Come join us for an unforgettable evening at "You Send Me" by Iria Vrettou and Andrew Stephens! Get ready to be mesmerized by the incredible performance and immerse yourself in a world of art and creativity. This in-person event promises to be a night to remember, so mark your calendars and don't miss out! See you there!

Greece in USA is pleased to announce the presentation of “You Send Me” by Iria Vrettou that will take place in the context of Portraits of the Collaborative-self (the reinvention of portraiture), a solo exhibition of works by Bill Hayward. Installed across the first floor of 42 Walker St, Hayward’s exhibition attempts to challenge the notion of photographic portraiture.

‘You send me’ is a project created by Iria Vrettou (animator) and Andrew Stephens (musician) in response to the exhibition title “outraged by pleasure” by Nadja Argyropoulou. The piece draws from the queer revolutionary history of jazz, the blues queens and explores jazz as an experience of exteriorization inspired by the works of Fred Moten. The three hand drawn animated loops are comprised of hundreds of drawings each. They explore the evolutionary origins of dancing as a primordial language and pleasure as a revolutionary act. They are conceived, and unfolding, as a world of many worlds, a (queer) oddkin. In collaboration with dancers Adonis Vais and Anastasia Delta the creatures come to life through the original music written and performed by Andrew Stephens in collaboration with Ben Goldberg, Georgia Heers and Jayla Chee.

“Considering the emphasis in Said’s critical work on space and place and the political importance of geography, it is less surprising to see the luxuriant evocation of a specific topography of dusty roads, grottos, plump figtrees, desert flowers, muddy clods, and the “beckoning hands of lambent hills”. Most revealing of all, perhaps, is the poems’ tendency to see the world through musical form. Musical imagery is everywhere, testifying to how much of Said’s mind in an introspective mood was immersed in the sounds, forms, and fables of Western classical music.”

Timothy Brennan
From the book’s Introduction

Edward Said was renowned for the breadth, erudition, and humanity of his scholarly and political writing. His ground-breaking studies of literature and culture threw a dazzling new light on the ways in which non-Western peoples have been misrepresented over the course of the centuries, and he was among the world’s most prominent voices in denouncing the modern-day injustices of Western foreign policy. This volume collects all his never-before-published poems, offering insight into the personality of the author of Orientalism,The World, the Text and the Critic, and Culture & Imperialism “to a degree hidden in those works themselves”.

The nineteen works collected in Songs of an Eastern Humanist canvass a variety of poetic forms, but they are all shot through with Said’s capacious intellect and passionate sensibility. They are also remarkable achievements of poetic craft. Said’s poetry alternates with unerring judgment between wit and pathos, between sublimely elevated and disarmingly quotidian registers.

His individual lines of verse are exquisitely constructed and richly elusive, while his poems as a whole are at once sweeping in their vision and keenly evocative of sensory experience. Their publication amounts to a major literary event, marking twenty years since the great public intellectual’s passing.

The Opening Gallery, Contra Mundum Press, and Eris Press are pleased to announce the event “Bleedings, Confessions and Other Sacred Stories”, an evening with poet Gabriele Tinti presenting his ekphrastic poetry series and books Bleedings (New York: Contra Mundum Press) and Confessions (London: Eris Press), in cooperation with Andres Serrano. The event takes place in conjunction with the live performance “Inneschi” by Luciano Chessa and the group exhibition “Spectral Senses” with participating artists Stella Ampazi, Daniel Firman, Nefeli Masia and Eleni Paridi curated by Sozita Goudouna on Wednesday July 12th at 42 Walker Street, with the participation of Andres Serrano, the actor Vincent Piazza, the publisher Rainer J. Hanshe, and the translator Nicholas Benson.

Tinti will introduce the screening of selected videos of readings by Abel Ferrara, Vincent Piazza, and Andres Serrano of his poems. Serrano and the author will then sign copies of the books.

Bleedings — Incipit Tragoedia is a series of poems Tinti composed in the spring of 2020. The epigraphic collections of the National Roman Museum, the Capitoline Museums, and the National Archæological Museum of Naples, as well as the most recent funerary inscriptions, were a spur for this work that aims to transfigure our fear of death, pain, and suffering. A writing that starts from ruins, crosses cemeteries, and smells wounds, the traces of what has disappeared. It is born of a memory of the ancient and a contempt for the contemporary. Artist cover by Andres Serrano.

Confessions is a highly distinctive artistic collaboration between Gabriele Tinti and Andres Serrano. They have produced a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness.

Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti’s most impressive body of work to date. Tinti’s verses accompany a series of images composed by Serrano — one of the most highly regarded artists of our time. Serrano’s works engage provocatively with the visual legacy of the Christian and classical traditions, while also embodying a very particular kind of beauty. Both the poems and the images in this volume are a major achievement in their own right; together they make for an essential collection.

The films of Tinti’s poetry are the video documentation of a reading series inspired by ancient and modern myths, which has involved some of the best-known artists of our time, such as Abel Ferrara, Malcolm McDowell, Stephen Fry, Franco Nero, and major world museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the British Museum, the Capitoline Museums, the Ara Pacis Museum, the Colosseum and the National Roman Museum, amongst others.

Screening and discussion of Miguel Abreu’s 1991 short film,which captured Jimmy Raskin on the eve of his new role as the ‘Documentarian of The Poetic Impulse.’ Abandoning art making as he knew of it, in this film Raskin contemplates his new role as “lecturer / performer,” which would define his expressive career for years to come.

Jimmy Raskin’s work is included in the galleries current exhibition, Wet Conceptualism Curated by Warren Neidich and Sozita Goudouna. For more information on Wet Conceptualism please go to http://wetconceptual.art/

Jimmy Raskin (b. 1970, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, Raskin has exhibited his work internationally and staged “lecture-performances” in institutions, art galleries and other non-traditional gathering places since the mid-1990s, notably at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Thread Waxing Space, Foundation 2021, Greene-Naftali, Cooper Union, Miguel Abreu Gallery, SculptureCenter, as well as at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Real Art Ways, Hartford, The Swiss Institute, Paris, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

On Saturday March 4th 2023 the Opening Gallery will present ATYPICAL:: FURTIVE SPEECH ACTS, a day of performances and poetry readings to celebrate the closing of the gallery's current exhibition ATYPICAL.

There will be a performance by Elaine Angelopoulos from 4-5pm.Then at 6:30 there will be a poetry reading with Brittany Adames, Bahaar Ahsan, Christina Chalmers, Rachel Stuart, Leda Koutsodaskalou and Jackie Abhulimen. This event is co Curated by Sozita Goudouna, Terrence Arjoon, and Adam Brown.

Bahaar Ahsan is a poet from the Bay Area living in New York City. She is the author of Gay Girl Hyacinth (Eyelet 2021).

Brittany Adames is a Dominican-American writer. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Half Mystic, Palette Poetry, Vagabond City, Rust+Moth, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Brooklyn College.

Christina Chalmers is a poet, translator, and researcher, and her new book Subterflect is forthcoming from Distance No Object Press. Other chapbooks include Truant of the Stintless Sun (1080), and willingness (materials).

Elaine Angelopoulos lives and works in New York City. She is an artist with an interdisciplinary approach that bridges her studio practice with audience participation, with select installations and performances. Her work has been exhibited in New York, the United States, and in Europe. Angelopoulos received a Franklin Furnace Fund/Jerome Fellowship in 2014/15. Recently, she performed for POPc, an organization that fosters dialogue about philosophy.

Jackie Abhulimen is a writer, scholar and activist from Athens, Greece and currently living in New York City. Her activism in dismantling the inequities that shape the migrant experience in Europe has been featured in the New York Times, Aljazeera, NPR to name a few, and in local Greek press. She has given speeches in the Greek Parliament, served on the Greek National Council Against Racism and Intolerance, and presented in conferences across Europe. She now works in cultural programming, writes on diasporic culture and practice and is currently working on her first manuscript of poems.

Leda Koutsodaskalou is an actor based in Athens and New York. She just graduated from Tisch School of the Arts with an MA in Performance Studies. Among others, she has collaborated with The National Theater of Greece, the National Theater of Northern Greece, The Athens and Epidaurus Festival and Stegi Onassis Cultural Center. Her last film credit is Midnight Skin by Manolis Mavris that is going to premier in May.

Rachel Stuart is a poet living in Brooklyn. She writes on a typewriter.