Tuesday 17 March, 7pm-10pm
Hopscotch Reading Room, Kurfurstenstr. 14 ( im hof), 10785 Berlin, Germany
States of the Body Produced by Love by Nisha Ramayya is a modern mystical journey through love – a many-headed snake twisting through devotion, sacrifice and the dream of returning home.
In her visionary debut, Nisha Ramayya conjures an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. States of the Body Produced By Love weaves essays, poetry and images together to offer fierce meditations on diasporic identity, language and resistance. From grief to bliss, this book explores the many states of the body seized by love in an incantation that never leaves its hold.
Join us for a special evening at Hopscotch Reading Rooms to celebrate the publication of States of the Body Produced by Love by Ignota Books. Nisha is joined by poets, writers and artists Season Butler, Jesse Darling, Johanna Hedva, Caspar Heinemann and Hannah Satz for readings from their poetry, prose, fragments and experiments around the body and love, or embodiment and intersubjectivity. More readers tba.
This event is free and will be followed by drinks and signings.
Nisha Ramayya grew up in Glasgow, and is now based in London. She is a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. Her pamphlets include Notes on Sanskrit, Correspondences, and In Me the Juncture, as well as Threads, co-authored with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil. States of the Body Produced by Love is her first full-length book.
Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and lecturer in Performance Studies and Creative Writing. Her writing, research and art practice centre around intersectionality and narratives of otherness, isolation and negotiations with hope. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre, Tate Exchange and Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in Spring 2019 and won the Writer’s Guild 2020 award for best first novel.
Jesse Darling is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, text, sound and performance. Their work is broadly concerned with what it means to be a body in the world. Darling’s practice draws on their own experience as well as the narratives of history and counterhistory. Their works and writing feature an array of free-floating consumer goods, liturgical devices, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols.
Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy. Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water. They are the author of the novel, On Hell (2018). Their next book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, will be co--published by Sming Sming and Wolfman in September 2020. Their album The Sun and the Moon was released in 2019, and they are currently touring Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a doom metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual.