The following presentations were recorded at An Airing of Grievances on July 19, 2018. Rahel Aima, Wo Chan, Marwa Helal, Devin Kenny, Jennifer Krasinski, and Sarah Resnick, along with Triple Canopy editors Matthew Shen Goodman and Emily Wang, shared works of art, literature, film, and music marked by forms of resentment they found to be pleasurable, validating, even hopeful.
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Triple Canopy is pleased to present An Airing of Grievances: an occasion to share and celebrate resentment as channeled through art, writing, song, and film. Resentment typically is cast as the sole province of cis-het white American masculinity, as well as something inherently excessive, selfish, and irresponsible. This event seeks to expand our understanding of the feeling, and to ask how and why we might express (rather than repress) our resentment. Participants will present a variety of works that are marked by forms of resentment that they find to be pleasurable, even hopeful; in airing of these grievances, they’ll try to find joy both in the airing and the grievance.
Participants include Rahel Aima, Wo Chan, Devin Kenny, Jennifer Krasinski, Marwa Helal, and Sarah Resnick. The editors of Resentment, Matthew Shen Goodman and Emily Wang, will introduce the issue and air their own grievances.
An Airing of Grievances is part of Resentment, an issue devoted to reclaiming—if not recuperating—resentment, especially as harbored by those who are used to fits of anger and bitterness being indicted as unproductive, petty, selfish, even pathological.
Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. In order to ensure that events are accessible and comfortable, we’ll open the doors at 6:30 p.m. and strictly limit admittance to our legal capacity. Please check Triple Canopy’s Facebook and Twitter accounts for updates, as we’ll indicate if events are sold out.
Triple Canopy’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have specific questions about access, please write at least three days before the event and we will make every effort to accommodate you.
- Rahel Aima is a writer and critic based in Brooklyn, the Special Projects editor at New Inquiry and former founding editor of THE STATE. She is currently working on a book about color and futurity.
- Wo Chan is a queer poet and drag performer. They are the author of the chapbook ORDER THE WORLD, MOM (Belladonna) and have received honors from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a standing member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, they have performed at venues including MOMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in New York, where they are an MFA Candidate in Poetry at New York University.
- Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. Her work has appeared in Apogee, Hyperallergic, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. She is the author of I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017) and Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019). Helal is the winner of BOMB’s 2016 poetry contest and has been awarded fellowships from Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, and Cave Canem. She has presented her work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Brooklyn Museum. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, Helal currently lives in Brooklyn.
- Devin Kenny is an artist living in Houston. Born in 1987 and online since childhood, he has witnessed the shift from web 1.0 to the “social internet” of web 2.0 to today’s paradigm. His work is colored by this transition. Using sculpture, video, photography, text, performance, music, and painting, his practice engages questions of identity construction and the aesthetics developed in networks: from quilt codes allegedly used on the Underground Railroad to memes and viral media. Raised on the south side of Chicago, Kenny relocated to New York to study at Cooper Union. He has participated in the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the summer program at SOMA in Mexico City, the Whitney Independent Study Program, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His performances have been presented at art and music venues in the United States and internationally, including Biquini Wax (Mexico City), Artspace Auckland, REDCAT (Los Angeles), MoMA PS1 (New York City), the Julia Stoschek Collection (Berlin), and the Glue Factory (Glasgow).
- Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic and a senior editor at Artforum.
- Sarah Resnick has published in n+1, Bookforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Triple Canopy, where she was previously an editor. Her writing was selected for 2017’s Best American Essays and for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York.
- Matthew Shen Goodman is a Triple Canopy senior editor. He writes and makes music.
- Emily Wang is a writer and editor. She is a senior editor at Triple Canopy.