UPCOMING:
Wednesday, December 6th
7-8:30pm
🍉 The Gaza Monologues of Ashtar Theatre: collective reading
In response to Ashtar Theatre’s request to collectively read The Monologues of Gaza in different settings around the world, we have organized this gathering as a way to show solidarity with Palestine here in Chicago. This event will take place on Dec. 6th at Inga, 7 pm. If you wish to read one of the monologues please go to the link in our stories (which we'll be repeatedly posting over the next few days).
🇵🇸 "The Gaza Monologues are testimonies written by ASHTAR youth in 2010, after the first war on the Gaza Strip. Tragically, these Monologues are still accurate today. They are highlighting the horrors, hopes and resilience of the courageous Gazans to a wider audience, bringing out the voices of children and people in Gaza." –@ashtartheatre
Thanks to @ercaba_ and @leticiapardo_ for organization/coordination
🇵🇸 "The Gaza Monologues are testimonies written by ASHTAR youth in 2010, after the first war on the Gaza Strip. Tragically, these Monologues are still accurate today. They are highlighting the horrors, hopes and resilience of the courageous Gazans to a wider audience, bringing out the voices of children and people in Gaza." –@ashtartheatre
Thanks to @ercaba_ and @leticiapardo_ for organization/coordination
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Sunday, November 12th
4–6pm
Track changes book launch with n+1 and Paper Monument
Join us on Sunday, November 12th at 4pm as we host n+1 (@nplusonemag) and Paper Monument (@paper.monument) for the Chicago launch of their recently released Track changes: a handbook for art criticism 📙🔡, edited by Mira Dayal (@miradayal) and Josephine Heston (@jvheston), in addition to a pop-up selection of the imprint's numerous publications (and hats)! 💭 Dushko Petrovich, co-founder of Paper Monument and Mira Dayal, artist, writer, and editor, will be reading and in conversation surrounding the book.
🧰 🔀 In Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, twenty-five art writers and editors share strategies for critical writing and editing that encourage solidarity and reparative decision-making to actively challenge structural inequalities within the art world. The book offers transparency into the editorial process and serves as a supportive guide to art criticism. It includes contributions by Kemi Adeyemi, Andy Campbell, Erica Cardwell, Re’al Christian, Aruna D’Souza, Leslie Dick, Amy Fung, Merray Gerges, Annie Godfrey Larmon, Ariel Goldberg, Yves Jeffcoat, Dana Kopel, Yaniya Lee, Dessane Lopez Cassell, Jessica Lynne, Tausif Noor, Ashley Stull Meyers, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Kristina Kay Robinson, Jillian Steinhauer, Ana Tuazon, Monica Uszerowicz, Wendy Vogel, Emily Watlington, and Elisa Wouk Almino.
🧰 🔀 In Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, twenty-five art writers and editors share strategies for critical writing and editing that encourage solidarity and reparative decision-making to actively challenge structural inequalities within the art world. The book offers transparency into the editorial process and serves as a supportive guide to art criticism. It includes contributions by Kemi Adeyemi, Andy Campbell, Erica Cardwell, Re’al Christian, Aruna D’Souza, Leslie Dick, Amy Fung, Merray Gerges, Annie Godfrey Larmon, Ariel Goldberg, Yves Jeffcoat, Dana Kopel, Yaniya Lee, Dessane Lopez Cassell, Jessica Lynne, Tausif Noor, Ashley Stull Meyers, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Kristina Kay Robinson, Jillian Steinhauer, Ana Tuazon, Monica Uszerowicz, Wendy Vogel, Emily Watlington, and Elisa Wouk Almino.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Saturday, October 28th
7–10pm
Son of Ingagi (1940) screening
Saturday, October 28th from 7-10pm (after shop hours), join us in hosting longtime Inga friends and programmers A.J. McClenon and Isra Rene for a spooky season screening of Son of Ingagi (1940) 🎥 by Richard C. Kahn with a screenplay by Spencer Wiliams Jr.
🚪Doors will open at 7 pm for light snacks, with the screening starting around 7:30 (Run time: 1hr 2 min) and a post-screening discussion aiming to address one of the central questions at hand in the film: What are the origins of Monstrosity? A reader of the material, the film, and Black Horror put together by A.J. and Isra will also be available alongside our titles at the shop 💭. The night will close with an accompanying playlist for the occasion.
🚪Doors will open at 7 pm for light snacks, with the screening starting around 7:30 (Run time: 1hr 2 min) and a post-screening discussion aiming to address one of the central questions at hand in the film: What are the origins of Monstrosity? A reader of the material, the film, and Black Horror put together by A.J. and Isra will also be available alongside our titles at the shop 💭. The night will close with an accompanying playlist for the occasion.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Saturday, October 21st
6–8pm
Book launch (with poetry reading) of Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum
Join us! 📚 this Saturday (October 21st), at 6pm, for the launch (with poetry reading) of Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum, published by @metatronpress 🌀🔭 @ivanna.jpg will be joined by Izzy Boutiette (@isabelka______ ) for a chat/Q&A
🪐🗝🧰 Oscillating between existential enormity and the “tiny electronic mess” of the self, Continuum telescopes temporal vastness into sharp utterance. Keenly perceptive and sonically incantatory, Continuum follows the porous “I” across elastic thresholds of past, present, and future. When “every rational option” tries and fails, Baranova challenges us to embrace irrational options. Lovingly dialogic, this collection bears witness to ongoing destruction and renewal, offering transformational visions of the future that refuse neat resolution. Baranova enjoins us to will these futures a reality. If language creates us, Continuum’s poetics are a testament to the limitless possibilities of making and remaking the self.
🧵 Ivanna Baranova is a writer, editor, teacher, and artist from the Pacific Northwest living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Confirmation Bias (Metatron Press, 2019) and Creative Communications Coordinator at the Poetry Project.
🪐🗝🧰 Oscillating between existential enormity and the “tiny electronic mess” of the self, Continuum telescopes temporal vastness into sharp utterance. Keenly perceptive and sonically incantatory, Continuum follows the porous “I” across elastic thresholds of past, present, and future. When “every rational option” tries and fails, Baranova challenges us to embrace irrational options. Lovingly dialogic, this collection bears witness to ongoing destruction and renewal, offering transformational visions of the future that refuse neat resolution. Baranova enjoins us to will these futures a reality. If language creates us, Continuum’s poetics are a testament to the limitless possibilities of making and remaking the self.
🧵 Ivanna Baranova is a writer, editor, teacher, and artist from the Pacific Northwest living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Confirmation Bias (Metatron Press, 2019) and Creative Communications Coordinator at the Poetry Project.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Tuesday, October 3rd
7–9pm
Organizing in El Salvador & Guatemala—A firsthand report
🇬🇹🪢🇸🇻 join us for reports from recent delegations to Guatemala and El Salvador, covering popular social movements and resistance to electoral fraud, land dispossesion and ecological destruction, and right wing authoritarian power consolidation, with @cispes_solidarity @crln_la @nisgua_solidaridad (plus snacks!)
🇬🇹🪢🇸🇻 acompañanos para escuchar informes de delegaciones recién vueltos de Guatemala y El Salvador, quienes cubrirán los movimientos sociales populares y la resistencia al fraude electoral, el despojo de tierras y la destrucción ecológica, y la consolidación del poder autoritario de derecha, con @cispes_solidarity @crln_la @nisgua_solidaridad (y con refrigerio!)
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Saturday, September 30th
7–9pm
Limn the Distance book launch
🌸⛰ To mark the launch of Limn the Distance, Rose will be at Inga Books reading alongside friend, writer and artist Lee Rae Walsh, bringing their individual poetics into a call and response on the themes of farming, collectivity, living and practice.
📙 Limn the Distance imagines decentralisation through personal narrative and the concentric communities of one mountain—from the radical sectarian shakers and experiments in communitarian living and small-scale farming that followed in their wake, to the life and legacy of poet Bernadette Mayer who lived nearby. Rose seeks movement away from rather than apart from major cities and art worlds, godheads and normative bodies as affirmative knowledge and value systems. Co-opting the essay, Limn the Distances uses poetics, autobiography and the fragmentary mode as a proposition for communitarian and decentralised practice in art-making and poetry.
🌾 Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer and critic whose work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and has been published widely, including by LA Review of Books, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, The White Review, Art Monthly, X-Tra, Bricks from the Kiln, Apollo, MAP Magazine and Worms. She has written several chapbooks and Limn the Distance is her first book, published this month by JOAN (@publishingjoan)
🌀 lee rae walsh is an artist-poet-photographer-teacher–researcher-facilitator-and-friend. They most recently organized Slowly and Surely with an Eternal Wing, an ongoing series bringing together artists, poets, lecturers and performers who use the stage as a place to truly, & messily practice. Their work is sundrenched and blurry, and happens in the hours of each little day.
📙 Limn the Distance imagines decentralisation through personal narrative and the concentric communities of one mountain—from the radical sectarian shakers and experiments in communitarian living and small-scale farming that followed in their wake, to the life and legacy of poet Bernadette Mayer who lived nearby. Rose seeks movement away from rather than apart from major cities and art worlds, godheads and normative bodies as affirmative knowledge and value systems. Co-opting the essay, Limn the Distances uses poetics, autobiography and the fragmentary mode as a proposition for communitarian and decentralised practice in art-making and poetry.
🌾 Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer and critic whose work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and has been published widely, including by LA Review of Books, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, The White Review, Art Monthly, X-Tra, Bricks from the Kiln, Apollo, MAP Magazine and Worms. She has written several chapbooks and Limn the Distance is her first book, published this month by JOAN (@publishingjoan)
🌀 lee rae walsh is an artist-poet-photographer-teacher–researcher-facilitator-and-friend. They most recently organized Slowly and Surely with an Eternal Wing, an ongoing series bringing together artists, poets, lecturers and performers who use the stage as a place to truly, & messily practice. Their work is sundrenched and blurry, and happens in the hours of each little day.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Sunday, September 3rd
1–7pm (then until 🌅)
Inga turns four!
✌️ Inga turns four! ✌️ Join us in H.A.G.S. (Had A Great Summer 🏁) festivities to celebrate 4️⃣ years of books, programming, and our wonderful reader-ship ⛴ on Sunday, September 3rd! 🌱 We will be open for book browsing from 1pm 📚👀 with tunes 🔊, cake cutting 🎂🌸, veggie skewer grilling 🍢, and refreshments 🧉 from 4pm until sunset 🌇 We’ll be launching some handmade ceramic and cyanotype bookmarks to commemorate our 4-year anniversary—come thru!🏺🌡️❤️🔥
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Saturday, August 12th
2–6pm
New Documents Popup
🆕 💼
New Documents
Los Angeles
(loves) ♻️
🌱 📚
Inga Books
Chicago
We're open from 1–7pm, and from 2–6pm are excited to host a @newdocuments pop up, with Jeff direct from sunny LA, with a myriad collection of new books from the art book publisher including titles from Raven Chacon, Lucy Lippard, Pope.L, and Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer's Infinite Library, among many, many others. 🌀🧩 🌞 We'll also have a scent to read by—sandalwood incense for the taking.
New Documents
Los Angeles
(loves) ♻️
🌱 📚
Inga Books
Chicago
We're open from 1–7pm, and from 2–6pm are excited to host a @newdocuments pop up, with Jeff direct from sunny LA, with a myriad collection of new books from the art book publisher including titles from Raven Chacon, Lucy Lippard, Pope.L, and Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer's Infinite Library, among many, many others. 🌀🧩 🌞 We'll also have a scent to read by—sandalwood incense for the taking.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Friday, July 28th
7pm
How To Treat a Body: Disability Reframed
Friday, July 28th at 7pm join us in hosting the film program How To Treat a Body: Disability Reframed in collaboration with 6018|North. Programmed by Ana García Jácome and Caroline K. Ng, the program will consist of shorts diving into the experiences of disabled people around the medical institution and beyond and will be followed by a conversation with Sky Cubacub and Ana García Jácome.
Film Program:
Emily Beaney (UK), Deviant, 2021
Ana García Jácome (MX), Malitas, 2022
Trini Ibarra (MX), He sido muchas, 2021
Nur Matta (MX), Maldita lisiada, 2021
Radical Visibility Collective (US), Access Bitch, 2018
Marrok Sedgwick (US), People Like Me, 2019
😷 Masks required. This project is supported by 6018|North as part of the ongoing project Justice Hotel.
Film Program:
Emily Beaney (UK), Deviant, 2021
Ana García Jácome (MX), Malitas, 2022
Trini Ibarra (MX), He sido muchas, 2021
Nur Matta (MX), Maldita lisiada, 2021
Radical Visibility Collective (US), Access Bitch, 2018
Marrok Sedgwick (US), People Like Me, 2019
😷 Masks required. This project is supported by 6018|North as part of the ongoing project Justice Hotel.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Friday, May 19th
7pm
Namkheun Collective (น้ำขึ้น: “rising tides” 🌊)
Join us this Friday evening (May 19th) at 7pm for a talk and informal discussion with Namkheun Collective @namkhen (น้ำขึ้น: “rising tides” 🌊), a textual collective based in Bangkok, Thailand, publishing and translating 🧰 🧨 around proposed modes of resistance, conversations and resonances across geographies, memes, and unfulfilled dreams. As many in recent protests in Thailand chanted: No God, No King, Only Fans, how will the electrifying election results yesterday destabilize the ‘Father’ complex instilled by the monarchy?
Some of the collective's output 📖 will be available for browsing—refreshments too 🧃🧉
Some of the collective's output 📖 will be available for browsing—refreshments too 🧃🧉
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Saturday, April 15th
5pm
Bosque de Cantares: Murmullos Mexicanos book launch
On Saturday, April 15th at 5pm, Inga will host Guillermo Garcia Pérez, author of recently released Bosque de Cantares: Murmullos Mexicanos (published by Gato Negro), for a book launch and discussion with Isaac Vasquez. The event will move between English and Spanish.
“Bosque de Cantares is a formless entity that threatens to unravel excessively codified historical episodes and, therefore, to allow new secret passages in time. Jumping freely between epochs and events (from the Tlaxcala Child Martyrs of 1527 to the Tzeltales of the twenty-first century, passing through Ignacio Castera's late seventeenth century urban conception or John Kenneth Turner's post-revolutionary Mexico), this series of fragmentary essays seeks to move the roles of Mexican anthropology, history, and literature, because it understands that only from that movement these roles can be repoliticized and serve as a toolbox.”
“Bosque de Cantares is a formless entity that threatens to unravel excessively codified historical episodes and, therefore, to allow new secret passages in time. Jumping freely between epochs and events (from the Tlaxcala Child Martyrs of 1527 to the Tzeltales of the twenty-first century, passing through Ignacio Castera's late seventeenth century urban conception or John Kenneth Turner's post-revolutionary Mexico), this series of fragmentary essays seeks to move the roles of Mexican anthropology, history, and literature, because it understands that only from that movement these roles can be repoliticized and serve as a toolbox.”
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Friday, April 14th
6pm
Joy James's In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love book talk
Next Friday, April 14th at 6pm, we're excited to host Joy James in conversation with Dr. rosalind hampton and Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III, surrounding James's recently published book In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities 🧰
📖 Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal
📖 Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Friday, June 24th
7–9pm
How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself (Reading/Performance)
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-shall-thou-resolve-thyself-presented-by-inga-tickets-354702092507
The Chicago premiere of new performance arranged for print by Matty Davis, featuring seven Chicago performers, artists, and friends.
Presented by Inga, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself will premiere in Chicago with cast of seven Chicago-based artists, performers, and educators: Bryan Saner, Katharine Schutta, Amira Hegazy, Thomas Huston, Luke Joyner, Sungjae Lee, and Anders Zanichkowsky. This occasion marks the first time that the work is presented by performers who themselves are not in the publication, offering a unique exploration of empathy that's motored by language, voice, and personal experience.
Admission to the event is free, but attendees may choose to make a donation - all donations go to the performers. While walk-ups and passersby are welcome, RSVP is strongly encouraged, as the work is spatially sensitive and it is important to know how many attendees are expected. A limited number of editions of How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself will be available for purchase at Inga.
More specifically, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself is a performance arranged for print that uses choreography, writing, photography, and design to trace the inner and outer contours of five people under pressure. Each person appears upon the same slab of concrete at different points in time. All engage a single gesture, including its approach and its undoing. Time is scarce, bodies pry. Meditations on gender, determination, solitude, and pain build and seep from within an exacting loop of structure and sensation.
How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself was conceived by Matty Davis and arranged for print by Matt Wolff and Nilas Andersen. It was performed by Holly Sass, Matty Davis, Matt Shalzi, Nile Harris, and Bobbi Jene Smith, with photographs by Jonah Rosenberg.
Following Knee Balance, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself marks the second work in a series of performances by Matty Davis that are arranged for print by Matt Wolff. Distinct in content and form, and featuring contributions from artists of various disciplines, each work weaves together spatial, temporal, and empathic possibilities unique to performance and printed matter. How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself was published in an edition of 150 and bound using fragments of clothes worn by the performers.
Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer whose work uses embodied forms of risk, trust, and empathy to locate and expand relationships to the self, other people, land, and histories. Unique and multi-faceted, each of these relationships, i.e., projects, is part of a broader orbit around perennial questions of mortality, desire, and how to deal with one another and survive together. Davis was born in Pittsburgh, PA, where his grandfather worked in the steel mills and his dad’s plane crashed. He grew-up as a multi-sport athlete, which exposed him to visceral experiences of surface, injury, resilience, cooperation, and play that continue to influence his interdisciplinary work. Spanning sculpture, drawing, photography, and books, his projects predominantly manifest in performance and dance, which he values as shared space in which to be transformatively alive. His performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death.” For more information, please visit www.mattydavis.net
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Saturday, June 4th
7–9pm
Off-leash
Join us in exploring multispecies storytelling and "significant otherness" this Saturday, June 4th, at 7pm with Off-leash, an evening of lecture performance, reading, and conversation with four artists engaged in human and non-human relations, featuring Matthew Lax, Laleh Motlagh, Joshi Radin, and Nate Young, with moderation by Kyle Bellucci Johanson. In conjunction with the conversation will be the release of Lax's publication "A Dog Worries a Bone, and Other Stories," published by @table.chicago and printed by Inga.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Tuesday, September 1st
6:30–7:30pm
Book Launch: Carriage by Matty Davis and Ben Gould and Sneak Peek Screening of Schroon Lake by Eryka Dellenbach
Register for the Zoom event link and link to view the film here.
Please join us for the launch of Carriage by Matty Davis and Ben Gould. Davis and Gould are joined by contributors to the book, Will Arbery, Joey Johnston, Luke Joyner, and Jade Thacker, for a performative reading of the publication.
A sneak peek screening of Eryka Dellenbach’s film Schroon Lake, which captures performance research for Carriage on a frozen lake, will stream for 72-hours from the start of the launch.
This event is co-hosted with Wendy's Subway, NYC and takes place on Zoom, at 6:30 PM CST / 7:30 PM EST.
Matty Davis and Ben Gould, Carriage (published in 2019), spread.
About the book
Carriage is a site-responsive performance by Matty Davis and Ben Gould that radically explores control and empathy. Informed by evolving senses of the body, from injury to trauma, healing, and growth, the work draws from the variance of Davis and Gould’s distinct physicalities to develop a shared language of movement. In this language, empathy is a physical tool, resistance offers stability, and a space is created in which everything is leveled, bringing real fear, awakening, and responsibility.
Created in collaboration with designers Ayham Ghraowi and Matt Wolff, this publication includes writing, photographs, and drawings to evoke the urgent physical and interpersonal landscape of Carriage. The artists bear witness to themselves and to each other as they undergo a wide range of physical and emotional dynamics that navigate trust, need, difficulty, and joy. The temporal and spatial experience of Carriage is resituated on the page, as are Davis and Gould's voices, which build off of each other, overlap, and merge as first person singular and plural meet. Their voices are joined by reflections from audience members who attended Carriage in its various locations— aboard a moving vessel on the Chicago River, in a limestone cave network in Kansas City—which offer insight into the viewers’ own bodies and unique physical and psychological spaces. As these voices combine and accumulate, a broader portrait emerges, not only of a performance, but of the intricacies of human vulnerability, challenge, and care. Carriage is co-published with the Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh in October 2019, and is the third title in the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form.
Eryka Dellenbach, Schroon Lake (2020), 16mm film (still)
About Schroon Lake
Schroon Lake (2020, 16mm, 14:39) is a film by Eryka Dellenbach in collaboration with artists Matty Davis and Ben Gould. Performance research carried out on the 9-mile long frozen lake in the Adirondacks was captured on expired 16mm film and rearranged through a queer female gaze. The final piece offers an intimate sightline of the unstable space between masculinities, refracted through a winter storm and mutually activated syndromes.
Eryka Dellenbach (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based and Chicago-bred filmmaker, choreographer, performer and teaching artist. Her embodied films and multidisciplinary performance works mine consent, power, beauty and terror through choreographies of designed sensation. They have worked with a broad range of dance and performance artists including Atsushi Takenouchi, Tino Sehgal, Blair Thomas Puppet Theatre, Tori Wränes and Amanda Gutierrez. Eryka has presented work at Movement Research at the Judson Memorial Church, Anthology Film Archives, Gene Siskel, Roulette Intermedium, Virginia Commonwealth University, Intuit Outsider Art Museum, Links Hall, No Nation Gallery, and the Shiryaevo Bienalle of Contemporary Art in Samara, Russia. In 2020 she had her first exhibition at Caravaglia Studio (NY) entitled 'Aftermath & Intimacy' with artist Selva Aparicio. Eryka earned a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a master’s degree in Film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a moving celluloid film instructor at MONO NO AWARE, a HEKLER collaborator, and work freelance as a performer, filmmaker and misc. laborer.
Eryka Dellenbach (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based and Chicago-bred filmmaker, choreographer, performer and teaching artist. Her embodied films and multidisciplinary performance works mine consent, power, beauty and terror through choreographies of designed sensation. They have worked with a broad range of dance and performance artists including Atsushi Takenouchi, Tino Sehgal, Blair Thomas Puppet Theatre, Tori Wränes and Amanda Gutierrez. Eryka has presented work at Movement Research at the Judson Memorial Church, Anthology Film Archives, Gene Siskel, Roulette Intermedium, Virginia Commonwealth University, Intuit Outsider Art Museum, Links Hall, No Nation Gallery, and the Shiryaevo Bienalle of Contemporary Art in Samara, Russia. In 2020 she had her first exhibition at Caravaglia Studio (NY) entitled 'Aftermath & Intimacy' with artist Selva Aparicio. Eryka earned a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a master’s degree in Film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a moving celluloid film instructor at MONO NO AWARE, a HEKLER collaborator, and work freelance as a performer, filmmaker and misc. laborer.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Monday, March 9th
7–9pm
National Letters — Talk and Launch
Join us for the launch of National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-building Tools with a talk by the book's editor and designer Marek Nedelka.
“It may well be that print and nationalism are axiological or co-ordinate, simply because through print a people sees itself for the first time. The vernacular in appearing in high visual definition affords a glimpse of social unity coextensive with vernacular boundaries. And more people have experienced this visual unity, of their native tongues, via the newspaper than through the book.” - Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-building Tools, the recently released anthology published by Letter Books and UMPRUM, travels through the episodes of the past in which letters, languages, and scripts played an important role in creating nation states and national identities. Through four case studies (Turkey, Israel, Georgia, Ethiopia), the main body of the book explores four languages and nations which were each, against all odds and for various reasons, able to develop and maintain their writing system throughout their entire history, up to the founding of their nation state.
Marek Nedelka, editor and designer of National Letters, will be at Inga to talk about the making of the book and to share some of the most interesting clippings and facts from the process. Followed by open discussion.
Published by Letter Books and UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague). Contributions and texts by Rusudan Amirejibi–Mullen, Ivo T. Budil, Birol Caymaz, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Marek Nedelka, William Safran, and Emmanuel Szurek.
Postcard letterings by Jan Horčík, Seb McLauchlan, Anežka Minaříková, and Jan Novák.
“It may well be that print and nationalism are axiological or co-ordinate, simply because through print a people sees itself for the first time. The vernacular in appearing in high visual definition affords a glimpse of social unity coextensive with vernacular boundaries. And more people have experienced this visual unity, of their native tongues, via the newspaper than through the book.” - Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-building Tools, the recently released anthology published by Letter Books and UMPRUM, travels through the episodes of the past in which letters, languages, and scripts played an important role in creating nation states and national identities. Through four case studies (Turkey, Israel, Georgia, Ethiopia), the main body of the book explores four languages and nations which were each, against all odds and for various reasons, able to develop and maintain their writing system throughout their entire history, up to the founding of their nation state.
Marek Nedelka, editor and designer of National Letters, will be at Inga to talk about the making of the book and to share some of the most interesting clippings and facts from the process. Followed by open discussion.
Published by Letter Books and UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague). Contributions and texts by Rusudan Amirejibi–Mullen, Ivo T. Budil, Birol Caymaz, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Marek Nedelka, William Safran, and Emmanuel Szurek.
Postcard letterings by Jan Horčík, Seb McLauchlan, Anežka Minaříková, and Jan Novák.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Sunday, January 19th
3–5pm
The Politics (and Joy) of Organizing around Print and Labor
Join us for dual lectures and conversation with Danielle Aubert (author of The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing) and J. Dakota Brown (author of Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor: A Brief History). Both authors’ recently published books explore intersections of printing, publishing, and design with histories of labor and organizing.
The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing
By Danielle Aubert
Published by Inventory Press
Building on in-depth research conducted by Danielle Aubert, a Detroit-based designer, educator, and the author of Thank you for the view, Mr. Mies, this book explores the history, output and legacy of the Lorraine and Fredy Perlman and the Detroit Printing Co-op in a highly illustrated testament to the power of printing, publishing, design, and distribution.
In 1969, shortly after moving to Detroit, Lorraine and Fredy Perlman and a group of kindred spirits purchased a printing press from a defunct militant printer and the Detroit Printing Co-op was born. The Co-op would print the first English translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and journals like Radical America, formed by the Students for a Democratic Society; books such as The Political Thought of James Forman printed by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; and the occasional broadsheet, such as Judy Campbell’s stirring indictment, “Open letter from ‘white bitch’ to the black youths who beat up on me and my friend.”
Fredy Perlman was not a printer or a designer by training, but was deeply engaged in ideas, issues, processes, and the materiality of printing. His exploration of overprinting, collage techniques, varied paper stocks, and other experiments underscores the pride of craft behind these calls to action and class consciousness.
Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor: A Brief History
By J. Dakota Brown
Published by Other Forms
“Typography was born in the mass-production mechanism of the printing press. It has thus always been implicated in automation—and, thereby, in the distinctly modern dynamics of overwork, underemployment, and runaway production.” In this compact illustrated essay, J. Dakota Brown reinterprets the history of graphic design by situating it in the history of capitalism. Beginning in the early industrial era, Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor: A Brief History traces the rise of the design professions alongside the gradual fragmentation and decline of the printing trades. Along the way, Brown re-reads the trajectory of the modernist “machine aesthetic” as a series of historically-specific reactions to the changing economic and technical realities of typographical practice. This dual contribution to labor history and design history incorporates the crisscrossing perspectives of design professionals and production workers, modernists and postmodernists, bosses and union reps, and materialist thinkers from Adam Smith to El Lissitzky.
The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing
By Danielle Aubert
Published by Inventory Press
Building on in-depth research conducted by Danielle Aubert, a Detroit-based designer, educator, and the author of Thank you for the view, Mr. Mies, this book explores the history, output and legacy of the Lorraine and Fredy Perlman and the Detroit Printing Co-op in a highly illustrated testament to the power of printing, publishing, design, and distribution.
In 1969, shortly after moving to Detroit, Lorraine and Fredy Perlman and a group of kindred spirits purchased a printing press from a defunct militant printer and the Detroit Printing Co-op was born. The Co-op would print the first English translation of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and journals like Radical America, formed by the Students for a Democratic Society; books such as The Political Thought of James Forman printed by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; and the occasional broadsheet, such as Judy Campbell’s stirring indictment, “Open letter from ‘white bitch’ to the black youths who beat up on me and my friend.”
Fredy Perlman was not a printer or a designer by training, but was deeply engaged in ideas, issues, processes, and the materiality of printing. His exploration of overprinting, collage techniques, varied paper stocks, and other experiments underscores the pride of craft behind these calls to action and class consciousness.
Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor: A Brief History
By J. Dakota Brown
Published by Other Forms
“Typography was born in the mass-production mechanism of the printing press. It has thus always been implicated in automation—and, thereby, in the distinctly modern dynamics of overwork, underemployment, and runaway production.” In this compact illustrated essay, J. Dakota Brown reinterprets the history of graphic design by situating it in the history of capitalism. Beginning in the early industrial era, Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor: A Brief History traces the rise of the design professions alongside the gradual fragmentation and decline of the printing trades. Along the way, Brown re-reads the trajectory of the modernist “machine aesthetic” as a series of historically-specific reactions to the changing economic and technical realities of typographical practice. This dual contribution to labor history and design history incorporates the crisscrossing perspectives of design professionals and production workers, modernists and postmodernists, bosses and union reps, and materialist thinkers from Adam Smith to El Lissitzky.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Monday, January 6th
7–9pm
Nance Klehm: SOIL-LOOK, SOIL-LISTEN
SOIL-LOOK, SOIL-LISTEN is a workshop with artist and ecologist Nance Klehm.
What is your relationship with our shared commons, the soil? Using our body tools of fingers, nose, and sight, we will access different soils' capacity to filter our urban environment's contaminated water and air and support our plants, animals and fungi. In this workshop, we will prepare slides with local soil samples and peer into a microscope to observe microorganisms and fungal threads. The short film: 'Soil Listen' by Katarzna Guzowska (2011) will be screened. Copies of Nance Klehm's new book, The Soil Keepers: Interviews with Practitioners on the Ground Beneath Our Feet, along with other publications, tinctures, and items will be available for purchase.
About Nance:
Nance Klehm has been an ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, and agroecological grower for almost three decades. Her approach is centered on instigating change by activating already existent communities, and her work demonstrates her lifelong commitment to redefining the way human populations coexist with plant and animal systems on this planet. She just release her first book, The Soil Keepers: interviews with practitioners on the ground beneath our feet Terra Fluxus, 2019. www.socialecologies.net
Photo by Rowdy Lee Dugan for Hyperobjects - Mineral
What is your relationship with our shared commons, the soil? Using our body tools of fingers, nose, and sight, we will access different soils' capacity to filter our urban environment's contaminated water and air and support our plants, animals and fungi. In this workshop, we will prepare slides with local soil samples and peer into a microscope to observe microorganisms and fungal threads. The short film: 'Soil Listen' by Katarzna Guzowska (2011) will be screened. Copies of Nance Klehm's new book, The Soil Keepers: Interviews with Practitioners on the Ground Beneath Our Feet, along with other publications, tinctures, and items will be available for purchase.
About Nance:
Nance Klehm has been an ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, and agroecological grower for almost three decades. Her approach is centered on instigating change by activating already existent communities, and her work demonstrates her lifelong commitment to redefining the way human populations coexist with plant and animal systems on this planet. She just release her first book, The Soil Keepers: interviews with practitioners on the ground beneath our feet Terra Fluxus, 2019. www.socialecologies.net
Photo by Rowdy Lee Dugan for Hyperobjects - Mineral
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Monday, December 16th
7–9pm
Susan Snodgrass: Inside the Matrix
Join us for a lecture and signing for recent book Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs with author Susan Snodgrass. Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs surveys the highly individual practice of American architect and designer Ken Isaacs (1927-2016), whose populist, DIY designs created from the 1950s to the 1970s challenged conventional architectural concepts in housing, as well as mainstream definitions of modernism. His flexible, accessible plans provided alternative solutions to the spatial and environmental challenges of midcentury modern life, while influencing subsequent generations of architects and designers interested in nomadic architecture, and DIY practices.
Susan Snodgrass is a Chicago-based critic and editor. Much of her writing is devoted to alternative models of critical practice and artmaking, whether exploring new genres of public art or contemporary art in former Eastern Europe. She is a 2018 recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog, In/Site: Reflections on the Art of Place, which explores art, architecture, and urbanism. She has written for both print and online publications for over thirty years, most notably for Art in America where she was a corresponding editor, and ARTMargins Online, devoted to contemporary on the global margins, for which she is coeditor. She has contributed articles to numerous other periodicals, including most recently Textile: Cloth and Culture and THE SEEN. Her current curatorial projects focus on the architecture of Ken Isaacs.
Published in Chicago, IL by Half Letter Press, 2019, with partial support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Susan Snodgrass is a Chicago-based critic and editor. Much of her writing is devoted to alternative models of critical practice and artmaking, whether exploring new genres of public art or contemporary art in former Eastern Europe. She is a 2018 recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog, In/Site: Reflections on the Art of Place, which explores art, architecture, and urbanism. She has written for both print and online publications for over thirty years, most notably for Art in America where she was a corresponding editor, and ARTMargins Online, devoted to contemporary on the global margins, for which she is coeditor. She has contributed articles to numerous other periodicals, including most recently Textile: Cloth and Culture and THE SEEN. Her current curatorial projects focus on the architecture of Ken Isaacs.
Published in Chicago, IL by Half Letter Press, 2019, with partial support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
PREVIOUSLY:
Thursday, November 14th
7–9pm
Bricks from the Kiln & Peak Picture Pixel Pile Book Launch + Screening
Join us for a night of pre-launch, launch, and film screening! Featuring a shared thread of contributors and collaborators, mountains and mountaineer Reinhold Messner, Inga hosts the pre-launch of Bricks from the Kiln #4 with editor Andrew Lister and the book launch of ‘peak picture pixel pile’ by James Langdon and Jacob Lindgren. As each publication draws from shared mountain-facing topics and a relationship to Reinhold Messner, we will pair the dual launches with a screening of Werner Herzog’s 1984 short documentary The Dark Glow of the Mountains.
Bricks from the Kiln #4
Edited by Natalie Ferris, Bryony Quinn, Matthew Stuart
& Andrew Walsh‐Lister
Bricks from the Kiln circulate a transcription of Edgar Wind’s 1960 Reith Lecture ‘The Mechanization of Art’, complete with annotations / insertions / interruptions from BFTK#4 guest editors Natalie Ferris and Bryony Quinn. Preorders of BFTK#4, due for release in early 2020, will also be available.
BFTK#4 is published as event / publication, existing initially as a series of presentations and live events taking place across 2019/20, before being transcribed and supplemented as a printed issue. Event One took place at LCC in London on 5 June 2019 and featured a lineup of talks, readings, performances, papers and scores by Sophie Collins, J.R. Carpenter, Florian Roithmayr, James Langdon, Rebecca Collins, Karen Di Franco and James Bulley. Forthcoming events include an evening of talks and screenings by Maria Fusco and Joyce Dixon at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh in January 2020; and a presentation of material by Phil Baber in Amsterdam, also scheduled for early 2020.
peak picture pixel pile
by James Langdon
Designed and edited by James Langdon and Jacob Lindgren
Published by Inga, peak picture pixel pile is a book of photographs processed to look like their own histograms. Using Ansel Adams’s Zone System—a system developed by the photographer in the 1930s and 1940s for black and white photography in which the exposure of the negative, its chemical processing, and final printing are numerically calibrated, resulting in a kind of analog metadata—the book looks to photographs of mountains, Adams’s quintessential subject, to explore what it means when an image looks like itself in the abstract (in its histogram, or the graph representing the distribution of color values in the image).
The Dark Glow of the Mountains (Gasherbrum – Der Leuchtende Berg) is a TV documentary made in 1984 by German filmmaker Werner Herzog. It is about an expedition made by freestyle mountain climber Reinhold Messner—who features in or influenced contributions to both publications—and his partner Hans Kammerlander to climb Gasherbrum II and Gasherbrum I all in one trip without returning to base camp. The film is not so much concerned with showing the climb itself or giving guidelines on mountaineering, but seeks to reveal the inner motivation of the climbers. “Are these peaks and mountains not a quality buried deep within us?” Run time: 45 minutes
Bricks from the Kiln #4
Edited by Natalie Ferris, Bryony Quinn, Matthew Stuart
& Andrew Walsh‐Lister
Bricks from the Kiln circulate a transcription of Edgar Wind’s 1960 Reith Lecture ‘The Mechanization of Art’, complete with annotations / insertions / interruptions from BFTK#4 guest editors Natalie Ferris and Bryony Quinn. Preorders of BFTK#4, due for release in early 2020, will also be available.
BFTK#4 is published as event / publication, existing initially as a series of presentations and live events taking place across 2019/20, before being transcribed and supplemented as a printed issue. Event One took place at LCC in London on 5 June 2019 and featured a lineup of talks, readings, performances, papers and scores by Sophie Collins, J.R. Carpenter, Florian Roithmayr, James Langdon, Rebecca Collins, Karen Di Franco and James Bulley. Forthcoming events include an evening of talks and screenings by Maria Fusco and Joyce Dixon at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh in January 2020; and a presentation of material by Phil Baber in Amsterdam, also scheduled for early 2020.
peak picture pixel pile
by James Langdon
Designed and edited by James Langdon and Jacob Lindgren
Published by Inga, peak picture pixel pile is a book of photographs processed to look like their own histograms. Using Ansel Adams’s Zone System—a system developed by the photographer in the 1930s and 1940s for black and white photography in which the exposure of the negative, its chemical processing, and final printing are numerically calibrated, resulting in a kind of analog metadata—the book looks to photographs of mountains, Adams’s quintessential subject, to explore what it means when an image looks like itself in the abstract (in its histogram, or the graph representing the distribution of color values in the image).
The Dark Glow of the Mountains (Gasherbrum – Der Leuchtende Berg) is a TV documentary made in 1984 by German filmmaker Werner Herzog. It is about an expedition made by freestyle mountain climber Reinhold Messner—who features in or influenced contributions to both publications—and his partner Hans Kammerlander to climb Gasherbrum II and Gasherbrum I all in one trip without returning to base camp. The film is not so much concerned with showing the climb itself or giving guidelines on mountaineering, but seeks to reveal the inner motivation of the climbers. “Are these peaks and mountains not a quality buried deep within us?” Run time: 45 minutes
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
