Publication Launch
BITTERNESS & WIT
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Sanja Grozdanić, Mira Mattar
Asymmetry, 102a Albion Drive, London E8 4LY
7PM - 9.30PM, 02.07.2024
Please join us for the launch of Bitterness & Wit, a pamphlet containing three interconnected short stories written by our 2023 Curatorial Fellow, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, as part of the project outcome of his Fellowship at Whitechapel Gallery.
The titular story, Bitterness & Wit, follows a museum worker who feels a profound sense of suffering as he vulgarises language to write jargon-filled wall texts for a contemporary art institution he finds deeply unserious and unrigorous. Amongst other things, he questions the emancipatory valence given to language in certain schools of psychoanalysis, and poses questions to do with whether giving language and form to a series of symptoms can alleviate an experience of suffering tied to something so material, and inescapable, like the wage. The second story is a letter to a failed intimate relationship named Dear—(A Post-Mortem), and the third is a fable about the illusions and fantasies we trade with one another to keep the experience of love afloat, titled In the Heart of Mother Magpie.
We are pleased to announce that Bitterness & Wit is a free publication. Visitors can take a copy on the night. Additionally, this launch will feature readings of original work from writer Sanja Grozdanić, poet Mira Mattar, and Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung.
Bitterness & Wit (2023) is authored by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung and edited by Sanja Grozdanić. The pamphlet is designed and typeset by Joan Shin.
FREE ENTRY, BOOK HERE
ACCESS INFORMATION:
We welcome all visitors. This event takes place on the ground floor and has step-free access to our multi-purpose programme space with a fully accessible, all-gender bathroom. Earplugs and ear guards will be available to use. Please inquire with info@asymmetryart.org if you would like to learn more about the programme or discuss any access needs. Please kindly share your request at least one week in advance of the event, and we will try our best to make accommodations subject to availability.
BIOGRAPHY
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer and cultural worker particularly interested in anarchist and dissident publication practices, utopian thresholds in language, and literary expressions of the revolutionary consciousness. He is the founding editor of Decolonial Hacker. In 2023, he was the Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where he curated the exhibition Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess. Eugene has been a curator-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, and was previously part of the curatorial and public program teams at the Julia Stoschek Foundation and documenta fifteen, respectively. His writing has appeared in e-flux Criticism, Third Text, ArtReview, Griffith Review, and Art+Australia, among others. In 2021, he won the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC). Eugene holds degrees in art history, gender studies, and law from the University of Sydney.
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung was our 2023 Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery.
Sanja Grozdanić is a writer living in Berlin. Across her interdisciplinary practice, she asks how events can be contested, mourned, and remembered. Her work is particularly attentive to the slippages between public and private grief, anxiety, and imagination. Currently, she is working on a film adaptation of her 2021-24 theater performance with Bassem Saad, Permanent Trespass. Previously, she has been a fellow at La Becque and LIVE WORKS. Her writing appears in Decolonial Hacker, The White Review, The Griffith Review, Close Distance, and Pilot Press, among other publications.
Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. Her novella, Yes, I Am A Destroyer, was published in 2020. Her chapbook, Affiliation, and her first collection, The Bow were both published in 2021. A new chapbook, And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring, has recently been published by Veer2. Mira lives and works in London.