'Reading Nana'

Performance readings in ‘Reading as a Contemporary Art’, ICA London. An event conceived by Sarah Wood, with Forbes Morlock, Steve Benson and Clare Connors, Kate Briggs, Brian Dillon, Hester Reeve, Peter Jaegar, Nicholas Royle, Sarah Wood, and Sharon Kivland.

Contemporary art-writing and creative writing continue to flourish. This Salon spotlights reading as itself an art: something to be cultivated, celebrated, enjoyed and thought about. Writers, artists, teachers and academics who work with, and on, reading present work and discuss what reading brings to contemporary art.

There are traditions, theories and learned practices of reading but it's also a more or less spontaneous, private and unregulated occurrence. And what happens to reading when we are confronted by the unreadable?

Schedule and Speakers

1pm - 2.30pm

The Rite of Reading - Forbes Morlock

Forbes Morlock, from The Institute for Creative Reading and Syracuse University in London, writes about texts, art and psychoanalysis, and teaches, among other things, a course called 'Reading Pictures: Seeing Stories.'

Teaching Reading Creative-Critical Writing - Stephen Benson and Clare Connors

Stephen Benson and Clare Connors convene the new MA in Creative-Critical Writing at The University of East Anglia. They will talk about their experience co-teaching creative-critical writing and about reading such writing with their students.

Individual Reading Records - Kate Briggs

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator, and teaches at the American University of Paris and Paris College of Art.

2.45pm - 4.15pm

Essayism - Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon, UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and Tutor in Critical Writing at the Royal College of Art, will address the essay as a form that crosses literature, film and contemporary art.

Shimmy - Hester Reeve

Hester Reeve's practice explores art as a species of philosophical agency, invested first and foremost in the task of radical thinking. She chooses to operate in her own mind via 'HRH.the' (a conceptual persona). Public showings of her artwork include former Randolph Street Gallery Chicago, LIVE Biennale Vancouver, The Women's Library Gallery London and Arnolfini Bristol. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and a member of the Performance Philosophy international research network.

Action Reading - Peter Jaeger

Peter Jaeger is a Canadian poet, literary critic and text-based artist now living in the UK. He is an AHRC research fellow for 2012-13, and is working on John Cage's poetics.

4.45pm - 6pm

Nicholas Royle, writer, critic and Professor of English at the University of Sussex, will read from the work of Elizabeth Bowen and Wallace Stevens.

The First Reader: a Dictation - Sarah Wood

Sarah Wood is an editor of Oxford Literary Review and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, and is also Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Kent.

Reading Nana - Sharon Kivland

Sharon Kivland is an artist, writer, Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University, and Tutor in Critical Practice at Wimbledon College of Art, UAL. Sharon is a keen reader, thinking about what is put at stake by art, politics, and psychoanalysis.