Chapbook launch: obsequies by manuel arturo abreu

Join us on May 2 at 7 pm to celebrate the launch of manuel arturo abreu’s new chapbook, obsequies. Reading alongside abreu are Laura Camila Medina and Bogosi Sekhukhuni. abreu will also play some piano. 

Laura Camila Medina is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogota, Colombia and raised in Orlando, FL. She bases her practice around uprooting and migration as a response to personal, cultural, and historical research. Medina is constantly inspired by her memories of home, her mother’s arepas, and her father’s soundtracks. She earned a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently based in Portland, OR.

Bogosi Sekhukhuni (b. 1991, Johannesburg) describes himself as a ‘lightworker’. He studied at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He has exhibited at the New Museum (NYC), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the 2017 African Biennale of Photography (Bamako), LUMA Westbau (Zürich), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Steve Turner Contemporary (LA), the 2nd Kampala Biennale, the 9th Berlin Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Tate Modern (London), MoMA Warsaw, and locally in Cape Town at Stevenson and Whatiftheworld, etc. Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the ‘tech-health artist group’ NTU and has worked with the CUSS Group collective. His most recent project is a ‘visual culture bank and research gang’ called Open Time Coven, which investigates ’emergent technologies and repressed African spiritual philosophies’.

manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet/artist from the Bronx. They live/work in a garage in southeast Portland, and received their BA in Linguistics (Reed College, 2014). They use what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. Recent exhibitions, projects, and discourse at AB Lobby Gallery (PSU, Portland), Yaby (Madrid), MoMA and MoMA PS1 (NYC), NCAD Gallery (Dublin), AA|LA Gallery (Los Angeles), Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Veronica (Seattle), Rhizome and the New Museum (online), and locally in Portland at the Art Gym, Yale Union, Open Signal Portland Community Media Center, S1, etc. abreu wrote two books of poetry (List of Consonants and transtrender) and one book of critical art writing, Incalculable Loss (Institute for New Connotative Action Press, 2018). abreu composes club-feasible worship music as Tabor Dark, and co-facilitates home school, a free pop-up art school in Portland, OR.