First, Business and Economy… Structures of Class, Law, Race, Rights and the Places where Dreams are Powerful

This year’s reading group has parallel, but connected routes: one in which we travel First Class: featuring dreamy (but complicated) depictions and constructs of glamour/luxury, rest and leisure, and another in which we get down to basics with texts that cut directly into problematic European derived issues of inequality. We’re going to read imaginative worlds (Monstress, Pleasure Palace, Deluxe Dreams) as beacons to help motivate or guide or as a space of reflection; as spaces to help digest the histories that we have inherited. Then, we have a fast-as-the-speed-of-thought connection to make: More Brilliant than the Sun is Eshun Kodwo’s machine of Sonic Fictions: a book activating the work of composers, producers and DJs whose music “comes from the Outer Side…arrives from the future…[and] is characterised by an extreme indifference to the human.” Because “Human is a pointless and treacherous category” our focus here are the Futurhythmachines of “music’s internal emigrants”. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s book Unpayable Debt is not really the last leg of our journey, rather it’s a U-turn. We have to retrace our steps because we forgot a bunch of important stuff. It’s not the kind of stuff we need, in fact, it’s the stuff (CAPITALISMMMM aka the apparatus of Law and economics) that split us into normalised separate categories of (legal and illegal) travellers in the first place.

Jay Tan is an artist and educator who grew up watching a lot of TV in South London. They completed their MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2010 and were a 2014/15 resident at the Rijksakademie. Based in Rotterdam, they make decorative sculptural and video installations heavy in domestic mechanics. This might mean dressing up model racing cars or bejewelling cavities. They teach in the Rietveld Academie Fine Arts Dept and the Masters of Artistic Research at KABK. They have shown work at the CACC Paris, Ujazdowski Castle, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Ellen de Bruijne projects and Gallerie van Gelder, Amsterdam, Futura, Prague, Kunstverein, Amsterdam, Vleeshal, Middleburg, the CAC, Vilnius, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Hollybush Gardens London, Tent and Kunstinstituut Melly (Formerly Witte de With), Rotterdam and RongWrong, Amsterdam.