Para Fictions

What kind of a reader does an artist make? This publication marks the conclusion of Para Fictions, a two-year commissioning series in which ten artists -Dineo Seshee Bopape, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Mark Geffriaud, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Laure Prouvost, Oscar Santillan, Lucy Skaer, and Rayyane Tabet- responded to works of literary fiction. Deploying strategies of allusion, vandalism, mistranslation and appropriation, the participating artists approached texts by writers such as Bessie Head, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Virginia Woolf. In the publication, invited writers and curators respond to each work, completing a circle between text and object, to trace the lines of literary affiliation and tease the productive tensions that arise between a source material and its reinscription.