Harry Burke

Montez Press presents an epic show of publishers + their writers for The Only Thing That’s New is Us at Mathew NYC, Aug 25

22 August 2017

The Only Thing That’s New is Us group exhibition is on at New York’s Mathew NYC  on August 25.

Hosted by recent AQNB publisher pick, Montez Press and Nettles Artists Collective, the event is part of the Montez at Mathew 2017 Summer Program, which brings 18 New York-based press houses or organisations together, each selecting an artist (or pair of them) to take part in the residency. Also associated with the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research program, the project revolves around a course taught on James Joyce’s epic Ulysses, asking each artist to respond in their own way to the literature.

The event features visual works, performance, video and readings by Harry Burke & Rin Johnson via Pfeil Magazine, Saretta Morgan & Kiran Puri via Belladonna, Mylo Mendez via We’re Hir We’re Queer, James Loop via Montez’s own The Interjection Calendar, and Candice Iloh via No, Dear Magazine, among others.

An artist book will be released of the work in 2018.

Visit the FB event page for details.**

'The Interjection Calendar' pub 2017 + feat various artists. Thank you #MontezPress 🌷

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“Housing Is a Human Right.” Public + private ownership in ÅYR’s I’d Rather Be Outside as part of Holland Festival

20 July 2017

ÅYR presented installation I’d Rather Be Outside at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, as part of the Holland Festival, running June 11 to June 25.

Housing Is a Human Right. ÅYR’s I’d Rather Be Outside as part of Holland Festival

Installed at the site of Museumplein, the work sprawls across the green open space; free and accessible, the 3D printed concrete forms create a landscape of rooms. A comment on the contemporary housing situation, the collective explore, “issues connected with the global housing crisis, mass production and the relationship between public and private.”

They also created a large scale text work, collaborating with graphic designer Fabian Harb for the font and fragments of poems selected by curator Harry Burke, including excerpts by Joan Larkin, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Carry van Bruggen, Sophie Collins and more. In addition, the collective invited Martha Rosler to exhibit her animated billboard ‘Housing Is a Human Right’ (1989).

åyr, founded in 2014, is made up of four architects who tackle “ownership, privacy and sharing within the domestic space.”**

ÅYR presented installation I’d Rather Be Outside at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum as part of the Holland Festival running June 11 to June 25.

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PFEIL Magazine #6 launch @ Shan Fu Store, Sep 6

5 September 2016

PFEIL Magazine #6 is launching at New York’s Shan Fu Store on September 6.

Each issue is dedicated to a specific theme and functions as a book, collection, and object. Taking the form of a key word, each theme adds to “an indexical collection of word-objects as objects of obsession”. Through this process, each word’s meaning is “expanded, eroded, overused, misused and ultimately enjoyed”. The sixth issue’s key word is ‘extra’ and includes contributions from Harry Burke, Isolée, Sarah Ksieska, Nicole Ondre, Fion Pellacini, Dan Rees, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Villa Design Group.

Guests are invited to come and enjoy an extra large delicious watermelon smoothie slush from Shan Fu, a supermarket, courtesy of the host, Montez Press.

See the FB event page for details.**

PFEIL Magazine #6 @ Shan Fu Store

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ÅYR party @ Venice Architecture Biennial, May 26

24 May 2016

Artist collective ÅYR is co-representing Britain in the 15th Venice Architecture Biennial, running May 26 to November 27.

The London-based group founded and run by Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava, Luis Ortega Govela, and Octave Perrault in 2014 focuses on contemporary forms of domesticity and often sets up installations in art fairs and biennials, such as London’s Frieze, where the the booth was turned into a room and all inside was constructed to be a ‘Smart Home’.

For the opening weekend of the Venice Architecture Biennial, ÅYR are hosting a party at Bauer Hotel called ‘Safe Space’, where there are “no lists”, “no stress” and where you can find “biennale realness”.

DJing will be New York-based poet Harry Burke, Signorina Van Der Rohe and Martti Kalliala.

See both the FB eventpage and the Venice Architecture Biennial website for further info.**

 

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ECOCORE IV @ The Art Market, Dec 18

17 December 2015

ECOCORE zine, edited by Alessandro Bava and Rasmus Myrup launches its fourth edition with party at The Art Markets on December 18.

The irregularly published zine aims to “edit the identity of ecology from the point of view of art” by fostering discussions about the topic and pushing it into the radars of contemporary artists, writers and poets.

The party will be hosted by M¥SS KETA and will be accompanied by a listening party selected by Bava and contributing artist Jacopo Mazzetti. Other contributing artists include Harry Burke, Juliette Bonneviot and Katja Novitskova.

See the FB event page for details. **

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Post Digital Cultures Symposium 2015 @ Palais de Rumine, Dec 4 + 5

2 December 2015

The third (and final) edition of the Post Digital Cultures takes over Lausanne’s Palais de Rumine for a two-day symposium on December 4 and 5.

As always, the symposium takes as its starting point the relationship between art and new media with a series of events examining the “current state of contemporary cultural production in relation to new technologies”, with a selection of participating artists, curators, philosophers, and researchers delivering papers, performances and keynotes.

Among the selected events is a talk with Harry Burke about Eugen Gomringer, one with Rózsa Farkas titled ‘Artist Novella; Language and Publishing Today’, Katja Novitskova presenting ‘New Horizons’, an E-performance by Gilles Furtwängler, and another performance by Lauren Huret called ‘Relaxing Data’.

See the Symposium website for details. **

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Belated Soul @ Pretty Days, Nov 10

9 November 2015

The Belated Soul group exhibition is showing at the “cellar/basement entrance” of New York’s 1100 Broadway on November 10.

Curated by Quintessa Matranga as part of the Pretty Days exhibition series running in various venues and utilizing a “rectangular grow tent as its primary platform”.

The artists participating in the first of this project include sometimes London-based artist, poet and Version House founder Harry Burke “b2b” with Sophia Le FragaKayla GuthrieAlison Veit, and William Hawkins.

See the Pretty Days website for details.**

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John Giorno @ MoMA PS1, Nov 8

6 November 2015

New York’s MoMA PS1 is presenting the latest edition of Sunday Sessions, called ‘It’s Not What Happens, It’s How You Handle It’, on November 8.

Organised by poet, visual artist and Performance Poetry co-founder John Giorno, along with Mark Beasley, the event explores a contemporary generation’s use of the internet and social media, mirrored by Giorno’s poetic use of technology.

Also taking part are Harry Burke, Todd Colby, Andrew Durbin, Ben Fama, Sophia le Fraga, Fanny Howe, Paolo Javier, Tan Lin, Morgan Parker, and Bunny Rogers, who all examine how  the internet is recalibrating digital spaces/languages and somehow express that “text and the staging of language is no longer a form fixed by the printed page.”

See the MoMa PS1 website for details.**

Illustration from Bunny Rogers' Columbine Library by Elliot Spence. Courtesy Guillaume Mojon.
Illustration from Bunny Rogers’ Columbine Library by Elliot Spence. Courtesy Guillaume Mojon.
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I Miss You Already 2 @ Mathew Gallery, Aug 1

31 July 2015

Mathew Gallery NYC will be presenting a poetry reading by Harry Burke and Hamishi Farah titled I Miss You Already 2 and taking place at the New York space on August 1.

The poetry reading brings together writer and poet (and Artists Space Assistant Curator and Web Editor) Harry Burke with Australian artist Hamishi Farah.

The event also invites the participation of a handful of others, including poet and artist Katherine Botten, Croatian poet Ana Bozičević, artist Whitney Claflin, Canadian writer, editor and curator Tess Edmonson, artist, writer, musician, and curator Devin Kenny, and artist Deanna Havas.

See the event page for details. **

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Speculative Writing @ Tenderbooks, Feb 24

24 February 2015

London’s Tenderbooks is launching a programme of talks and discussions to coincide with the How to Construct a Time Machine exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery on February 24.

The independent artist bookseller has teamed up with MK, joining the exhibition’s curator, Marquard Smith, with Journal of Visual Culture book reviews editor Nina Trivedi and curator Simon Wright to organise a conversation about the recent speculative turn in philosophy. The exhibition’s title, taken from a 1899 text by avant-garde French writer Alfred Jarry, points to the exhibition’s preoccupation with science fiction or ‘the science of imaginary solutions’.

Trivedi, functioning as both organiser and speaker, will be joined by Living in the Future co-editor Rebecca Bligh and curator and writer Harry Burke to discuss the materiality of language and the “shift towards a new materialism” which holds speculation at its core.

See the event page for details. **

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Sitting in the City of God : a review

14 January 2015

I think: it takes a real asshole to agree to do a poetry review.

I am sitting under a makeshift coconut-shaped hut somewhere down the Mexican coast, flipping through the digital pages of City of God, Harry Burke’s new book of poems accompanied by the architectural drawings of Alessandro Bava. The only rain the blazing week has seen drizzles through the gaps of the straw roof and collects around my toes. Nearing the end of my first sober month in more time than I can adequately understand—and the longest I have been away from Berlin since moving there over three years ago—I am feeling things through a skin so thin the sun leaks through.

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A great writer recently wrote, of her own book reviews, that they were actually “book reviews about myself”, echoing a long-held (and weakly debated) literary conviction that everything a writer does is, in the end, about herself. It applies to other things too, things less transparent; everything is personal, especially the political. And so when I read City of God, all I can adequately feel is my own skin burning through. There is no way to write an objective review, and to disguise it as such feels dishonest in a way that to me is altogether unforgivable. I love City of God because Burke’s pain is my pain, his regrets, his longing my own; I love it because in that moment, I am it.

I had been reading Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying while flying the previous week, but the irony didn’t strike me then, and why would it: it wasn’t irony, it was chance. Besides, it should have been called Fear of Everything, or A Manual on How to Escape Yourself, and I needed it more than I needed the food I had finally begun to eat again, so that when I read Burke’s line “Life is the thing that you make when you’re free,” I looked up at the blue horizon and down at my naked skin and knew I was freer than I had been in a very long time.

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I read the book out of order, jumping from front to back to middle to front, reading certain sentences in isolation, skipping entire poems because in that heartbeat of a moment, the title did not suit me. Which is to say: I read it truthfully, according to my heart. Because I did this, listening to the truth beyond the book, I liked it more every time I read some lonely fragment of it.

Every line in the book brings something. When, in ‘Confession:’, he writes “this is bad writing / this is bad writing and its boring to read”, it is Anne Carson’s “My personal poetry is a failure” and the imposter syndrome that any self-respecting person I know lives by every day. When, in ‘confes’ he writes “if i was a poem i wouldn’t be me / a poem shouldn’t be an apology”, I actually feel my eyes well up. It’s mortifying. But no therapy can bring you that level of understanding, that catharsis, and I stand by that. When, in ‘Wednesday’, he writes “Time is really long : ( / time is like a thing”, you can’t help but laugh at the banality, like in Eileen Myles’s ‘Peanut Butter’ when she describes buying it in the “largest supermarket you know”. Even banality is beautiful, do you get that? When he writes, in ‘romance poems :)’ that he is “just fine and for the most part incorporated”, I decide that this is how I will answer the next time I am asked how I am. Truthfully. And when in ‘9th of October, that time’ he writes “Night doesn’t die / jus (sic) moves away sometimes”, I think of nothing else, and I think of everything I have ever known.

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Somewhere towards the end, Burke writes “A pin drops but there’s no gravity in the void” and my sunburnt skin prickles in direct response, and try as I do to reason with myself, in the end I don’t. We are in the City of God, and there is no reasoning with poetry, or the truth. **

City of God by Harry Burke and Alessandro Bava was published by Version House in September, 2014, and is available for digital download.

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Silly Canvas @ Utopian Slumps, Dec 15 – 22

15 December 2014

Melbourne’s Utopian Slumps gallery is teaming up with Centre for Style for the Silly Canvas group exhibition, running at the gallery space from December 15 to December 22.

The gallery and the Centre for Style exhibition space and retail store are joining forces again to host and curate, respectively, Silly Canvas, which will feature 14 various artists and artist collectives – including Amalia Ulman, ffiXXedMarlie Mul and Trevor Shimizu – working within the restricted parameters of two rectangular pieces of material attached to one another to form a two-sided wearable canvas. 

The December 15 opening kicks off with a panel and performance byAnna-Sophie Berger on the following Thursday, December 18, titled The Styled Canvas: fashion’s image and its various production lines and featuring D&K, Briony Wright and Robyn Healy in a discussion of “how image and styling mitigate fashion practice”.

The exhibition comes in conjunction with the launch of a Centre for Style publication, Centre for Style Rag, which is posited as a response to the themes of Silly Canvas and is comprised of texts by six writers, including Harry Burke, and artist pages by another five, including Dena Yago.

See the Silly Canvas exhibition page for details. **

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Unreliable Source reading installation @ DRAF, Dec 10

8 December 2014

Harry Burke, Holly Childs and Sophie Collins will be presenting a new “immersive reading installation”, titled Unreliable Source, in Nina Beier’s solo exhibition at DRAF on December 10.

Burke – who, after editing the  I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best anthology earlier this year, is publishing his latest project, an ebook of poems accompanied by architectural drawings by Alessandro Bava and titled City of God (for which we have a review coming…soon!) – is joining forces with Childs to read a story that “maps out space”. Melbourne-based Childs, in turn, works as a writer, editor, and artist, with a new novel, Danklands, coming out this month.

Following Burke and Child’s piece, poet Sophie Collins will read a series of ekphrastic poems, followed by video readings by a handful of artists, including Natalie Parker, Jack Mannix, Aurelia Guo and Autumn Royal.

See the DRAF event page for details. **

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Harry Burke + Eloise Bonnevoit performance @ tank.tv, Nov 27

26 November 2014

Artists Harry Burke and Eloise Bonnevïot are putting on a performance to accompany Sanssouci Reality‘s Issue #1: The Latte Vision, taking place in the tank.tv basement on November 27.

Burke, who previously edited the I Love Roses poetry anthology, will be doing a reading from his latest book of poems, City of God, created as a response to architecture and accompanied by the architectural renderings of architect Alessandro Bava and audio/visuals from artist and 18+ member Samia Mirza. Burke’s publishing house, Version House, writes this about the book: “Each drawing is like a poem, and each poem is like a space in which you can live. Each reading is like a confession. Together they build a city of belief, a City of God.”

Bonnevïot will offer the second performance of the night with a distributed arrangement of her ongoing project, The Meditative Relaxation Cycle, which invites various artists to perform a series of six digital automatic drawings on iPads or tablets as a kind of “contemporary re-appropriation of Surrealist Automatism”.

See the FB event page for details. **

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Mature Themes launch @ New Museum, Sep 26

23 September 2014

Writer Andrew Durbin is launching his first book, titled Mature Themes, at New York’s New Museum on September 26.

The poetry/art criticism/memoir takes up the subject of disingenuity in the Information Age, examining through various media, voicing what exactly constitutes personal experience nowadays – both online and off – and uncovering the “fading specters of meaning” beneath art and the art market.

The book launch will feature readings by Harry Burke, editor of the I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best poetry anthology, and House of LaDosha artist-cum-DJ, Juliana Huxtable, as well as a screening of ‘Reifying Desire 6’ by artist Jacolby Satterwhite and a new video by Jesse Darling.

See the New Museum event page for details. **

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Morag Keil @ Project Native Informant reviewed

10 September 2014

Ten minutes walk from Project Native Informant’s converted garage project space in Mayfair is luxury department store Liberty. Opened in 1875 by Arthur Lasenby Liberty, over the past 140 years it has become a global household name, selling high-end homeware and fashion brands alongside its own-brand products. It has a history of working with notable designers like William Morris and Archibald Knox, and has been an important site for the advancement of design in the UK. The Liberty building on Great Marlborough Street is itself an iconic location – built in the 1920s in a Tudor revival style it’s an instantly recognisable building, and a London shopping landmark. It’s not cheap, though. Sitting somewhere between couture and high-end high street, it caters to a particular strata of the rich.

Morag Keil, L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. (2014) @ Project Native Informant exhibition view. Courtesy the gallery.
Morag Keil, L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. (2014) @ Project Native Informant exhibition view. Courtesy the gallery.

In L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. Morag Keil has transposed the mock Tudor facade of the department store into the gallery. Each wall is decorated with strips of black half-timbering – appropriately treated, carefully cut and professionally attached. It’s a slightly disorientating experience, the framing exists as a relief whilst shifting the reading of the entire space with its specificity. We’re suddenly enclosed within a form that suggests an exterior – the facade of Liberty is wherever you look. We are trapped outside, inside, with no way to access what’s behind the walls.

In the corner of the gallery are two Windsor chairs painted with copper paint and splashed green with oxidation. Arranged like in a waiting room they hold copies of the exhibition text – an interview with Keil by Harry Burke. Titled Can you live in art? it’s conducted in a 20-questions format, like an unedited magazine lifestyle interview, informal but professional. They discuss Keil’s recent work, as well as her approaches and ideas on the art world and the state of contemporary living. One answer is conspicuous in its absence, there’s simply blank space in response to, “Do you have a social art practice or a formal art practice?”

Morag Keil, L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. (2014) @ Project Native Informant exhibition view. Courtesy the gallery.
Morag Keil, L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. (2014) @ Project Native Informant exhibition view. Courtesy the gallery.

The ideas sold about freedom in contemporary living constitute a deceptive ideology: ostensibly defined as the increase in flexibility, our lives mainly manifest as precarious and alienated, despite how much money we might accumulate. Keil shows us Liberty as a site where the galvanisation of this ideology is exceptionally evident. It’s a brand that flourishes largely because of suggestions of its own historic importance. It deals in adornments, designs and fashion – the materials and objects that furnish our lives and act as signs that distinguish our relative level of success under capitalism. The precarity of contemporary living means we will never fully achieve the freedom that owning an item from Liberty might suggest we have. In Keil’s L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. we are allowed to step in, to be immersed in the signs of heritage, but never allowed real access. **

Exhibition photos, top-right.

Morag Keil’s L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. is on at London’s Project Native Informant, running from September 4 to October 7, 2014.

Header image: Morag Keil, L.I.B.E.R.T.Y. (2014) @ Project Native Informant exhibition view. Courtesy the gallery.

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