Reading Room: Shanzhai Lyric

In August, hot off the heels of their visit to the Robin Hood Festival in Nottingham, England, roving poetic research unit Shanzhai Lyric visited Malmö to share some of their findings on the entangled histories of counterfeits, property, enclosure, theft, hedges, anti-property movements, and noble thieves. Since then, Shanzhai Lyric’s archive of over 400 found poetry-garments, has been available for perusal as part of the inaugural Reading Room at skēnē, alongside related readings selected by Anti. They consider the archive to form one long poem unfolding across bodies and landscapes, a shifting work they call Incomplete Poem.

Incomplete Poem is available for consultation at the skēnē Reading Room during exhibition hours (Thurs–Saturday 1–4pm) and by appointment. The Reading Room was designed in collaboration with architectural collective common room.

Shanzhai Lyric (Est. 2015) is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies.

Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin & Alex Tatarsky) circulate their ever-growing archive of poetry-garments in the form of poetry-lecture, publication, and installation. In the fall of 2020, Shanzhai Lyric founded the fictional office entity Canal Street Research Association from which they continue to problematize notions of ownership and property through bootleg as method. Their work has been presented in unofficial and official spaces including Amant, Times Museum, INIVA/Stuart Hall Library, Women’s Art Library, Abrons Arts Center, SculptureCenter, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Artists Space, MoMA PS1, Printed Matter, Harvard (AFVS), Clearview Ltd, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Selected publications include essays in The New Inquiry, Viscose, The Serving Library, Capilano Review, Vulture and ArtReview Asia.

Lizzie Borden – Born in Flames

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with restoration funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation. Distributed by Cinenova.

New York; ten years after the most peaceful revolution that the world has ever seen. The governing Socialist party is emphasising the need for unity on the slow road to reform.

”Hello, this is Honey Speaking”.

Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary and educational videos made from the 1910’s to the early 2000’s. The thematics in these titles include oppositional histories, post and de-colonial struggles, representation of gender, race, sexuality, and other questions of difference and importantly the relations and alliances between these different struggles.

The event is supported by Kulturrådet, Malmö stad och Region Skåne