Public Programming
GIVE/GIVEN/VOICE
Will Harris, Jason Wee, Nicholas Y. H. Wong
Asymmetry, 102a Albion Drive, London E8 4LY
6-8PM, 10.05.2024
'Give/Given/Voice' gathers three poets and writers, Will Harris, Jason Wee, our Goldsmiths PhD scholar, and Nicholas Y. H. Wong, in conversation about voice as a literary formation and as action, as gift-giving that facilitates the passage of the unspoken into audible expression, but also as a performance attentive to the borders and fences between those who are heard and those that are not. Speaking amongst and between each other about the voice as media, in translation and ekphrasis, the evening programme draws on questions of mediation and transmission in poetics.
Through reading, speaking, and audiovisual projection, the contributors will draw on different forms of mediation as they work with archives and histories, and in their performances as moderators, interlocutors, translators, and representatives, among other modes in which our voices carry others along with and within them. Poet and writer Harris will share excerpts and images relating to his poetry collection Brother Poem (2023), relaying the loss of what cannot be seen and the weight of those that are all too present. In keeping with the exegesis of familial relationality, scholar and poet Wong will relay his recent translation of Taiwanese poet Ling Yu’s poetry collection, Daughters (2022), while delving into the intertextual inspirations for his and Ling Yu’s poetry. Jason Wee, will draw from his research and writing journey into the affect and intensity of living at the borderlines of permission and prohibition, culminating in his recently published poetry collection From A (Undesirable) Diary (2024).
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BIOGRAPHY
Will Harris is a London-based Indonesian-British writer. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023). He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, Harris and Nisha Ramayya, is published by Monitor Books.
Jason Wee is an artist-curator, writer and researcher whose practice centres on polyphony and ‘powerless’ minor poetics within architecture, infrastructure and history. His works move restlessly between art, design histories, poetry, publishing, activism, sculpture and photography. Most recently, he has been embarking on a multiyear project on the figuration and futuring of Asia and Southeast Asia. His recent projects include the choreographies of queer secrecy in parks and shipping lanes (Asia Society Triennale, 2020) and the history of publishing ‘undesirable literatures’ in Malaya (Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2022). Jason is the recipient of our 2023 Goldsmiths PhD Scholarship at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Nicholas Y. H. Wong is an assistant professor in the School of Chinese at The University of Hong Kong. He teaches Chinese-English translation and writes on extractive capitalism and Southeast Asian Chinese writing. His translation of Ling Yu's poetry collection, Daughters (2022), is forthcoming from Balestier Press. As Zhou Sivan, he has published three poetry chapbooks, which address poetic form (Zero Copula, Delete Press, 2015), Malaysia’s policies on refugees and migrants (Sea Hypocrisy, co-published by DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016), and trees as metaphor (The Geometry of Trees, Sputnik & Fizzle, 2022).