Reaching Out: Episode 2 - Gladstone Gallery

Reaching Out: Anicka Yi

April 2, 2020

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Installation view of Anicka Yi: We Have Never Been Individual at Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, 2019 and portrait of Anicka Yi

This week, we connect with Anicka Yi, who was recently announced as the next artist to transform Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for their prestigious Hyundai Commission. Yi, who took over our Instagram account last week, shares some of the texts and songs that have kept her busy and inspired during this period of physical isolation.

"My reading list is a direct download of source material for my studio practice research. This particular edit reflects what I hope will help to address some of the pressing issues/concepts of this Covid-19 moment. When I am confused, lonely, scared, threatened, I turn to books."

Biography & Autobiography

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson
GoatMan by Thomas Thwaites

Cultural Anthropology

Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman

Soft Subversions by Félix Guattari

Debt: The first 500 Years by David Graeber
The Multispecies Salon by Eben Kirksey
Thoughtful Foragers: A Study of Prehistoric Decision Making (New Studies In Archaeology) by Steven J. Mithen
After Ethnos by Tobias Rees

History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Homo Sacer by Giorgio Agamben
Futurability by Franco "Bifo" Berardi
The Social Amoebae by John Tyler Bonner
Regenesis by George Church and Ed Regis
Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism and Technoscience by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip
Alien Ocean by Stefan Helmreich
Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan
The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice and Knowledge After The Genome by Jenny Reardon
Probably Approximately Correct by Leslie Valiant

Poetry & Drama

Actual Air by David Berman
The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus

Science Fiction

Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Tentacle by Rita Indiana
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
The Need by Helen Phillips
Red Mars by Ki Stanley Robinson
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
Oval by Elvia Wilk

Transdisciplinary Non-Fiction

Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl
Meeting The Universe Halfway by Karen Barad
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
Animacies by Mel Chen
Females by Andrea Long Chu
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
Volatile Bodies by Elizabeth Grosz
Staying With The Trouble by Donna Haraway
The Age of Extremes by Eric Hobsbawm
The Sentient Machine by Amir Husain
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil
How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
The Great Leveler : Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World by Walter Scheidel
The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman
Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets
Art of Living On A Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt
Pirate Utopias by Peter Lamborn Wilson

"This Spotify playlist is largely melancholic, but the beauty of melancholia is that it's a kind of sadness with a slight smile."