The Kathy Acker Reading Group offers a social and intellectual space for deeper engagement with Acker’s novels. Led by writers, artists and academics directly and indirectly influenced by Kathy Acker’s work, the reading group follows the collective explorations of Acker’s texts undertaken by ICA staff in the course of planning
I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker.
Each meeting will involve close readings of Acker’s work through the intersecting lenses of identity, sexual desire, mythology, and the language of the body. These themes relate to salient ideas located in the eight text fragments around which the exhibition is structured.
The first reading group, led by writer, lecturer, and political dominatrix Reba Maybury, focuses on Acker’s Hannibal Lecter, My Father (Semiotext(e), 1991) as a vehicle for discussion of the many themes used by Acker to shock and disorient the reader. Making connections between the father figure, ownership, cannibalism, the free market, fucking and emancipation, this reading group aims to elevate and celebrate Acker’s work through fearless conversation.
Reba Maybury is a writer, artist, lecturer and political dominatrix. In 2015 she founded Wet Satin Press a publishing company exploring eccentric corporate male sexuality. Dining with Humpty Dumpty is her first novella and was released in 2017. She lives in London, teaches a program in subversive thinking at Central Saint Martins and was born in 1990. Her radio show ‘Mistress Rebecca's World’ is regularly broadcast on NTS. Arcadia Missa represents her and she has exhibited and read at Karma International, Los Angeles, Bridget Donahue, New York, Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, Schloss, Oslo, Balice Hertling, Paris, and has work in upcoming shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, White Columns, New York, and P.P.O.W, New York.
no. 236848.