Conversation and Book Launch

wiggle room

with Jason Hirata, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and Sarasija Subramanian

Friday, October 10, 6–8pm
Café & Bookstore

Join artists Jason Hirata and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, in conversation with Reliable Copy’s editor and former Amant NY Spring 2024 resident Sarasija Subramanian, for a launch and conversation at Amant around the books Supporting Role by Jason Hirata and Robbie Williams by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Seda Naiumad, Uwe Schwarzer, Ashkan Sepahvand, and Robbie Williams, from Reliable Copy's wiggle room series.

The wiggle room series charts and compiles the writings of artists that have created a textual framework for a practice that stands at odds with the art context, offering an expanded field for participation and intervention. While Hirata's Supporting Role looks at support as a framework for artistic practice through his texts—press releases, invoices, visual descriptions, curricula vitae—which take on the form of supporting documents, Haghighian and her collaborators offer Robbie Williams—the artist, not the singer—as a figure to expose the mechanisms of outsourced artistic production and the myth of the solo artist.

Jason Hirata’s artistic ambiguity parallels his personal comfort with indirectness, abstraction and indeterminacy. Artistically this invites interpretation. Psychologically it might function as defense, avoidant of emotional exposure, dissociative. Intentional ambiguity can foster reflection and collective engagement, but overuse of vagueness may impair clarity in personal relationships and professional collaboration. Role-fluidity enables experimentation and boundary navigation, but identity fusion may scuttle definition of self and direct assertiveness. Hirata has shown at Ulrik, New York; Fanta-MLN, Milan; The CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson; Fluentum, Berlin; Simian, Coppenhagen; Paid, Seattle; Theta, New York; The Wig, Berlin; B. Beamesderfer Gallery, Highland Park, New Jersey; Billytown, The Hague; Artists Space, New York; 80WSE, New York, Svetlana, New York Veronica, Seattle and elsewhere. Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany or Kassel, Germany or Gütersloh, Germany or Santa Monica, California, USA or the Cotswolds, Great Britain. Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions to imagine infrastructures and conditions of collectivity. Her practice is deeply invested in collaboration, sensual play and listening as modes of unraveling liberal individuality and the boundaries of cognition. Recently she has been interested in epistemic disobedience as a mode of unlearning coloniality. She co-founded various collectives and coalitions, among them the institute for incongruous translation together with Ashkan Sepahvand, and kaf together with Shahab Fotouhi and Tirdad Zolghadr.Sarasija Subramanian is an artist based in Bangalore, India, where she is also the editor of Reliable Copy, a publishing house and curatorial practice for works, projects, and writing by artists. Reliable Copy was founded in 2018, and publishes books and documents, curates exhibitions and screenings, undertakes research projects, and hosts a wide variety of public programming. It is represented by the artists Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.