Ana Hine responds to the publication Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event?

Reason Escaped Me

Dancing to
Rosas Danst Rosas
By Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker

Under chairs in the psychiatric hospital
Trying to explain feminist art theory
To nurses who were trying to help me
It was all a failure

I missed the actual event
As part of Of Other Places
Where Does Gesture Become Event?
And a presentation I was supposed to give
At the Talking Bodies Conference
On Visual Representations of the Matrixial Zone
I was off, looking for my missing fiancé

Or the exhibition
Body of Work
At Centrespace, Visual Research Centre
Organised with the Student Curatorial Team
With my friend, back then, Fiona Verran
I haven’t seen her since

It’s all a blur
Those months of madness
Trying to explain feminist art theory
To nurses
In psychiatric hospitals
While they were trying to help me
As I searched for my missing fiancé

Reason escaped me




Poems in Response

Page. 167

You told me I couldn't sing
And I couldn't
But I did, in harmony with others around me
A litany
For women artists

---
Page. 83

It never occurs to me
To ask if there's a creche

---
Page. 131

I don't own a kitchen table
And if I did I wouldn't sit at it peeling potatoes

---
Page. 210

Exhibitions like this keep persuading me to stay in the city
---

Page. 156

Opening up the exhibition
There isn't a guide to switching on
The digital works
I sit and wait for someone
More competent
To show up

______________
Members of Cooper Gallery's Student Curatorial Team were invited to respond to the newly published book (Sternberg Press, 2019).

Ana Hine was a member of the Student Curatorial Team and is a recent graduate from DJCAD with a Masters in Arts & Humanities in August 2019. She is editor of the feminist zine Artificial Womb: https://www.facebook.com/artificialwomb

Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? is an annotation and reflection on the two-chapter eponymous exhibition and event project that took place at Cooper Gallery in 2016–17. The core of the publication is constituted by material presented and performed by over thirty thinkers, art historians, artists, writers and poets at the project’s culminating symposium, 12-Hour Action Group alongside important historical texts by Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Monica Ross, Annabel Nicolson and others.