Wendy's Subway / Residency / GenderFail

PUBLISHER-IN-RESIDENCE: GENDERFAIL
October-December, 2018

Wendy's Subway is pleased to announce our sixth in a series of one- to two-month long residencies designed to host artists, publishers, writers, special collections and libraries. In October and December 2018, Wendy's Subway will host GenderFail.

About GenderFail

GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative that seeks to encourage projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity. Our projects look at various forms of failure - from personal, public, and political perspectives - as a boundless form of creative potential. GenderFail is fueled by the messiness of collaboration, education, and community to continue to push our goals of failing forward. Since 2017, GenderFail has been working on The GenderFail Archive Project, an intersectional archiving project that allows multiple parties help to decide what becomes archived and presented in mobile presentations of our collection of art books, artist books and zines. In April 2018, The GenderFail Archive Project was invited by Art Feminism to present as part of "Past and Future Fictions," a Sunday Session events on radical archiving at MoMA PS1. GenderFail has also been collaborating with the International Center of Photography Library on "Queering the Collection," a series of exhibition and events based around the perspectives and queer people and people of color. GenderFail publications can be found at various artist books shops including Printed Matter (New York City), Art Book @ MoMA Ps1 (Long Island City), Art Metropole (Toronto), Ulises Books (Philadelphia), Otherwild (New York), Lugemilk (Tallinn) and many others. GenderFail is currently working on an anthology of publications based on personal, collective and institutional forms of failure as a site of cultural production. The first publication, GenderFail: An Anthology on Failure 1 will focus on personal accounts of failure with essays by Manuel Arturo Abreu, American Artist, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Demian Dineyazhi, Johanna Hedva, Nicole Killian, Andrea Liu, Be Oakley, Nate Pyper Sable Elyse Smith, Alok Vaid-Menon and Agustine Zegers.

View the GenderFail Archive Catalog here.

Sunday, October 28 - 6-9pm (Readings at 7pm)
Launch for GenderFail: Anthology on Failure 1
Readings by American Artist, Be Oakley, and Agustine Zegers.
Performance by Andrea Liu.
A curated playlist inspired by FAILURE by A Bar Called Mary.

The first in an anthology of publications based on personal, collective, and institutional forms of failure as a site of cultural production, GenderFail: An Anthology on Failure 1 focuses on personal accounts of failure with essays by Manuel Arturo Abreu, American Artist, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Demian Dineyazhi, Johanna Hedva, Nicole Killian, Andrea Liu, Be Oakley, Nate Pyper Sable Elyse Smith, Alok Vaid-Menon and Agustine Zegers. Contributors American Artist and Agustine Zegers will from their essays in the anthology, while Andrea Liu will present a performance entitled "A Paranoid Reparative Meets a Text."

American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work uses video, installation, new media, and writing. American attended the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist. They have exhibited at The Kitchen (New York), the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and New Criticals and are a co-founder of the arts and politics publication unbag.

Andrea Liu is a NYC-Berlin based performer, writer, and artist. She has performed at S.A.L.E Docks, Dixon Place, Chez Bushwick, Flutgraben-Berlin, HTMlles Feminist Festival of Media Arts & Digital Culture, Artists Space (Movement Research Dance Improv Festival), Berliner Festspiele (under Chto Delat), & HOT! Festival (NYC’s longest running 24 year performance festival for queer themes/artists). She has been artist (or writer)-in-residence in the U.S, Berlin, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague, Vilnius & Italy, including Atlantic Center for the Arts (Master Artist: Cornelius Eady), MFAH Core, Ox-Bow, Z/KU-Berlin, Centrale Fies Liveworks Performance Act Award Vol. 4, Art & Law Program, Chashama, amongst others.

A Paranoid Reparative Meets a Text:

This is a performance that attempts to stage an encounter between a reading subject and a text. A paranoid reparative meets a text replete with ‘Heterosexual Plenty.’ Heterosexual Plenty’ is an empire of meaning, an ontology with no edges: it is the unexamined assumption that heterosexuality is timeless, universal, ubiquitous, and ‘natural’. ‘Heterosexual Plenty’ suffuses every facet of our cognitive terrain–from the way we hold the spoon to the curve of an eyelash to the teleological progression of Beethoven’s 9th. It is a mental fascism that heterosexuality is ‘normal.’

The paranoid reparative attempts to destabilizes the signifier, but the signifier collapses into the letter’s materiality. The anarcho-queer non-futurist applauds the death drive as the sole mode of an unassimilable queer “last stand” against a well-scrubbed clean-teethed sensibly shoed Heterosexual Plenty.

Failure, Failure Failure: Failure to swell according to the ebbs of narrative realization. Failure to skip hop and jump according to the cues of teleological progression. Failure of narrative closure. Smash the Subject, Smash the Subject, and with it, the promise of a futuricity coated with the sunny tinges of hetero-fascism as unexamined plenitude.

Agustine Zegers is a Chilean artist/writer and MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. They reek of wet earth and Atrazine.

Be Oakley, is a writer, facilitator and publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. In 2015 they started GenderFail, a publishing and programming initiative that seeks to encourage projects that foster an intersectional queer subjectivity. Their work has been shown in programs and exhibitions at MoMA PS1, The International Center of Photography, Vox Populi and Sediment Arts.

Saturday, November 3 - 12-5pm
Risograph Workshop: Urgent Printing, Protest and Dissemination
Register here.

Join GenderFail publisher Be Oakley for an afternoon workshop in Risograph printing. Since 2017, GenderFail has been hosting events offering free use of our risograph machine for LGBTQIA folks. In the lead-up to the midterm elections, GenderFail will gladly print any materials that have an urgent need to be disseminated to the public. Oakley will be offering use of their Risograph machine for the public to learn more about the potential of Risograph as a tool for resistance. During the event, we will be providing collage materials for guests to create their own artworks or protest materials to be Risographed.

Notes on Materials

Please bring a printed black and white image you wish to be risographed. GenderFail will also have collaging materials set up for guests to create their own works.
Please bring your own paper to Risograph. GenderFail will be supplying a small amount of paper for use by donation.

This event free (with suggested donation) and open to the public.

December - TBA
Dead Planet Cookbook: A Dinner with Pallavi Sen

Join GenderFail, Pallavi Sen and Wendy’s Subway for the release of the second edition of Dead Planet Cookbook. We will hosting a dinner from recipes included in the publication. More details coming in early November!

Dead Planet Cookbook is an anti-packaging food waste, pro-clean plate, pro-small budget, climate-aware cooking project for first time cooks, living in the Anthropocene. To celebrate the release of the book’s second edition, GenderFail hosts a collaborative performative dinner, featuring dishes from the cookbook. More on the cookbook here: http://genderfail.space/dead-planet-cookbook.html

Pallavi Sen, born in 1989, in New Delhi, India, is an interdisciplinary artist, working with installation, printmaking, textiles, Instagram, and intuitive movement. An uncompromising and invested dabbler, her latest interests include the lives of birds and animals, South Asian costumes, traditional architecture, rituals, altars, deities, the history of pattern, of woven cloth, farming and the artist as farmer, work spaces, work tables, eco-feminism, love poems, the gates to Indian homes, sisterhood, walking, and cooking deliberately. Sen is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.

The Wendy’s Subway Residency Program is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).