Institutions betray us. Free Mahmoud Khalil.
Several friends have lost or are afraid of losing their jobs. It’s war. Don’t want to ignore that. A lot of stuff in this post:
Hope ppl get behind AKG Workers United. The AKG has the name of a weapons manufacturer profiting from g***c**** on its ticket desk. It also just retaliated against its union by firing 13 union members. You don’t have to be a nz-fancying billionaire to be an anti-worker p.o.s. You can just run a museum like one.

@doublecrosspress ‘s poetics of the handmade series is featuring my essay “Asbestos, Duck Tape, and Willow Bark: 8 Notes on Heading Toward Hostile Books,” published in conjuction with the long lost Hostile Book Lemon by Ryan Kaveh Sheldon. My essay thinks about art economies, making problems, and feeling like an idiot injecting lemon juice into a printer cartridge. It’s also an account of what led me to work with the collective Hostile Books. Included, is an interview w/ @the_deeps / Ryan Kaveh Sheldon, a Hostile Books collective member. Ryan is wickedly smart and funny in interview. @mc.hyland is incorporating sandpaper into the cover so it’s unpleasant for everyone (her, my bookshelf, your hands).

Pre-orders are here. It’s just $10. I hope you read it and turn a brick into a book into a problem.

Also, Apr 5, a non-union-busting arts institution, Squeaky Wheel, presents a poetry reading by Carolina Ebeid and me as part of the public programs accompanying their exhibition, The Image in its Absence which features an installation by Ebeid. Catering from Ali Baba Kebab, with vegetarian options, will be available to attendees. Very good.

Carolina Ebeid’s work is fantastic: “Carolina Ebeid’s poem, She Got Love: A Circle of Spells for Ana Mendieta, focuses on the testimony and lack of witnesses to the death of the singular Cuban-American artist; its circle is both protective and repellant, seemingly circling Mendieta herself. In the context of the exhibition, the work dives into what is hidden in recorded, official testimony, and what exists beyond it.”

The larger exhibit: “The works in the exhibition [by Azza El-Hassan, Crystal Z Campbell, and Noor Abuarafeh] and public programs focus on several different historiographic approaches to how artists address the absence of archives”