Reading by Rindon Johnson and Precious Okoyomon

12 July 19, 7 pm

Venue: KW Studio, front house, 1st floor

In English

In her 1994 essay Purity, Impurity, and Separation, María Lugones, working in a hybrid mestizaje tradition, addresses the idea of curdling, which she calls an “exercise in impurity”. According to the logic of curdling, she writes, “the social world is complex and heterogenous and each person is multiple, non-fragmented, embodied.” In her vision, communities of creative, border-dwelling consciousnesses can resist the hetero-relational world order. Curdling, as a literary metaphor, describes language that is unclassifiable, and unmanageable.

The poetry of Precious Okoyomon and Rindon Johnson takes multiplicity, fragmentation, and embodiment as foundational conditions. Pursuing a lyrical mode, each poet destabilizes the authority of the speaking voice, while subverting prescribed understandings of race, gender and technology. For the reading at KW, both have been invited to respond to the notion of curdling as a prompt and as a departure point for a poetics that operates in the ambiguous zones of between, within, and beyond.

Rindon Johnson is an artist and writer. His solo exhibition Cirsumscribe is currently on view at Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf. He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient Press, 2016), the virtual reality book Meet in the Corner (Publishing House, 2017) and most recently, Shade the King (Capricious, 2017). Johnson’s writing has been published in Artforum, Cultured, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.

An artist and writer, Precious Okoyomon has had a solo exhibition at the LUMA Westbau, Zurich, and two-person exhibitions at Real Fine Arts, New York (with Hannah Black) and Quinn Harrelson/Current Projects, Miami (with Puppies Puppies). Her work was included in the 13th Baltic Triennial and in group exhibitions at Exo Exo, Paris, and the ICA, London. She is the author of Ajebota (Bottlecap Press, 2016). Her second book But Did U Die? is forthcoming from Wonder this autumn.

This event is co-organized with Harry Burke.