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Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study of Hervé Guibert (Columbia University Press). Forthcoming in Summer 2023 from Riverhead is The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, as well as Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press in early 2024. ‘Insekt’ is part of an in-progress work of fiction, Realisms. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Articles Available Online


Insekt or large verminous thing

Fiction

September 2022

Kate Zambreno

Fiction

September 2022

Around dusk one evening in March, I went out back to the small garage, and switched on my small square of artificial light at...

Feature

January 2018

Accumulations (Appendix F)

Kate Zambreno

Feature

January 2018

I’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of...

Luke Hart’s Wall, recently on display at London’s William Benington Gallery, is a single, large-scale sculpture composed of a series of steel tubes held together by orange polyurethane joints The tubes at the base of the sculpture are welded together into an elongated S-shape, such that the work curves diagonally across the gallery floor, forcing the viewer to walk around it The welded base also provides the stability necessary for the rest of the sculpture to remain flexible The polyurethane joints make the work to some degree elastic, determining and limiting its movements   Wall, then, is not a wall in the conventional sense of the term The work’s lattice or weave-like structure articulates empty space It is a wall which, like a net, is mostly made up of holes And while the sculpture divides the gallery, setting a porous boundary between the spectator and the world, there is little difference between what is found on one side of the wall and what is found on the other There are further elements of the sculpture that add to its ambiguous status The polyurethane joints, for instance, work to hold the structure together, but there is also a tactile, almost fetishistic quality to the orange rubber, which looks like a tangle of muscle sinew This inscribes the sculpture in a bodily register and lends the work an anthropomorphic quality Like all elastic structures, moreover, Wall quickly settles into a particular position, while also remaining in a state of potential motion The way in which the sculpture pulls itself downwards dramatises its susceptibility to the laws of gravity Entropy might be too strong a word for this movement, but there is an unexpected sense of precarity and instability to the work, a sense that it might teeter over under its own dead weight   In a recent conversation, Hart explained that for him one of the most important aspects of Wall is its functionality At first the word seemed a misnomer It is true that, like a wall, the sculpture gets in the way, filling much of the gallery space, but otherwise its resemblance to

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno

Contributor

August 2014

Kate Zambreno is the author most recently of Drifts (Riverhead) and To Write As If Already Dead, a study...

Heroines

feature

March 2013

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like...

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feature

February 2011

Red Shirts in Thailand

Sam Brown

feature

February 2011

The closest I had ever come to a protest was in 2003, in Bangkok, when I tried and failed...

poetry

May 2015

Europe

Kirill Medvedev

TR. Keith Gessen

poetry

May 2015

I’m riding the bus with a group of athletes from some provincial town they’re going to a competition in...

poetry

December 2011

Return After Earthquake

Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

although left for months my house is still standing here on terra firma branches broken by snow fallen into...

 

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