Writing/waiting

We cordially invite you to participate in the second Pausition in the framework of our project HOW WILL YOU ASCERTAIN TIME? – a writing workshop with Fatin Abbas and Emese Benczúr: 

In this 3-day writing workshop, we will read together creative and critical texts that unpack alternative/subversive forms of time & waiting: including queer time, Black time, speculative/sci-fi time, and use these texts as inspiration to generate our own literary reflections on time and waiting (participants are welcome to produce fictional or non-fictional texts). The second half of the 3-day workshop will approach the theme of time and waiting from a different angle: through the art of embroidery, as a means of reflecting on time in a tactile, in-the-moment, embodied form of “writing/waiting.” Through these overlapping acts of reading, writing and embroidering, participants will have the chance to explore various conceptions and approaches to temporality, and elaborate their own thinking and writing in relation to it.

Fatin Abbas i s a writer. Her novel, Ghost Season, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Freeman’s: The Best New Writing on Arrival, The Warwick Review, and Friction, and her journalism and review essays have appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, The Nation, Die Zeit, Africa is a Country, Bidoun, African Arguments and openDemocracy, among other places. She has been a Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholar (UK), a Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), and a Mophradat Writing Grant recipient (Belgium), and has been a Writer-in-Residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature (Switzerland), a Maison Baldwin St. Paul de Vence Writer-in-Residence (France), as well as an Austrian Federal Chancellery/KulturKontakt Artist-in-Residence (Austria). Born in Khartoum, Sudan and raised in New York, she gained her BA in English from the University of Cambridge, her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, the City University of New York, where she was awarded both the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize and the Miriam Weinberg Richter Award for her writing. She teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing at the Pratt Institute, New York.

Emese Benczúr is a visual artist from Hungary. She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1990 to 1996. From the beginning of her career, the conceptual artist has included texts in her work. In 1994, she “sewed” her first iconic work of that decade, an embroidered sentence repeated over and over: “Oh how I envy those who have so much leisure…”. In these works, she reinterprets traditional feminine roles, ironically paraphrasing typical women’s work. Through their status and process (embroider as a hobby), her texts question the sense of all human action and thus the teleology of art. The artist confronts spectators with the absurdity of existence, as well as her own. For the second Manifesta biennial (Luxembourg 1998) she began a long-term work on the theme of passing time, Should I Live to Be a Hundred: inscribed on prefabricated ribbons the words “day by day” as many times as there are days until she is 100 years old and every day on these same labels she embroidered I think about the future…