Pages of Hackney

Independent Bookshop, Hackney, since 2008

Event: Smashing It: Sabrina Mahfouz with Salena Godden

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Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen

Join us as we welcome Sabrina Mahfouz, editor of the new anthology SMASHING IT: WORKING CLASS ARTISTS ON LIFE, ART, AND MAKING IT HAPPEN, for a discussion of the experiences of working class artists with contributor Salena Godden.

Working-class artists continue to be hugely underrepresented in the arts industries, though they make up a third of the British population. These professions are already notoriously hard to get into, but working class artists face extra challenges, from unpaid work reinforcing social disparity, to prejudice. How do we break this cycle of inequality in the arts?

In Smashing It, leading musicians, playwrights, visual artists, filmmakers and writers share how they overcame obstacles, from the financial to the philosophical, to make it in the arts. Edited by acclaimed poet and playwright Sabrina Mahfouz, it celebrates the achievements of working class artists in Britain, from the global takeover of Grime musicians to the literary powerhouses pushing representative narratives, and empowers those who will be a part of tomorrow's cultural landscape.

Includes a guide section on how to make it in the arts, and contributions from Kerry Hudson, DJ Target, Riz Ahmed, Bridget Minamore, Anthony Anaxagorou, Salena Godden, Madani Younis and Bryony Kimmings, among others.

Sabrina Mahfouz is the editor of THE THINGS I WOULD TELL YOU: BRITISH MUSLIM WOMEN WRITE, a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year and the forthcoming SMASHING IT: WORKING CLASS ARTISTS ON LIFE, ART, AND MAKING IT HAPPEN. She has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is the recipient of the 2018 King's Alumni Arts & Culture Award. She has won a Sky Arts Academy Award for Poetry, a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights and a Fringe First Award for her play Chef. Her play With a Little Bit of Luck won the 2019 Best Drama Production at the BBC Radio & Music Awards. She also writes for children and her play Zeraffa Giraffa won a 2018 Off West End Award. She's an essay contributor to the multi-award-winning THE GOOD IMMIGRANT and is currently writing a biopic of the rapper and producer Wiley, for Pulse Films.

Salena Godden is one of Britain’s foremost poets whose electrifying live performances have earned her a devoted following. Her latest poetry collection, PESSIMISM IS FOR LIGHTWEIGHTS, was published by Rough Trade Books in July 2018 in the first Rough Trade Editions series. Her earlier books include the poetry collections UNDER THE PIER and FISHING IN THE AFTERMATH: POEMS 1994-2014, and the literary childhood memoir SPRINGFIELD ROAD (Unbound), and her essay ‘Shade’ was published in the ground breaking essay anthology THE GOOD IMMIGRANT. Her live poetry album LIVEwire was released with indie spoken word label Nymphs and Thugs and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award.

Exhibition Opening: PULLED LANDSCAPE by Martina O’Shea & Tara Li-An

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PULLED LANDSCAPE by Martina O’Shea & Tara Li-An
PULLED LANDSCAPE by Martina O’Shea & Tara Li-An

Join us for the opening of PULLED LANDSCAPE, a two person show by Martina O’Shea and Tara Li-An.

This show explores landscape through a series of abstractions. The photographic process is one which is quite instantaneous, and both artists use photography in a different way which is process driven.

When you arrive at a new landscape, you have a certain perspective, The moment you start to move, the landscape starts to move too. The constant shifts in landscape is mirrored in us and as Rebecca Solnit points out in Wanderlust, “Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

Martina O’Shea works with alternative process of image making, such as the chemigram and photogram process. Her interest in the idea of transformation, of one thing changing into another is evident in her work. Her images evoke a sense of movement and are representative of both of what's inside of us: bones and organs as well as whats outside of us in the landscape.

O’Shea’s torn and bruised images have emerged organically in the darkroom: a process that can be likened to the subconscious, and later, massaged, torn, scanned and reprinted to form an abstract image thats evocative of landscape.

Tara Li-An works with digital/analogue photography — hazy boundaries, aberrations of fantasies, esoteric themes and flexible memory creep into her work. In the series Ode from a Nemophilist, she is processing tree abstractions and the energy they exude. Tara creates an energy loop between the camera, her body and the tree, once a vibrational equilibrium is reached, a slow exposure photograph is taken. She has begun photographing them at the locations of the earth's seven planetary chakras, as well as ley lines in between.

For each sale from the exhibition, the artists will donate 30% of the profit to The Tree Council which will be enough to plant and care for a tree until it’s big enough to survive on its own.

Please note that while this event is free to attend, space is limited so please RSVP below if you'd like to join us.

Author of the Month: David Wojnarowicz

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David Wojnarowicz

The Waterfront Journals gives voice to some of the people Wojnarowicz encountered during his time sleeping rough. These fictional monologues create a kind of fractured mosaic of life on the margins during late 1980s America. “David Wojnarowicz has caught the age-old voice of the road,” said William S Burroughs. “The voice of the traveller, the outcast, the thief, the whore…”

David Wojnarowicz on Marginal America’s Hustlers and Runaways (AnOther)

The work of artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) has been the focus of much attention recently thanks to a high profile retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as previously hard-to-find collections of his work appearing in the UK for the first time. Most notably, two small Hackney-based imprints have been responsible for making new editions of Wojnarowicz's journals available in the UK for the first time. Peninsula Press published The Waterfront Journals this summer, a previously unavailable collection which draws from the writer's experiences struggling on the streets of New York, and Penultimate Press released Cross Country back in the spring, a triple LP edition of Wojnarowicz's 1989 tape journals.

We're making David Wojnarowicz our author of the month throughout November, so swing by and check out the titles below as well as others by those he has inspired (such as Olivia Laing's The Lonely City).

Author of the Month: David Wojnarowicz
Paperback / £12.99

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The Waterfront Journals

The Waterfront Journals is a road trip through the sensuous, perilous landscape of alternative America—a series of fictional monologues that ventriloquise the real people Wojnarowicz met on his travels while he was sleeping rough.

We meet these hustlers, runaways and dreamers in unassuming locations—in truck stops, bus stations and parks. Their stories are disturbing, often shocking; but they’re told with an honesty and a hallucinatory intensity that simply demands to be heard.

Published for the first time in the UK, this electrifying collection confirms that David Wojnarowicz was not only one of millennial America’s most necessary and visionary artists, but also among its most humane and urgent literary chroniclers.

Published by Peninsula Press on 26th July 2018
Author of the Month: David Wojnarowicz
Paperback / £9.99

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Close to the Knives

The powerful, personal and iconoclastic memoir of David Wojnarowicz, AIDS activist, author and one of the most provocative artists of his generation. With a new introduction by Olivia Laing.

Close to the Knives is the artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz’s extraordinary memoir. Filthy, beautiful, and sharp to the point of piercing, it is both an exploration of the world seen through the eyes of an artist, and a moving portrait of a generation living, grieving, and dying through the AIDS crisis. It is a triumphant hymn of resistance, and a dizzying celebration of the joys of seeing and living in the world.

Published by Canongate on 2nd March 2017
Author of the Month: David Wojnarowicz
Hardcover / £11.99

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Memories that Smell Like Gasoline

Not content to be a tremendous photographer, painter, filmmaker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) was also the author of three classic books: Close to the Knives, The Waterfront Journals and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, now back in print from Artspace. This volume collects four tales-"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral" and the title story-interspersed with ink drawings by the artist. "Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream. The highway at night in the headlights of this speeding car speeding is the only motion that lets the heart unravel and in the wind of the road the two-story framed houses appear one after the other like some cinematic stage set..." From these opening sentences of the book (in "Into the Drift and Sway"), Wojnarowicz lets loose a salvo of explicit gay sexual reverie harshly lit by the New York cityscape.

Published by Profile Books on 1st September 1992
Author of the Month: David Wojnarowicz
3LP / £45.00

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Cross Country: Tape Journals, February-June 1989

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was a writer and artist active in New York’s Downtown scene in the 1970’s and 80’s. In the 1980’s Wojnarowicz become one of the central figures in the AIDS struggle, as well as the target of homophobic censorship efforts by the American Family Association. Wojnarowicz kept written and cassette tape journals throughout his adult life. This three-disc vinyl release publishes for the first time three of Wojnarowicz’s tape journals, documenting his thoughts, dreams, fears, and environment during two separate road trips he took to the American Southwest and West Coast in the first half of 1989. The original cassettes are archived as part of the Wojnarowicz Collection at Fales Special Collections and Library at New York University. Wojnarowicz died in New York in 1992.

Total runtime: 2 hours, 6 minutes.
3xLP in a triple gatefold jacket featuring photos of Wojnarowicz by Marion Scemama.
Limited edition of 200.
Includes digital download card

Released by Penultimate Press on 3rd April 2018

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