TNL! Remote Reading Room: Wild Things with Jack Halberstam

In this iteration of Remote Reading Room, Jack Halberstam will read from Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Halberstam’s remote, spoken word performance will be accompanied by a soundtrack by Ash Fure, and will be followed by an online Q&A.

As part of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s research on burn-out and exhausted bodies, Remote Reading Room investigates how voice, oral histories, and collective, embodied listening can be deployed as a counterbalance to the pervasiveness of the image and the growing pressure to put bodies on display.

For this event, Jack Halberstam, author and Columbia University professor, will read from his latest book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Halberstam’s reading will be accompanied by a soundtrack by composer and Dartmouth College associate professor Ash Fure.

Participants are encouraged to listen to the sound piece while walking outside, after which they are invited to join the Q&A with Jack Halberstam via Zoom at 6pm (18:00 CET).

Jack Halberstam

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.

Ash Fure

Ash Fure’s practice sits at the nexus of experimental music and experiential art. Described by the New Yorker as “staggeringly original” and “the most purely visceral music-theatre outing of the year,” Ash’s full-bodied listening environments offer space for social reckoning through the political, poetic, and erotic multiplicities in sound. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Ash also received a Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University. Notable recent projects include Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas (2020), a migratory performance installation premiered at Berghain/CTM; Filament: for Trio, Orchestra, and Moving Voices (2018) commissioned by the New York Philharmonic; and The Force of Things (2017), an immersive installation opera that wrestles with the rising tide of eco-dread around us. Ash holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College.

About Wild Things

In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the 20th century. Halberstam theorises the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries - from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement - to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more broadly.

Remote Reading Room

Remote Reading Room is a series of evenings dedicated to the act of reading and collective listening. It is a place to decipher and interpret the world with its countless languages and systems, including phenomena that by their ubiquity evade investigation. Led by an artist, researcher or designer, the audience is invited to engage in a reading of a particular concept, text, object or image. A sound artist or musician is invited to guide the listeners on this sonic journey with an accompanying soundtrack.