Tate Liverpool: An Evening of Readings

Presented in our Keith Haring exhibition, next to Haring’s enormous artwork, The Matrix 1983, enjoy an evening of poetry with Isabel Waidner, Jay G. Ying, Laurel Uziell, Nat Raha, and Niven Govinden and organised by Patrick Staff and Dagmawi Woubshet.

Through a range of readings of poetry, prose, and critical text, the evening will broadly explore Woubshet’s concept of a ‘poetics of compounding loss,’ a vital condition of queer and trans expression wherein speech acts become a necessary vehicle of survival, and love and open grief may operate at the very center of art and protest.

The event is organised as part of Patrick Staff’s residency, and supported by the Keith Haring Foundation.

Biographies

Patrick Staff

Patrick Staff is an artist based in Los Angeles, USA and London, UK. Their work has been presented internationally, including solo shows at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2016); and Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2015). Recent group exhibitions have included The Body Electric, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Made in LA, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger, New Museum, New York (2015).

Dagmawi Woubshet

Dagmawi Woubshet is the Ahuja Family Presidential Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He works at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ and African studies. He is the author of The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (2015), and the co-edited volume Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo (2010). His writings have appeared in various publications including Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and The Atlantic.