NEWS
![]()
An long essay (in Dutch) about Kate Brigg’s excellent ENTERTAINING IDEAS by Tommy van Avermaete, here, who seems to have put his finger on everything that matters.
How to Avoid Writing a Narrative Novel: Sean Ashton in conversation with Anna Aslanya
Krupa Gallery invites you to an evening with Sean Ashton, an event devised by Adriana Jaroslavsky, Nuria López Blanco, Loulou Siem, and Ana María Chamucero, as part of their current exhibition ‘How to Avoid Being Wrapped’. The artists have invited Sean Ashton to read from his novel Massive Massive Oil Slick, composed entirely of sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose and avoid. Described by critic Michael Hampton as ‘an unrelenting catalogue of the faded, dead and dying, pop culture piledriven hard into the highbrow’, Massive Massive Oil Slick is the second of three novels written to constraints (Living in a Land and the forthcoming A Village of Uncles).
Ashton will be in conversation with writer and translator Anna Aslanyan, author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History (Profile, 2021) and several articles on literary constraints, including the Oulipo group and Georges Perec. Join us for readings and insights from the artists, whose current show is the first of several projects that will use ‘avoidance’ as a curatorial conceit.
Free entry. Book your ticket here.
Textual Actants (Infrastructure): Book launch, readings, and discussion
Please join us for an event celebrating the publication of Adam Walker’s new book, Textual Actants (Infrastructure). Adam will be joined in conversation by Susannah ThomPson, Laura Haynes, and Nell Osborne, who will also read from their work.
Textual Actants is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them, to the on-screen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Through the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, six interweaving texts attend to the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.
Refreshments will be available.
Copies of Textual Actants (Infrastructure) will be available for purchase.
This event is hosted by the Visual Culture Research Group and made possible with support from AHEAD (Arts and Humanities Engagement and Dialogue).
Adam Walker is an artist and writer. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amid these. Text sits at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts that interrupt dominant textual flows. The works are sometimes written, other times they spill into performance, moving-image and digital forms, and have been exhibited, performed, published and commissioned by institutions including the Serpentine, ICA, Tate and Tyneside Cinema. Their monograph Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care was published by Routledge in 2023.
Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic, and Professor of Art History and Criticism at Manchester School of Art, MMU. Her research follows three (often interconnecting) paths: feminist art history, Scottish art, and art writing and creative criticism. Recent projects have focused on Scottish women artists who write, including Maud Sulter, Cordelia Oliver and Joan Eardley. Alongside her academic research, she has worked as a freelance art writer and critic since 2000, publishing features, reviews and articles in the specialist press, including Artforum, Art Review, Burlington Contemporary, Flash Art, MAP, Modern Painters, Sight and Sound, Variant and many more, and for artists, museums and galleries. Current projects include a catalogue essay on the work of Scottish painter Steven Campbell, an article on artist-led publishing in Scotland from the 1980s, and a monograph on the work of Maud Sulter.
Laura Haynes is a writer, editor and academic. She was co-director of MAP magazine (2011 – 2024) and at The Glasgow School of Art is leader of the studio-based interdisciplinary MLitt Art Writing programme, where she also edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing. Laura’s writing and research are concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Publishing internationally and across various forms, her work appears in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes and Journal for Writing in Creative Practice, and in magazines and presses including Sternberg, Freelands Foundation, Nothing Personal and MAP. With Susannah Thompson, she was co-editor of ‘Art Writing, Paraliterature and Intrepid Forms of Practice’, a special issue of the Journal for Writing in Creative Practice. She is currently working on her first novel, The Quick.
Nell Osborne is a poet, novelist and researcher of feminism and experimental writing. From 2018–20, she co-ran the Manchester-based experimental feminist reading series No Matter, commissioning new work from writers including Anne Boyer and Lisa Robertson. She completed her doctoral research at The University of Manchester, focused on writers including Ann Quin and Kathy Acker. She co-edited Gestures: a body of work, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice (2025). In 2024, she published the poetry pamphlet Thank You For Everything (Monitor Books). In 2025, she published her debut novel, Ghost Driver (Moist Books). Daisy LaFarge calls Ghost Driver ‘addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar’.
Louise O’Hare’s CENTREFOLD 1974. A MEMOIR is reviewed here (the Crack Magazine) by Steven Long, who writes: ' How Louise O’Hare tackles so much in two hundred forty-four pages is something else, and I should mention her sly humour which cuts through the art world and art mag/critical shenanigans with great effect, “letting the wrong-ness hang out”.’
Back in print at MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE:
Murdo Macdonald, RUSKIN'S TRIANGLE
Sharon Kivland, UNABLE TO ACHIEVE BROAD RECOGNITION IN MY LIFETIME
&
FREUD DREAMS OF ROME, volume I in the FREUD ON HOLIDAY series, first published in 2006, a new edition of a hundred copies, each signed and numbered.
How to Avoid Writing a Narrative Novel: Sean Ashton in conversation with Anna Aslanya
Friday 10 April, from 18.30 to 20.30
Krupa Gallery, 1 Pakenham Street London WC1X 0LA
Krupa Gallery invites you to an evening with Sean Ashton, an event devised by Adriana Jaroslavsky, Nuria López Blanco, Loulou Siem, and Ana María Chamucero, as part of their current exhibition ‘How to Avoid Being Wrapped’. The artists have invited Sean Ashton to read from his novel Massive Massive Oil Slick, composed entirely of sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose and avoid. Described by critic Michael Hampton as ‘an unrelenting catalogue of the faded, dead and dying, pop culture piledriven hard into the highbrow’, Massive Massive Oil Slick is the second of three novels written to constraints (Living in a Land and the forthcoming A Village of Uncles).
Ashton will be in conversation with writer and translator Anna Aslanyan, author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History (Profile, 2021) and several articles on literary constraints, including the Oulipo group and Georges Perec. Join us for readings and insights from the artists, whose current show is the first of several projects that will use ‘avoidance’ as a curatorial conceit.
Free entry. Book your ticket here.
Textual Actants (Infrastructure): Book launch, readings, and discussion
Wednesday, May 20, from 16.00 to 19.00
Grosvenor East Building, Manchester Metropolitan University, M15 6BG
Please join us for an event celebrating the publication of Adam Walker’s new book, Textual Actants (Infrastructure). Adam will be joined in conversation by Susannah ThomPson, Laura Haynes, and Nell Osborne, who will also read from their work.
Textual Actants is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them, to the on-screen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Through the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, six interweaving texts attend to the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.
Refreshments will be available.
Copies of Textual Actants (Infrastructure) will be available for purchase.
This event is hosted by the Visual Culture Research Group and made possible with support from AHEAD (Arts and Humanities Engagement and Dialogue).
Free entry. Book your ticket here.
Adam Walker is an artist and writer. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amid these. Text sits at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts that interrupt dominant textual flows. The works are sometimes written, other times they spill into performance, moving-image and digital forms, and have been exhibited, performed, published and commissioned by institutions including the Serpentine, ICA, Tate and Tyneside Cinema. Their monograph Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care was published by Routledge in 2023.
Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic, and Professor of Art History and Criticism at Manchester School of Art, MMU. Her research follows three (often interconnecting) paths: feminist art history, Scottish art, and art writing and creative criticism. Recent projects have focused on Scottish women artists who write, including Maud Sulter, Cordelia Oliver and Joan Eardley. Alongside her academic research, she has worked as a freelance art writer and critic since 2000, publishing features, reviews and articles in the specialist press, including Artforum, Art Review, Burlington Contemporary, Flash Art, MAP, Modern Painters, Sight and Sound, Variant and many more, and for artists, museums and galleries. Current projects include a catalogue essay on the work of Scottish painter Steven Campbell, an article on artist-led publishing in Scotland from the 1980s, and a monograph on the work of Maud Sulter.
Laura Haynes is a writer, editor and academic. She was co-director of MAP magazine (2011 – 2024) and at The Glasgow School of Art is leader of the studio-based interdisciplinary MLitt Art Writing programme, where she also edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing. Laura’s writing and research are concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Publishing internationally and across various forms, her work appears in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes and Journal for Writing in Creative Practice, and in magazines and presses including Sternberg, Freelands Foundation, Nothing Personal and MAP. With Susannah Thompson, she was co-editor of ‘Art Writing, Paraliterature and Intrepid Forms of Practice’, a special issue of the Journal for Writing in Creative Practice. She is currently working on her first novel, The Quick.
Nell Osborne is a poet, novelist and researcher of feminism and experimental writing. From 2018–20, she co-ran the Manchester-based experimental feminist reading series No Matter, commissioning new work from writers including Anne Boyer and Lisa Robertson. She completed her doctoral research at The University of Manchester, focused on writers including Ann Quin and Kathy Acker. She co-edited Gestures: a body of work, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice (2025). In 2024, she published the poetry pamphlet Thank You For Everything (Monitor Books). In 2025, she published her debut novel, Ghost Driver (Moist Books). Daisy LaFarge calls Ghost Driver ‘addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar’.
Louise O’Hare’s CENTREFOLD 1974. A MEMOIR is reviewed here (the Crack Magazine) by Steven Long, who writes: ' How Louise O’Hare tackles so much in two hundred forty-four pages is something else, and I should mention her sly humour which cuts through the art world and art mag/critical shenanigans with great effect, “letting the wrong-ness hang out”.’
Back in print at MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE:
Murdo Macdonald, RUSKIN'S TRIANGLE
Sharon Kivland, UNABLE TO ACHIEVE BROAD RECOGNITION IN MY LIFETIME
&
FREUD DREAMS OF ROME, volume I in the FREUD ON HOLIDAY series, first published in 2006, a new edition of a hundred copies, each signed and numbered.
On 2 December, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé read /performed from her book A direction out there, readwalking (with) Thoreau at the Architectural Association in London, as part of the public programme of their Ursula K Le Guin exhibition.
We have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. – > Ursula K Le Guin
This evening of readings took its cue from Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – which reimagines narrative not as a linear arc of conquest but a container to gather and ‘hold things that bear meanings and enable relationships’.
The gathering functioned as a kind of ‘carrier bag’ – a vessel for holding voices, fragments, and temporalities. The event unfolded through a series of short readings that resist closure and invite collective engagement. Voice becomes continuous with what it reads, while also altering it – construing a space of communication, resonance, and shared knowledge. Through conversational exchange and the labour of reading, the event explored acts of being with others through words.
=
We have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. – > Ursula K Le Guin
This evening of readings took its cue from Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – which reimagines narrative not as a linear arc of conquest but a container to gather and ‘hold things that bear meanings and enable relationships’.
The gathering functioned as a kind of ‘carrier bag’ – a vessel for holding voices, fragments, and temporalities. The event unfolded through a series of short readings that resist closure and invite collective engagement. Voice becomes continuous with what it reads, while also altering it – construing a space of communication, resonance, and shared knowledge. Through conversational exchange and the labour of reading, the event explored acts of being with others through words.
=
Read Richard Marshall’s lovely essay about Bridget Penney’s SONIA’S BOOK here.
[...] A pressed flower in a family book is close to the language of affection, yet here the book does not turn the object into a token of affection. It keeps to the surface, and by doing so it stays with a different intimacy, the intimacy of pressure. Leaves and petals are held between papers. Tape is pressed and lifted and pressed again. Fingers leave a logic of spacing that another hand can later follow. The writing reproduces that logic. It does not draw conclusions about the life behind it. It recognises that the act of keeping is the life that matters for the purposes of the present book. If there is an eros here, it is the eros of touch that does not consume. It is the persistence of contact without possession, a sustained nearness that maintains distance as its condition.
[...] A pressed flower in a family book is close to the language of affection, yet here the book does not turn the object into a token of affection. It keeps to the surface, and by doing so it stays with a different intimacy, the intimacy of pressure. Leaves and petals are held between papers. Tape is pressed and lifted and pressed again. Fingers leave a logic of spacing that another hand can later follow. The writing reproduces that logic. It does not draw conclusions about the life behind it. It recognises that the act of keeping is the life that matters for the purposes of the present book. If there is an eros here, it is the eros of touch that does not consume. It is the persistence of contact without possession, a sustained nearness that maintains distance as its condition.
Read Sal Randolph’s superb essay on Sean Ashton’s MASSIVE MASSIVE OIL SLICK here.
[...] Suppose is like a reality that parallels and investigates our own (“Suppose there is more rain. Suppose there is more snow”). Expect is darker, with a sense of something impending (“Expect delays. Expect
major delays and minor delays: three-mile tailbacks, slow-moving
traffic.”). Avoid is the spiky voice of negative advice (“Avoid cider. Avoid dry cider and sweet cider.”). Reading Massive Massive Oil Slick feels like encountering an oracle muttering continuously in the back of
a cave. Any time I enter, I find something that speaks to my personal
moment, a diagnosis of sorts, maybe a guide. Today it tells me to expect
more dictatorship, and naturally I’m feeling it. There’s another “No
Kings” march coming up, and you’ll find me in the crowd.
Read Michael Hampton’s superb review of Sean Ashton’s MASSIVE MASSIVE OIL SLICK here.
[...] MMOS is an unrelenting catalogue of the faded, dead and dying, pop culture piledriven hard into the highbrow. Another of his anchor points is the lament ‘all over, all over, all over’, as if Michel de Montaigne had been reincarnated and was attempting elegiacally, under the influence of Kenneth Goldsmith’s rigid ploys, to grasp the complexity and sheer bulk of digital data in cyberspace; for a lot of this para novel emanates from the online world, meaning it is truly a warped dystopian vision; although its literary antecedents could plausibly include St Augustine’s Confessions, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Yet this strangely gripping, Hudibrastic text, poses some serious questions about traditional form (especially how it has been altered beyond recognition by formatting), and more importantly even the bothersome need to conjure up or devise the imaginary—fiction in other words—when the nature of contemporary reality is so disturbing, grotesque and comical?
[...] MMOS is an unrelenting catalogue of the faded, dead and dying, pop culture piledriven hard into the highbrow. Another of his anchor points is the lament ‘all over, all over, all over’, as if Michel de Montaigne had been reincarnated and was attempting elegiacally, under the influence of Kenneth Goldsmith’s rigid ploys, to grasp the complexity and sheer bulk of digital data in cyberspace; for a lot of this para novel emanates from the online world, meaning it is truly a warped dystopian vision; although its literary antecedents could plausibly include St Augustine’s Confessions, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Yet this strangely gripping, Hudibrastic text, poses some serious questions about traditional form (especially how it has been altered beyond recognition by formatting), and more importantly even the bothersome need to conjure up or devise the imaginary—fiction in other words—when the nature of contemporary reality is so disturbing, grotesque and comical?
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE was delighted to return to the South London Gallery in midsummer, to launch three new books from the press in The Constellations series. The evening started with the measure of time through gardening
and cooking while wars wage, moving to preservation and observation
(what can be recorded, considered anew). The second part started with
rumours and fables, in the rude immediacy of living, and ended with an
inventory of individual and collective anticipations, apprehensions, and
aversions.
Read Sean Ashton’s essay on the gambit of MASSIVE MASSIVE OIL SLICK here in The Best American Poetry.
Art Monthly No. 486 May 2025
Michael Kurtz’s brilliant article ‘Negative Freedom’ asks how contemporary art might respond the the rise of what Hito Steyerl calls ‘negative freedom’. Kurtz discusses Wasser’s practice, including SPLIT as one component in Wasser’s wider examination of twenty-first-century cultural labour, the social space of the museum, and the politics of arts education.
The Editor is still offering for sale some of her drawings from the series LES LISEUSES DE CAPITAL. The sale of each work will partly fund a new book. The drawings are ink and gouache on paper from old French school exercise books. They are exquisitely presented in elegant bespoke frames. Some are in museum or private collections. Three have left her (thank you, keen readers) but a few remain,
The price? well, around £500, but open to negotiation to meet pecunious desire and serve an ever-faltering press.
Email to discuss acquisition: sharonkivland@wanadoo.fr
