Reading Is Yielding communed with different kinds of reading: being read, being read to, being unread, being unreadable. It asked if reading is a form of being (or vice versa?). Its materials were the voice, private libraries, self-destructing messages, video, gifs, astrology charts, taxonomies of mysticism, and secret knowledges.
Reading Is Yielding lived in at least four different sites: the private home and library of curators Lynton Talbot and Hana Noorali, the internet, a speculative book, the gallery space of David Roberts Art Foundation and between Hedva’s universe and yours.
It tried to tunnel into a space of mystical meaning, following Simone Weil and Nine Inch Nails as guides toward, or against, the hermeneutics of annihilation. For Weil, mysticism demanded a radical yielding of the self: “We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say ‘I.’ This is what we must yield up to God.” Or, as NIN says, “God break down the door / You won't find the answers here / Not the ones you came looking for.”
Much of
Reading Is Yielding was a secret—for artist, curator, and audience, alike. The work was a gesture away from, rather than toward, explaining what is mysterious. This is simultaneously a proposition that such a gesture is as centripetal as it is centrifugal.
Lynton Talbot, the curator, was the host and medium of the work. His home, his body, his voice, his labor, and care were the raw materials of the piece. The library he shares with Hana Noorali was mined by Hedva, for books both curator and artist share, but the books Hedva chose were kept secret from Lynton and Hana.
The audience, here cast as the querent, unlocked the library with their natal chart, which, in a way, is the most unique image in the world, as it represents a single person’s first breath, taken at their time and place of birth. Hedva read the querent’s chart and, based on a process kept secret, selected a book from the
Reading Is Yielding library, to be read aloud to the querent by Lynton, in either corporal or apparitional space.
The selection process was veiled to Hedva themself. They used the querent’s natal chart as an oracle, a kind of divination, reading the querent like reading a book, and more importantly, reading the book for and because of and into the querent.
Reading is Yielding was online and open by appointment at
parrhesiades, September 28 - November 11, 2019.
The project continued at DRAF, as part of
The Season of Cartesian Weeping, an exhibition curated by Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, October 30 - December 8, 2019.
Documentation included in
parrhesiades, volume 1.
Image caption: An alphabet composed of devils, from Paris, 1836. Found in
A History of Lettering: The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms, a book published in 1971 that Hedva stole from the CalArts library.
