January 26, 2016
Join us on Tuesday, January 26 at e-flux for the launch of The City Outside the Sentence by Mirene Arsanios.
The City Outside the Sentence was written without a mother tongue. Pronunciation glitches, thwarted accents, and makeshift multilingualism are turned into narrative possibilities, inviting the reader to navigate a city on the outskirts of grammar. Borrowing from fictional conventions as well as more essayistic forms, Arsanios’ first publication gathers ten short stories written between 2013 and 2015. It is published by Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. For the occasion, poet Christopher Rey Pérez and artist Caitlin Berrigan will be reading alongside the author.
Mirene Arsanios is the author of The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, 2015). Her writings have appeared in publications such as The Rumpus, Ink & Coda, Enizagam, and The Outpost, among others. She co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual literary magazine. She holds an MA in Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and a writing MFA from Bard College. She lives in New York where she is currently a writer-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Caitlin Berrigan works across performance, video, sculpture, text, and public choreographies to engage with the intimate social dimensions of power and politics. Her work has shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard Carpenter Center, Storefront for Art & Architecture, Hammer Museum, and Anthology Film Archives, among others. She has received fellowships & residencies from the Humboldt Foundation, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, PROGRAM for Art & Architecture Berlin, and a will be a 2015-17 Schloss Solitude fellow. She teaches emerging media at NYU Tisch Photo & Imaging, and holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT and a B.A. from Hampshire College.
Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet writing from a matrix of opaque folklore, violence, and language. His publications include On the heels of our enemies (98editions, Beirut), 427-375 (LIKE Editorial, Mexico City), and an untitled collaboration with artist Barbara Ess (321 Editions, New York City). He is also the recipient of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize from &Now Books, which will publish his first full-length book, gauguin’s notebook, Fall 2016. Currently, he writes for Intelligentsia Gallery in Beijing and co-edits a nomadic riso publication of the Americas, called Dolce Stil Criollo. He is a graduate of Bard MFA and current faculty of Bard’s Language and Thinking program.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.