On 24th of October starting at 5pm you are welcome to join us for Publics Talk by writer and artist Chris Kraus who is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. Followed by the talk, PUBLICS host a critical writing workshop aimed at anyone writing about art, and would like to share their work with Kraus. Please see below for further information and instructions on how to submit your work.

In addition to the talk PUBLICS has co-organized a Baltic tour of the entire selection of Chris Kraus’s films made between 1982-1995. These works range widely in form, feeling, and length. Each materializes from the meeting of desire and contingency, where the personal, political and practical contend with one another. The films are on view at PUBLICS between 24–28 Oct and touring to Latvian Center for Contemporary Art (LCCA), Riga (1–2 Nov 2018) & Index, Stockholm (31 May–8 Sept 2019). What I couldn’t write: Chris Kraus’ Films from 1982-1995 on tour has been organised by PUBLICS in collaboration with Château Shatto, Los Angeles.

Chris Kraus: Kelly Lake Store
Publics Talk
24 Oct 2018, 5–7PM

Moving from an abandoned convenience store in northern Minnesota, to an artist-run gallery in the working class Puerto Nuevo neighborhood of Mexicali, Chris Kraus talks about the facts and possibilities of artistic work in off-the-grid locales, outside of metropolitan centers.  As she argues in her new essay collection, “Social Practices” the genre of that name – which has come to describe the forarys of well-meaning artist into practical realms like landscape design and education, is misleading. Like everything else, art will always be transactional. Kraus’s new book “Social Practices” will also be available for purchase at PUBLICS on the evening at a discounted launch price.

Master Class: In Personal & Critical Writing
25 Oct 2018, 4–7PM

This 3-hour class is aimed at anyone who has work-in-progress that they’d like to discuss in a workshop setting. Visiting writer and critic Chris Kraus will discuss each participant’s submitted work in detail, and participants will exchange views and ideas with each other. The class can hold maximum 8 participants and is free of charge.

Please submit work between 2-15 pages in length (these pages may be excerpts from a longer work) and be prepared to read the work of other participants before the workshop. Send your work to: eliisa.suvanto@publics.fi. Deadline: 10 Oct 2018

What I couldn’t write: Chris Kraus’ Films from 1982-1995 on tour
25–28 Oct 2018, 11AM–4PM
Opening reception 24 Oct 2018, 7–9PM

PUBLICS is proud to announce the first exhibition in Europe of the complete collection of Chris Kraus’ films alongside a unique set of printed material. Chris Kraus made nine films between 1982 and 1995, the entirety of her output in this medium. What courses through each of these distinct films is a current of visions, refrains, genre, nostalgia, libido, sound, image and impulse. These films convey their maker’s process of sublimation and also an undoing of that same process. Kraus’ productions are necessarily experimental. Recurrently, she considers existing formats – the novel, the biography, the manifesto, the documentary, the trailer, the short and feature-length film – and retools them. The process of finding a process often becomes subject matter rendered visible in the work. Scripted dialogue and improvised exchanges share equal status. Footage might be captured on an involuntary whim, or be the consequence of assiduous planning.

The cohabitation of what is deemed high and cognitive, with what is deemed base and sentimental, takes full effect in her four novels and extends to the manner with which she considers artists and confronts their work in her critical writing. Yet this influential space that Kraus established – where the private and public modes of experience meddle with one another – is initiated in these nine films, each intoxicated and equipped with heady thinking and thick atmosphere.

Kraus’ work is now decisively inscribed in the DNA of contemporary cultural thought and In Order to Pass (1982), Terrorists in Love (1983), Foolproof Illusion (1986), Voyage to Rodez (1986), How to Shoot a Crime (1987), The Golden Bowl or Repression (1984-88), Traveling at Night (1990), Sadness at Leaving (1992), and Gravity and Grace (1995) form the foundation of this impactful contribution.