Join us for A SPACESHIP MOMENT, a hybrid talk between drama and ISABEL WAIDNER on their latest novel STERLING KARAT GOLD. 

To top off the event, drama embarked on a collective making trip with 5 Brussels-based artists: Aay Liparoto, Anouchka Oler, Henrik Olai Kaarstein, Kato Six, and Marlie Mul.

They were invited together in the studio to each conceive and make a piñata - thereby re-enacting Cataclysmic Foibles, a quarterly series of DIY artist's plays directed and performed by Chachki and Sterling, held in Sterling's flat - a pivotal political moment in STERLING KARAT GOLD. 

Orbiting Isabel's worlding practice throughout the book, they came up with a series of delirious piñatas. Come and celebrate the exhibition (and, who knows, smashing?) of these avant-garde props alongside the talk we'll have with Isabel Waidner.

There will be drama, there will and will not be Isabel Waidner, there will be spaceship piñatas

 

About the novel

Sterling is arrested one morning without having done anything wrong. Plunged into a terrifying nonsensical world, Sterling - with the help of their three best friends - must defy bullfighters, football players and time-travelling spaceships in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.

Sterling Karat Gold is Kafka's The Trial written for the era of gaslighting - a surreal inquiry into the real effects of state violence on gender-nonconforming, working-class and black bodies.

Following the Goldsmiths Prize-nominated We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner's latest novel proposes community, inventiveness and the stubborn refusal to lie low as antidotes against marginalisation and towards better futures.

 

About Isabel Waidner

@isabelwaidner is a writer and academic based in London. They are the author of three novels: Sterling Karat Gold (2021), We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019) and Gaudy Bauble (2017). They were shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize (twice), and won the Internationale Literaturpreis. They are a co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the programmer and presenter of This Isn’t a Dream, a fortnightly literary talk show, also hosted by the ICA via Instagram live. Sterling Karat Gold has just been selected for the Goldsmiths Prize 2021.

 

Participating artists

Aay Liparoto https://www.aliparoto.com/ @__.aay.__

Anouchka Oler-Nussbaum https://www.instagram.com/drama__more/?hl=en @drama__more

Henrik Olai Kaarstein https://henrikolaikaarstein.com/ @henrikolaikaarstein

Kato Six https://www.katosix.be/ @katosix

Marlie Mul http://marliemul.com/ @_yappy

 

About drama

drama (@therewillbedrama) is a nascent curatorial spacecraft hovering between visual arts and writing, navigated by Florence Cheval & Greg Nijs.