On Wednesday 9 December, 8-11 Gallery will host If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’s Sister Reading Group in Toronto for a launch of the latest reader, Rereading Appropriation. This reader compiles texts read in, and shared by, If I Can’t Dance’s four sister reading groups that were convened in Amsterdam, New York, São Paulo and Toronto at a monthly rhythm across Edition V — Appropriation and Dedication (2013–2014). The launch will be held in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition, Radiant Temperature of Openings: A Prologue, by the Toronto-based artists Faraz Anoushahpour, Parastoo Anoushahpour and Ryan Ferko.
Rereading Appropriation reconsiders the artistic strategy of appropriation through later elaborated theories of affect, to explore how an understanding of 'reciprocal investment' reconfigures appropriation as an act that is based in connecting, acknowledging and being porous to material.
The reader include texts from art history, feminist theory, political economy, anthropology, and artists, among others, by Richard Bell, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Adriana Cavarero, Darby English, Alfred Gell, Corinn Gerber, Isabelle Graw, Emma Hedditch, Bruce Hainley, Melanie Klein, Teresa de Lauretis, Sherrie Levine, Karl Marx, Helen Molesworth, Fred Moten, Adrian Piper, Henrik Olesen, Pauline Oliveros, Craig Owens, Suely Rolnik, Peter Stallybrass, Hito Steyerl, Ian White, and Slavoj Žižek. It also includes, essays by Kelly Kivland, Claudia Medeiros, Rachel O’Reilly, Alex Martinis Roe, the São Paulo Reading Group, the Toronto Reading Group, and Vivian Ziherl, and artist pages by Christian Nyampeta.
The third in an ongoing series of readers, Rereading Appropriation joins the previous titles (Mis)reading Masquerades and Reading / Feeling, which originate in the research field that circumscribe each of If I Can’t Dance’s two-year Editions, and are designed by Joris Kritis and Julie Peeters.