Thursday 24th October

READING GROUP: MINOR KEY

Refusal, Remembrance and Kinship in Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love

What is the relationship between remembering and resistance? What does refusal look like in the everyday? Where are the opportunities to form and maintain kinships in times of multiple protracted crises? Spanning three sessions, we invite you to share your thoughts on kinship, remembrance, and refusal in relation to Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us. Whether you’re familiar with Bouteldja’s work or are encountering it for the first time, we hope our reading group will open a space for free and open discussions where we can connect with one another, reflect on past and present political realities, and collectively consider the relationship between ‘intimacy’ and political struggle.

You can find a full PDF of the book by following the link in Minor Key’s Instagram bio and copies will be available at Good Press to purchase on the night.

The book group will meet three times:
Refusal -- 10 October
Remembrance -- 24 October
Kinship -- 07 November

Minor Key is an artistic and curatorial collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Emmy Yoneda and curator and Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, Orsod Malik. Taking inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, they critically consider the relationship between ‘intimacy’ and political struggle.

Friday 25th October

LAUNCH: WOMEN ARTISTS TOGETHER: ART IN THE AGE OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION

Amy Tobin will be in conversation for the launch of her book Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation (Yale, 2023) in Glasgow.

Offering a fresh perspective on collaboration, collectivity, and conflict in the women’s art movement of the 1970s, Women Artists Together is a thought-provoking study of how the women’s liberation movement galvanized a generation of women artists. The event at Good Press will focus on Tobin's approach to researching these histories and to putting together a survey of artistic and cultural practices associated with Women's Liberation, sometimes for the first time.

Amy Tobin is associate professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and curator, contemporary programmes, Kettle’s Yard. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge.

This event is presented by the Exhibitions and Curating Research Network at the School of Fine Art, GSA.

Image credit: Cecilia Vicuña, Frente Cultural, 1973. Oil on canvas, 76 x 93cm. Private Collection. Courtesy of Cecilia Vicuña.

Wednesday 26 November

LAUNCH: ROCK FLIGHT BY HASIB HOURANI

Please join us for the launch of Hasib Hourani's debut collection, rock flight (Prototype Publishing, 2024). Hasib will be joined by Colin Herd and Hussein Mitha. 

rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

Hasib Hourani, born in Bahrain in 1996, is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator who lives in so-called Australia. His 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted in the Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize and appears in the anthology, Against Disappearance. rock flightis his first book.

Colin Herd is a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. His books include Too Ok (2011), Glovebox (2013), Oberwilding- with SJ Fowler (2015), Click and Collect (2017),You Name It (2019) and Cocoa & Nothing- with Maria Sledmere (2022). He has also edited four anthologies of contemporary poetry. Dennis Cooper has written of his work that it is "exquisite and adventurous and armed to the teeth". 

Hussein Mitha is an artist and writer who lives in Glasgow.

Hasib Hourani's UK events have been made possible through the International Travel Fund for Authors and Illustrators (Creative Australia).