If I Can’t Dance’s first ‘Satellite Reading Group’ will commence on Tuesday 27 September at 19:00 hrs at Art Metropole, 788 King Street West, in Toronto. The sessions will be led by curator Jacob Korczynski.

If I Can’t Dance’s Reading Group has been taking place since 2006 in Amsterdam and consists of artists, thinkers and other interested readers who come together to discuss a text in an open way. Some members have been present since the beginning, while others have joined and left, but continue to read along from a distance. Jacob Korczynski became a Reading Group member in early 2011, but said goodbye to the Netherlands this summer. If I Can’t Dance invited him to stay on reading, and to found a new branch of the Reading Group in his hometown Toronto. Like its Amsterdam counterpart, this branch will concentrate on discussions of affect in theory and in contemporary artistic practice. It is our hope that a fruitful exchange between the Reading Groups across continents may ensue. This Reading Group is an experiment in engaging with an audience from afar and evolves from If I Can’t Dance’s methodology of presenting traveling projects at (inter)national locations.

The Toronto-based Reading Group is kindly hosted by Art Metropole, an internationally renowned artist-run centre that promotes the appreciation and importance of conceptually based art and is specialized in the contextualization and dissemination of artist’s books, multiples, and related materials with an emphasis on innovative formats and emergent technologies.

During the first session, the group will read a chapter from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). This chapter is titled Shame, Theatricality and Queer Performativity: Henry James’ ‘The Art of the Novel’. In addition, Michael Hardt’s Affective labor (1999) will be discussed.