Join artist Abbra Kotlarczyk and poet Autumn Royal for an afternoon of spoken performance, presenting poetic and auto-fictive texts central to the exhibition reading room anti-aria for ater-. The performance will draw out key themes from the exhibition, activating an operatic and dialogic response to the emotional terrain of gendered and familial experience, set against the climatic intensities of a fuel-loaded planet.

This exhibition is the final instalment in a three-part series of exhibition reading rooms by artist Abbra Kotlarczyk that are centred around genealogy, familial history, material and elemental kinships, and queer modes of reading and resistance.

anti-aria for ater- draws from, while also representing an operatic break with, the paternal line of its previous two iterations. The exhibition centres feminist and autobiographical psychogeographies of fire as they intersect with the history and architecture of the gallery’s incinerator, known colloquially as ‘The Destructor’. The exhibition title draws on the etymology of the root word ‘ater’ meaning fire (blackened by) and ‘aria’ meaning air (a melody for a single voice). It exists as an anti-proposition for solo expressions of creation—familial, artistic and otherwise—drawing on the pyrotechnical tensions implicit in extinction and extermination, rebirth and rejuvenation.

Envisioned as an expanded publication, this three-chapter ‘book’ cycles back to its beginning to round out with a coda, reflecting the adjacencies of water to fire in the afterlives of the artist’s grandparents and the site of the gallery/incinerator itself.

Image: Portrait of the artist's mother as 'Chop Shop' breastfeeding the artist, 1984. Courtesy the artist.