Tania Bruguera, born in 1968 in Havana, is a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power. By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.

Nora Elmarzouky grew up between Egypt and Pennsylvania. With a BA from Tufts University in International Relations, coupled with her studies in Spain, Morocco, and the Czech Republic, her interest in the interactions between humans, culture, identity, and the built environment was enhanced. She is currently supporting alternative Arab spaces, connecting sustainable dots, a Founders Fellow with Impact100, and expanding in.site collaborative in Philadelphia - a collective of designers and researchers working to make urban development and change more participatory and equitable. Additionally, she is managing Friends, Peace, and Sanctuary Project at Swarthmore bringing archives above refugee crises into the contemporary with Syrian and Iraqi refugees and creating art books with artists.

Image: Tania Bruguera. Immigrant Movement International. First public reading of the Migrant Manifesto. United Nations Students Conference on Human Rights. December 2, 2011. Courtesy IMI.

Xaviera Simmons, “Superunknown (Alive In The),” 2010. C-prints mounted on sintra with brace each photo 20 x 30 inches, Edition of 3 Courtesy: David Castillo Gallery

Next weekend Ulises will be at the New York Art Book Fair, organized by Printed Matter at MoMA PS1.

• Preview Thursday, September 21, 6-9 pm
• Friday, September 22, 1-7pm
• Saturday, September 23, 11am-9pm
• Sunday, September 24, 11-am-7pm

Join us for the Philadelphia launch of We Have the Great Discontent, a book of found poetry by Joel Evey, published by Actual Source. The book’s sole inspiration — the legendary John Shahidi of Avril50 — will be in attendance. There will be snacks, drinks and books for sale. RSVP

Joel Evey is a designer and educator based in Philadelphia, PA.

Book launch for The Obvious Earth, an essay collection from Carville Annex Press in San Francisco. Join us for an evening of sounds/sentences with Caren Beilin, Tristan Dahn and Nabil Kashyap. Snacks are likely. Come!

Caren Beilin is the author of the novel The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press) and a forthcoming book of nonfiction, SPAIN (Rescue Press). Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Fence, the Offing and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia.

Tristan Dahn is a librarian and semi-frequent performer of music in the Philadelphia arts scene interested in resonance, texture, and form.

Nabil Kashyap wrote The Obvious Earth (Carville Annex Press) and has had work appear places like Actually People Quarterly, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Seneca Review and Versal. He is a librarian based in Philadelphia.

Migrations contributor Marwa Arsanios will appear via Skype for a conversation and screening of the artist’s two recent video works, “Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling Is Extending” and “Who is afraid of ideology.”

RSVP

• “Who is afraid of ideology,” 2017, Digital video, color,sound 22:20 min
• “Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling Is Extending,” 2016, Digital video, color, sound 22:34 min.

“Through recorded testimony, Who is afraid of ideology? Part I tracks the practical work of the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement—how to use an axe, how to eat fish within its biological cycles of production, when to cut down a tree for survival and when to save it. But the film also explores how individuals come to a conscious participation in the movement—in short, how they become part of the guerrilla.” - Mason Leaver-Yap

In “Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling Is Extending,” Marwa Arsanios addresses the impact of the migration of waste on the changing landscape of Beirut, the city where she lives and works, which has been marked by the rapid development of its urban spaces and burdened by a recent garbage crisis.

Marwa Arsanios was born in Washington D.C. and lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. She received her MFA from University of the Arts London in 2007 and was a researcher in the Fine Art department at Jan Van Eyck Academie from 2011 to 2012. She has had solo exhibitions at Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2016); The Hammer, Los Angeles (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015). Her work was also shown at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Home Works Forum in Beirut (2010, 2013, 2015); the New Museum, New York (2014); M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2013); and nGbK, Berlin (2012). Screenings of her videos have taken place at the Berlinale, Berlin (2010, 2015), e-flux storefront, New York (2009), and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011). In 2012, Arsanios was awarded the special prize of the Pinchuk Future Generation Art Prize.

Join Ulises for the US release of Taxis, Issue 64 of Brownbook magazine. For this issue, Brownbook takes a road trip with five taxi drivers from across the Middle East and North Africa, joining Ismail Khaouli, one of Morocco’s last grand taxi drivers, along the roads that wind through the Atlas Mountains and stopping along Muscat’s coastline with Mohamed Al Nuumani, the Omani student who taxis passengers around on the side. RSVP

The issue release party will feature screenings of Brownbook’s short video features and interviews, as well as refreshments and an opportunity to browse and purchase a selection of themed back issues.

Launched over 10 years ago, Brownbook is the essential guide to the contemporary Middle East and North Africa focusing on architecture, travel and other culture. The bimonthly magazine is dedicated to documenting the lesser known stories of the region – from the music of Kuwaiti pearl divers to the Iranian diaspora of Los Angeles.

Book launch and barbecue cookout with Alex Da Corte celebrating the release of “Slow Graffiti” and “50 Wigs,” two recent publications of the artist’s work.

Soak in the summer with food, refreshments, and readings by Alissa Bennett and Sam McKinniss as well as a rotating screening of Da Corte’s latest video work. RSVP HERE

Alex Da Corte’s artist’s book “Slow Graffiti,” made on the occasion of his show at Vienna Secession, comprises two volumes: a conversation between the artist and the Los Angeles-based writer and critic Bruce Hainley, and Sorcery, a photographic comic strip by New York-based curator and writer Bob Nickas.

“50 Wigs” includes essays by art writer William Pym, curator Kim Nguyen (CCA Wattis), and artist Sam McKinniss, and is made in collaboration with Da Corte and The Andy Warhol Museum for his 2016 show at Herning Museum of Art.

Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale University School of Art. His first survey exhibition Free Roses was held at MASS MoCA, North Adams in 2016. Other recent exhibitions include Slow Graffiti at Vienna Secession, Austria (2017); A Man Full Of Trouble at Maccarone Gallery, New York; 50 Wigs at the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, Denmark; Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; A Season in He’ll at Art + Practice, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Easternsports at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2014, together with Jayson Musson). In 2012, Da Corte was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Crime enthusiast and writer Alissa Bennett was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1980. She is the author of DEAD IS BETTER, a twice-yearly zine dedicated to celebrity death, criminal behavior, and the American television program Intervention. Bennett lives and works in Brooklyn.

Sam McK­in­niss is an artist in New York. His paintings have been fea­tured in numerous group shows and solo presentations internationally. Most recently, his portrait of the pop star Lorde was featured as the cover art for her sophomore album, “Melodrama.” As a writer, McKinniss frequently collaborates with Da Corte, having created a monologue featured in the exhibition “Slow Graffiti” as well as contributing a semi-biographical essay to the catalog for “50 Wigs.”

“Migrations” considers how artists, thinkers, and whole communities engage narratives of movement and traversal, sanctuary and refuge. Through video, photography, and readings from artists Marwa Arsanios, Tania Bruguera, Banu Cennetoğlu, and Xaviera Simmons, Ulises will explore the poetics of migration and trouble our notions of origin and boundaries. Further contributions of workshops, screenings, lectures, and presentations will survey and remap these themes throughout the course of the season.

Contributors

Marwa Arsanios

“Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling Is Extending,” 2016 Digital video, color, sound 22:34 min.

“Resilient Weeds,” 2016 Pen on paper Dimensions variable

Banu Cennetoğlu

“The List” is a document that contains the information of known refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants who have died within, or on the borders of Europe since 1993. The data is compiled and updated each year by UNITED for Intercultural Action. Since 2006, in collaboration with art workers and institutions, Banu Cennetoğlu maintains up-to-date and translated versions of “The List” for public display and dissemination.

Tania Bruguera

“Selected Readings on Migrations”

Xaviera Simmons

“Superunknown (Alive In The),” 2010 42 C-prints mounted on sintra with brace 20 x 30 in. Edition of 3 Courtesy: David Castillo Gallery

Please join Ulises in celebrating the launch of our third quarterly season, “Migrations,” on Saturday, July 1 from 3-7PM. RSVP

“Migrations” considers how artists, thinkers, and whole communities engage narratives of movement and traversal, sanctuary and refuge. Through contributions from artists Marwa Arsanios, Tania Bruguera, Banu Cennetoğlu, and Xaviera Simmons, Ulises will explore the poetics of migration and trouble our notions of origin and boundaries.

Image: Xaviera Simmons, “Superunknown (Alive In The)” (detail), 2010. 42 C-prints mounted on sintra with brace, each photo 20 x 30 in. Edition of 3. Installation view Perez Art Museum Miami in “Poetics of Relation” (2015), Courtesy David Castillo Gallery

Artist-Run Reading Spaces is part of BABZ FAIR 2017 Extended Program Series Knockdown Center, 52-19 Flushing Ave, Queens, New York 11378

From 1975 to 1978 in Amsterdam, Ulises Carrión operated Other Books and So, an artist-run bookstore and exhibition space dedicated to artists’ books and ephemera, which served as a key point of interchange between Latin American and European artists’ publishing communities. Drawing upon this example, this discussion brings together the founders of artist-run bookstores, libraries, and reading rooms. Ideas of circulation, access, and “making public” intersect both libraries and experimental publishing practices, and artist-run reading spaces offer alternative ways of actualizing these ideas outside of institutional paradigms. More than distribution points for texts, they function as social spaces of reading. Panelists will join in a 90-minute discussion of their projects, to be accompanied by a casual book display including items selected by the presenters and items from MoMA Library.

Panelists:

• Gee Wesley, Ulises, Philadelphia
• Rachel Valinsky, Wendy’s Subway, Brooklyn, NY
• David Richardson, Dispersed Holdings, NYC
• Kimi Hanauer & Bomin Jeon, Press Press, Baltimore
• Devin N Morris, Brown Paper Zine Fair, 3 DOT ZINE, Brooklyn, NY

Moderator: Sarah Hamerman, Artist Book Cataloger, MoMA Library

Join Ulises for a book launch with artist Becky Suss. Enjoy libations, snacks and company celebrating the release of the ICA exhibition catalogue “Beck Suss.”

In the fall of 2015, Suss presented selections from her most recent body of work in her first solo museum exhibition curated by ICA’s Laporte Associate Curator, Kate Kraczon. Released in 2017, the fully illustrated catalogue for this exhibition includes an extended interview of Suss by Kate Kraczon.

“Meditative, large-scale paintings augmented by smaller studies in oil and ceramic reimagine the domestic spaces of her relatives with a focus on her late grandparents’ mid-century suburban home. The flattened architecture and exaggerated perspective of Suss’s canvases memorialize their collected art and objects through an intimate, archeological process that opens familial narrative to questions of class, politics, and religion.”

Becky Suss was born in 1980 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is currently based. She received an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, a BA from Williams College, and in 2013 attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition to ICA Philadelphia, Suss’ work has been exhibited at the Woodmere Art Museum, Pennsylvania, the Berkeley Art Museum, California, and The Berman Museum at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania, as well as at storied Philadelphia artist collectives Vox Populi and Space 1026, of which she is a former member. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery. Her solo exhibition Homemaker is currently on view at Jack Shainman Gallery through June 3rd.

Image: Becky Suss, “1919 Chestnut (Three Cities, The Mother, Kiddush Hashem, Salvation, The Apostle, Mary, Nazarene),” 2015

Join us at Ulises to celebrate the release of 3 new zines. “Leap of Faith” by Isaac Tin Wei Lin, “Two Way Mirror” by Clark Mizono, and “The Grand Inquisitor” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky with illustrations by Zoe Axelrod and Geoffrey KixMiller, are the first publications produced by High Tide and we are excited to share them with you.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin explores the realm where representation and buzzing abstraction meet. His surfaces are often densely covered in calligraphic, brushed and hand-drawn patterns that express both the logic and complexity of written language. Cartoon figures, often in the form of cats and dogs, make appearances, sometimes as larger-than-life-size cut-outs covered in pattern themselves.

Clark Mizono, is an artist and freelance photographer living and working in New York City.

High Tide is an artist-run gallery and project space located in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Through formal exhibitions, performances, workshops and experimental programming, High Tide seeks to maintain a critical dialogue between artists and our local and global communities.

Friday, May 5: 12:00pm-8:00pm

Saturday, May 6: 10:00am-6:00pm

We are excited to be participating in the Philadelphia Art Book Fair, co-presented by Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and The Print Center. It is a two-day event showcasing 70 plus exhibitors, from art book publishers to individual artists and institutions, local, national and international.

Location: Twelve 27, 1227 N. 4th Street, Phila, PA Entrance to the Philadelphia Art Book Fair is free, open to the public and fully accessible.

“Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection– no less deep, yet aware of its transience.” - Svetlana Boym

Join Ulises for a group discussion facilitated by Jennifer Wilson on Svetlana Boym’s article “On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes.”

Please find the reading in the following link: Boym, Svetlana. “On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 498–524.

Jennifer Wilson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania where she is currently working on her first book, “Radical Chastity: Abstinence and the Political Imagination in Nineteenth Century Russia.” From 2015-2016, she participated in the Penn Humanities Forum on “Sex.” Her writings on literary culture, Russia, and politics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Al Jazeera America, among others. You can follow her on Twitter at @JenLouiseWilson.

Svetlana Boym’s article “On Diasporic Intimacy: Ilya Kabakov’s Installations and Immigrant Homes” is one of the texts included in “Selected Readings on Intimacy,” a presentation of books and articles choosen by scholar Lauren Berlant as her contribution to Ulises’s curatorial season “Intimacy.”

RSVP for Dear Reader: On Diasporic Intimacy

Please join Ulises this Saturday for the Philadelphia launch of the newest issue of The Third Rail. The launch will feature a short screening program of videos connected to Issue 10 and Ulises’ quarterly theme, Intimacy. Jonathan Thomas, editor of The Third Rail, will give a brief introduction. Drinks and light refreshments will be available.

At 8pm we will screen a teaser from Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s second feature film, “Empty Metal,” co-directed with Barry James Sweitzer, followed by Mati Diop and Manon Lutanie’s “Liberian Boy” (2015), and two shorts by Alexander Kluge: “BLIND LOVE / Jean-Luc Godard: My mother had only seen silent films!,” and “TSCHAK TSCHAK BOING / Love in a Space Suit” (both 2001).

Issue 10 of The Third Rail features an in-depth interview with writer, filmmaker, and television pioneer Alexander Kluge by Jonathan Thomas, in which Kluge shares his theory of montage and constellational filmmaking, discusses his move from cinema into television, and unpacks his principle of the city; psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster recalls her first dreams on the analytic couch; actress and filmmaker Mati Diop and independent publisher Manon Lutanie present a four-minute dance film; film critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin reflect on Isabelle Huppert’s performance style, both in print and with an audiovisual essay online; filmmaker Sky Hopinka discusses indigenous poetics, language revitalization, and experimental modes of documentary filmmaking with filmmakers Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil, and shares a video online; poet Anne Boyer writes on a rebellion against images; experimental flutist and composer Barbara Held is interviewed by Alexandra Alisauskas and Godfre Leung and discusses breath as a medium, composer-interpreter-audience relations, and her approach to the indeterminate scores of Alvin Lucier and Yasunao Tone; chef Michelle Gayer offers a tool for fighting fascism; and there are artist projects by John Fleischer and Sara Greenberger Rafferty.

The Third Rail is a free nonprofit periodical devoted to a discussion of modern and contemporary art, politics, philosophy, and culture, featuring critical essays and reviews, interviews, literary arts, and artist projects. Based in Minneapolis, The Third Rail is an editorially independent affiliate of The Brooklyn Rail.

In response to Ulises’ current quarterly, Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents two works that cast a shadow on the theme of intimacy. “Saydnaya (the missing 19db),” recently commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 13, and “Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley,” (2013) contour intimacies of violence, separation, and conflict. The works communicate, in whispers and shouts, bonds nevertheless formed and performed in difficult – murderous – terrains: the prison, the courtroom, and the border. Venturing considerations of intimacy in relation to community, citizenship, and the state, this event also aims to question some of the presumed conditions of intimacy: proximity, disclosure, transparency, reciprocal knowledge, truth. This event is co-organized with Ulises by Kirsten Gill, who will also give an introduction. RSVP

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley,” 2013,
Digital video, 14’

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Saydnaya (the missing 19db),” 2017, Stereo audio, 12’

Image: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley,” 2013. Installation view at Kunsthalle St Gallen. Photo by Stefan Jaggi

“Will you give a hand to Ban? Do you have a sentiment, do you have class? Let me tell you before you extend yourself that Ban is disgusting. Let me tell you that Ban is a difficult person to love, full of transience. I could tell you things about Ban.”

Join Ulises for a reading group discussion and writing session led by Becky Huff Hunter on Bhanu Kapil’s book “Ban en Banlieue” —partly a response to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s murder—which struggles to memorialize the rape of a young Indian girl walking home alone during a race riot. This session will focus on roughly the first half of the book, found in the link below.

“Ban en Banlieu” PDF

Bring a notepad and pen in order to participate in writing exercises that draw upon the book’s themes. As the discussion will partly be discussing interpersonal violence, please help us maintain a safe space by being mindful and considerate of others.

Becky Huff Hunter is a writer and editor, who has recently written on Philadelphia’s contemporary art in “Artforum,” “Frieze,” and “Art Papers.” She previously organized the Writing Art and Life reading/writing groups at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a trained Anti-Violence Advocate.

Please join Ulises for a screening of “Hyper Normalization” (Adam Curtis, 2016, 166 minutes) with an introduction by Ulises member and Philly-based designer, Joel Evey. Followed by drinks and mingling.

Adam Curtis explains how, at a time of confusing and inexplicable world events, politicians and the people they represent have retreated in to a damaging, & over-simplified version of the world.

[on ideas and consequences] Well, a lot of people go on about how I’m a leftist, but I’m not really, because I believe that ideas have consequences. And why I like people like Weber [German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920)] is because they are challenging what I see as that crude left-wing vulgar Marxism that says that everything happens because of economic forces within society, that we are just surfing, our ideas are just expressions-froth on the deep currents of history, which is really driven by economics. I’ve never believed that. Of course, economic forces have a great effect on us. But actually, people’s ideas have enormous consequences. And to be honest, if you had to reduce what I do, I spend my whole time just looking at how ideas have consequences, not necessarily what the promoters of them intended, because I think that’s a really big thing in our time. I came into writing and describing and filming the world at the very moment that those old left-wing certainties were beginning to collapse, certainties that said somehow progress and modernity were on a inevitable path towards a particular destination in history. But it was also equally obvious to me the right-wing reaction-where you just bring a market force in to create a form of stability that goes nowhere-was equally not going to work. And I became interested in examining how ideas have led us to this position in ways that those who had the ideas didn’t really intend. People like Weber who were, in a sense, conservative sociologists of the late nineteenth century were looking at the consequences of rationality. At how scientific ideas were used by those in power in modern society-and what the consequences then were. I think this is still incredibly important to look at today. [2012] — Adam Curtis on IMDB

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Please join Ulises, in partnership with Moore College of Art and Deisgn, for a screening of “The Politics of Intimacy” (Julie Gustafson, 1972, 52 minutes) and “Now” (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 12 minutes) with an introduction by Jesse Pires, Program Curator at International House Philadelphia.

These two feminist works exemplify the intimacy and immediacy of emergent video technologies in the early 1970s. Both videos employ “close-up” framing, a cinematic device that more intimately connects a viewer to an onscreen subject. In “The Politics of Intimacy,” various women, representing a wide range of ages and social and economic backgrounds, openly discuss their sexual feelings and behaviors on topics ranging from orgasm to masturbation. The tape unfolds in a manner that resembles a candid conversion not unlike those of women’s consciousness-raising groups from the era. With Now, Benglis intensifies the relationship between viewer and screen as she interacts with various prerecorded versions of herself. The mediated intimacy of the artist speaking across time and space is downright haunting and foreshadows a future where screens and devices would become preferred modes of connection.

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International House Philadelphia

Moore College of Art and Design

Workshop: Saturday 2–5pm Limited capacity: Sign up at loveoptimizedworkshop.eventbrite.com

Pop-Up Show: Saturday 5pm–7pm + Sunday 12–6pm Features inventions blueprinted at the workshop. Open to all: RSVP for the Pop-Up Reception

Welcome to a world of problems, solved.

Love, Optimized is a multimedia experience by Object Solutions, a fictional company that envisions the high-tech future of romance—with a dose of dark humor.

In the Love, Optimized workshop, you become the inventor. Guided by our laboratorians, you partner up and draw blueprints for new technologies to solve everyday love troubles. The afternoon’s inventions become a pop-up show at Ulises, where visitors are invited to imagine the future of love—optimized.

Our aim is to provoke pressing questions about intimacy and innovation. By co-creating a vision of tech-assisted love, we engage in what Anthony Dunne calls “design for debate,” where we move away from thinking about technological applications to technological implications. We invite you to consider the possibilities and limitations of a future where intimacy is administered and supervised by consumer products.

Love, Optimized is a partnership between Ernesto D. Morales and Shelly Ronen.

For richer details, visit objectsolutions.net/love

For more intimate contact, join our mailing list at objectsolutions.net/mail

See the workshop overview + images: How to Design the Future of Love

See what participants have devised:

• Surveillant clothing and immersive dreams
• Precoital pinpricks and the foul stench of breakups
• Emotional dinnerware and connected underwear

Authors Al Bedell and Larissa Pham will be reading excerpts from their short erotic fiction published by Badlands Unlimited and part of the “New Lovers” series. Each story has its own unique take on relationships, intimacy, and sex, as well as the complexities that bedevil contemporary life and culture today.

Join the intimate evening – drinks and light refreshments will be served.

Al Bedell, “I Would Do Anything For Love” Al Bedell is a writer who splits her time between New York and Los Angeles. Her writing explores quotidian trauma and the contemporary female condition. She studied Philosophy at the University of Hartford.

Larissa Pham, “Fantasian” Larissa Pham is a writer living in Brooklyn. She has written for Adult, Guernica, The Nation and Nerve. Pham studied painting and art history at Yale University.

Since 2012, Title has been a fixture in the Philadelphia art world as an unaffiliated platform for art writing. Beginning in 2017, they are establishing a new structure in pursuit of broader, more conceptually-driven goals for content. Title Magazine’s new editorial team — Lindsay Buchman, Samantha Mitchell, Kaitlin Pomerantz, Meredith Sellers, and Bailey Sheehan — invites you to join in celebrating their relaunch at Ulises. Brunch cocktails and light snacks will be available!

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Image: Isabel Lederman

Book talk with Nato Thompson on his new book,”Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life.” Thompson is the artistic director of the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time, which commissions and supports socially engaged works of art.

“Culture as Weapon” is a spirited and insightful examination of how, over the past century, corporations, politicians, nonprofits, and activists alike have embraced the power of creativity to shape public opinion, for good and for ill. Thompson simultaneously investigates the way artists have reacted to this cultural transformation, from Andy Warhol’s prescient Pop Art to Dread Scott Tyler’s provocative installations to Suzanne Lacy’s social interventions. As he puts it, “the world has witnessed the realization of the age-old avant-garde demand that art become part of the everyday.”

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Image: Sharon Hayes, “May 1st,” 2012. 5 Letterpress prints (framed), 14.5 x 19.75 in. Edition of 5 + 2 AP

In this quarter, Ulises considers intimacy through a close-knit constellation of topics, ranging from proximity and privacy to love, friendship, sex, and sexuality. Through a season of artworks, programs, and explorations, Ulises seeks to offer space for artists, thinkers, and communities of care to interrogate our role as social and civic participants, engage notions of inclusion and belonging, and discuss and employ affect, empathy, and love-based politics. Artist Sharon Hayes, scholar Lauren Berlant, and independent publishing imprint Badlands Unlimited provide principal contributions, with additional contributors extending these ideas and communities over a period of three months.

Contributors

Sharon Hayes

“May 1st,” 2012 Five Letterpress prints (framed) 36.8 x 50.2 cm 14 1/2 x 19 3/4 in Edition of 5 + 2 AP

In addition to “May 1st,” Hayes presents a new public work entitled, “Beyond the moon is Lesbos, you told me,” a series of texts posted in public space in Philadelphia addressesing both the present political moment and the linguistic and psychic terrain of the outburst.

Badlands Unlimited, “New Lovers”

A paperback erotica fiction series inspired by Maurice Girodias’s legendary Olympia Press, Badlands Unlimited’s “New Lovers” series features the raw and uncut writings of authors new to the erotica genre. Each novella in the “New Lovers” series is an independent story of about 12,000-18,000 words in length with its own unique take on relationships, intimacy, and sex, as well as the complexities that bedevil contemporary life and culture today.

• Wednesday Black, “How To Train Your Virgin”
• Lilith Wes, “We Love Lucy”
• Andrea McGinty, “God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name”
• Lex Brown, “My Wet Hot Drone Summer”
• Al Bedell, “I Would Do Anything For Love”
• Cara Benedetto, “Burning Blue”
• Tamara Faith Berger, “Kuntalini”
• Bettina Davis, “One Valencia Lane”
• Larissa Pham, “Fantasian”
• “New Lovers” Reading Event with Larissa Pham and Al Bedell, March 4th, 6:30pm

Lauren Berlant

Selected Readings on Intimacy:

1. James Baldwin, All works
2. Roland Barthes, “A Lover’s Discourse,” “Incidents,” and “Camera Lucida”
3. Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, “Intimacies”
4. Svetlana Boym, “Diasporic Intimacy”
5. Veena Das, “Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary”
6. Bracha Ettinger, All works
7. Deborah Gould, “Moving Politics”
8. Donna Haraway, “The Companion Species Manifesto”
9. Bhanu Kapil, All works
10. Chris Kraus, “I Love Dick”
11. Annette Kuhn, “Family Secrets”
12. Kiese Laymon, “Long Division” and “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America”
13. Toni Morrison, All works
14. Beatriz Preciado, “Testo Junkie”
15. Elspeth Probyn, “Outside Belonging”
16. Christina Sharpe, “Monstrous Intimacies”
17. Carolyn Steedman, “Landscape for a Good Woman”
18. Kathleen Stewart, “Ordinary Affects”
19. Jalal Toufic, “Undying Love”, or “Love Dies”
20. Patricia Williams, “On Being an Object of Property”

Join Ulises for a reading group discussion led by Maria Murphy on Judith Butler’s text “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” This session’s reading will focus on Chapter One of “Excitable Speech” entitled, “Burning Acts, Injurious Speech,” found in the link below.

Butler, Judith. Chapter One. “Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.” New York: Routledge, 1997. 43-69.

As part of the discussion, Murphy will perform “The Production of Voice,” a short spoken-word piece for voice and voice processor and John Cage’s “Aria” (1958), originally written for interpretation by Cathy Berberian.

“Excitable Speech” by Judith Butler is included in “Twelve Books & Seven Records: Re-voice,” a presentation of books and albums selected by curator Mark Beasley as his contribution to Ulises’s curatorial season Active Voice.

Active Voice considers the voice in relation to listening, language, and political agency through a series of programs, artworks, readings, and selected publications from contributors Mark Beasley, Hannah Black, and Steffani Jemison.

Maria Murphy is a PhD candidate in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research considers the relationship between music technologies and body politics through the work of multimedia artists Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, and Karen Finley. In her dissertation, Maria maps how these artists participated in a particular mode of aesthetic activism, which took part in biopolitical shifts concerning the circulation and industrialization of information, the production of healthy and sickly bodies, and the political fictions of gender and sexuality during a precarious time for public health and social hygiene under Ronald Reagan’s administration. Maria is also interested in developing creative spaces for hands-on research. She is the co-founder of Listening (to) Cyborgs: A Media Archaeology Workshop on Sound Technologies.

Join Ulises for a book discussion on Mladen Dolars’s text “A Voice and Nothing More.” This event is the first in a new reading group series from Ulises entitled “Dear Reader.” The reading for this session is the introduction to “A Voice and Nothing More” found in the link below.

“A Voice and Nothing More,” Introduction

“A Voice and Nothing More” by Mladen Dolar is one of the publications included in “Twelve Books & Seven Records: Re-voice,” a presentation of books and albums selected by curator Mark Beasley as his contribution to Ulises’s curatorial season Active Voice.

Active Voice considers the voice in relation to listening, language, and political agency through a series of programs, artworks, readings, and selected publications from contributors Mark Beasley, Hannah Black, and Steffani Jemison.

Facilitating the discussion is Hammam Aldouri. Hammam Aldouri is an independent scholar who holds a PhD in philosophy from the CRMEP, Kingston University and a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Critical Studies from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program. His writing has been published in Radical Philosophy, Detroit Research and Field Journal. He is currently a contributor to the Philadelphia based online art magazine the Artblog.

Artist and writer Hannah Black. Black, will read via Skype from a selection of her recent writings. As a contributor to Active Voice, Hannah Black presents recent video works — including “Intensive Care/Hot New Track,” “Fall of Communism,” and “My Bodies” – that consider pop vocals as a space to explore violence, power, and pluralism.

Image: Hannah Black, “Fall of Communism,” 2014, video still

View the full “Fall of Communism” video

Ulises is heading to New Haven for the day to participate in the Odds & Ends Art Book Fair hosted by Yale University Art Gallery.

Steffani Jemison presents her 2014 two-channel sound piece, “Same Time,” a reprisal of a speech delivered in 1970 by Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton that has been reinterpreted by Brooklyn-based R&B group Sidetrack Boyz as a vocal improvisation. Her presentation will be followed by a conversation with Steffani and artist David Hartt.

Active Voice considers the voice in relation to listening, language, and political agency through a series of programs, artworks, readings, events, and curated publications from contributors Mark Beasley, Hannah Black, and Steffani Jemison. Active Voice seeks to address the performative and embodied potential of the voice and its ability to reify and limit political and social realities.

Contributors

Steffani Jemison

Steffani Jemison presents her 2014 two-channel sound piece, “Same Time,” a reprisal of a speech delivered in 1970 by Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton that has been reinterpreted by Brooklyn-based R&B group Sidetrack Boyz as a vocal improvisation.

Hannah Black

Hannah Black presents a selection of recent video works – including “Intensive Care/Hot New Track,” “Fall of Communism,” and “My Bodies” – that consider pop vocals as a space to explore violence, power, and pluralism.

Mark Beasley

Re-Voice Reading Room

A curated selection of books and records on the theme of voice

January 10, 2017, 6:30PM–8PM January 17, 2017, 6:30PM–8PM Mark Beasley: Re-Voice Reading Room

Mark Beasley presents, Re-Voice, a curated selection of books and records on the theme of voice. These events are the first in a new reading group series from Ulises entitled “Dear Reader”. These discussions aim to open up and invite conversation on excerpts from Mark’s list.

Twelve Books & Seven Records: Re-Voice

A curated selection of books and records on the theme of voice, by Mark Beasley

1. Ashley, Robert, “Perfect Lives: An Opera, Burning Books,” New York, 1991
2. Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath, “Image, Music, Text,” New York, Hill and Wang, 1977
3. Beasley, Mark, “Hey Hey Glossolalia: Exhibiting the Voice,” New York, Creative Time Books, 2008
4. Butler, Judith, “Excitable Speech (A Politics of the Performative),” Routledge, New York and London, 1997
5. Connor, Steven, “Dumbstruck, (A Cultural History of Ventriloquism),” Oxford University Press, 2000
6. Dietrich, Ralf, “Robert Ashley: Outside of Time,” Germany, Musik Texte, 2009
7. Dolar, Mladen, “A Voice and Nothing More,” (Short Circuits), The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006
8. Heller-Roazen, Daniel, “Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers,” Brooklyn, New York, Zone Books, 2013
9. Mudrian, Albert, “Choosing Death: The improbable history of Death Metal and Grindcore,” Los Angeles, Feral House, 2004
10. Nancy, Jean-Luc, “Listening,” Fordham University Press, USA, 2007
11. Neumark, Norie, “Voice, (Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media),” The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010
12. Weiss, Allen S., “Breathless,” (Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and The Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia), Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2002
13. Lincoln, Abbey, “We Insist!” (Freedom Now Suite), Max Roach, 1960
14. Ashley, Robert, “The Wolfman,” New York, Lovely Music, 1964 / 2003
15. Ono, Yoko, “Fly,” 1971
16. La Barbara, Joan, “Voice is the Original Instrument,” New York, Wizard Records, 1976 (Re-released in 2016 on Arc Light Editions)
17. Cabaret Voltaire, “Extended Play,” Rough Trade Records, 1978
18. Napalm Death, “Scum,” Birmingham, Earache Records, 1987
19. Big Legs, “Big Legs,” Junior Aspirin Records, 2015