September 30, 2007

Prosody Castle 3.2: Urban Distant
featuring Meg Hamill!
Thurs., Oct. 11th 8pm
The Gallery of Urban Art
1746 13th St. (@Wood), Deep West Oakland

The second installment of Prosody Castle's mini-series of urban explorations takes us to the blistered edge of U.S. imperialism in the distant cities of Baghdad, Sammara, Kirkuk, Mosul, Iraq. Meg Hamill's new work, Death Notices, attempts what seems impossible, to encounter, viscerally and exhaustively, the Iraq of the occupation. As historically our knowledge and our literature of distant places has come from conquest, Hamill's work gives us a glimpse into the consequent, but necessarily only a glimpse: "I have no idea how many suicide bombers have exploded themselves into anonymous fireballs because some information, even in this age of information abundance, is still very difficult to find. I can’t write that many obituaries, though I’m beginning to understand why I must. The fact that there are 367, 294 Iraqi civilians who we couldn’t say are alive or dead right now is indicative of both the impossibility and the urgency of this project." Prosody Castle is pleased and privileged to get this glimpse, 10,000 miles away, in Oakland, Ca.