Reading Group with Serena Lee

The Land + Place reading group meets this Saturday, October 23rd, at 2:00 pm for a special session hosted by visiting artist Serena Lee.

This week’s session combines reading aloud and sensing exercises in the gallery space and online, as an experiment in situated and embodied reading. We will play with different formats of experiencing and discussing texts to shift vision and listening so as to explore ideas of porous bodies, phenomenology via internal martial arts qi gong 'breath work' and language taking shape as written and oral practices.

The reading group is open to new and returning participants of all levels. Limited spots are available for in person attendance at the Or Gallery (Vancouver), with additional Zoom access for participants unable to attend in person. For in person attendance, please register through this Eventbrite page; if you require a Zoom link, please email kitt@orgallery.org with the subject "Reading Group."

Texts will be emailed to participants one week in advance.

This session takes place in relation with wave hands, like clouds, not eyes, opening October 22nd at Or Gallery.

More on wave hands, like clouds, not eyes:

Combining sound, scent, and textures, this "speculative spa" is guided by the feeling of taijiquan internal martial arts practice and reflecting upon daoist principles and yinyang cosmology as an atmosphere to enter by yourself or with someone you know. With a menu of experiences in flux over three months, this "speculative spa" convenes Vancouver artists, and invites you to take off your shoes, recalibrate your senses and notice time unfolding in an intimate, immersive space. Playfully critical of the neo-liberal imperative of relaxation towards optimized productivity, this "spa" is slippery and contradictory, questioning the healing and martial nature of taijiquan, how it is practiced away from the place of origin, and how it softly resists colonial binaries as an embodied knowledge practice. Supported by a Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant.

Artist Bio:

Serena Lee's practice stems from a fascination with polyphony and its radical potential for mapping power, perception and belonging. She plays with movement, language, cinema, voice, and space. Serena collaborates as part of Read-in, a collective researching political, embodied, and situated practices of reading; and with artist Christina Battle as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE, a framework for sci-fi world-building through living research and transmedia publication. Serena is based between Vienna and Tkaronto/Toronto.

Image courtesy of Serena Lee, 2021.