#callforthedead

[subwaybookreview]

Peter: “This is le Carré’s first novel and the first time he introduces George Smiley. I’ve read many of his books and I love him. His use of language is beautiful, his characters are well developed, and it’s a murky world he writes about, one that is not black and white. I find that to be an honest view of the world. Right now, we’re on our way to see my mother who is in assisted living. We’re from New York but live in LA. We’re only here for 24-hours to attend a friend’s surprise party. I love living in LA. Catherine misses New York more than I do.” Catherine: “What I miss about New York is that I used to read way more – especially on the subway. I just started Exit West and am only 100 pages in, but within the first chapter I knew it I would love it. You know when you feel like hugging a book? That’s what this one feels like.” #JohnleCarre #CallForTheDead #ExitWest #MohsinHamid / @theubc for #subwaybookreview #newyork 🗽 (at 96th Street (Second Avenue Subway))

[wolfquilting]

This is another book that came up on my “All time best mystery books” search. It was written in 1961 and is the first one in the George Smiley series. I’m not usually a huge spy book reader, but this one intrigued me so I’ll prob grab the next one at some point! Do you have a favorite LeCarre book? . . . #callforthedead #johnlecarre #whatkristyisreading #books #bookstagram #book #audiobook #bookreview #bookrecommendation #quiltsandbooks (at Kirkland, Washington) https://www.instagram.com/p/CZ8L7t6lJpi/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hemanchong]

In #CallForTheDead (2020)—83 black-and-white scans of pages from the eponymous #1961 novel by #JohnLeCarré, screen-printed on linen and hung in a grid-like formation in a long, white-walled gallery—Chong takes his experiments with text into new territory. The #ColdWar fantasies of the mid-century #spygenre might here be read as a comment on #decoloniality: the novel was written while #LeCarré was working as a spy for #MI6—which had a regional outpost in #Singapore. Chong has intervened in this text by #redacting everything but the verbs: “#killed […] #fired […] #remembered […] #fought,” reads one cluster. Among the most impactful yet #enigmatic works in the show, the prints have an #ambiguous quality, at once #pictorial and #linguistic, #physical and seemingly #immaterial. Chong is a writer as well as an artist, and his engagement with historical, political, fictional, and philosophical texts—as indicated here—point to an interest in how knowledge and power are constructed through the interplay of images and words. As the repeated pages in Call for the Dead indicate, the grid—with its flattened, geometric, and ordered structure—is a motif of this exhibition. In the 2018 photo series “#ForeignAffairs,” for instance, Chong has photographed the back entrances of embassies and printed them in a grid formation on canvases and on curtains, where regimented sequences of images depict windows, fences, doors, mirrors, gates, brick walls, and barbed wire overgrown with plants. Out of these repetitions and variations emerges the sense of an architectural type: the artist here seems interested in bringing to light how the #mythical function of embassies, as symbols of #protection and #power, are physically constituted. Text by @chris.han2021 Published by @art.agenda_ #HemanChong @stpi_gallery #stpiGallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CR64SRLlTjS/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hemanchong]

I’m participating in @artbasel’s OVR: Portals co-curated by @distantatlas #ChristinaLi! I’ll be speaking about two of my works #ForeignAffairs and #CallForTheDead this Thursday at 7 pm Singapore time. The link is in my stories. See you! Please come! “Foreign Affairs is a series of banal photographs of embassy backdoors. The systematic repetition of images simultaneously recalls a cinematic frame and the omnipresence of the surveillance camera that watches nothing and everything. As a literal and cumulative representation of embassy backdoors, each image of a backdoor can be read as infrastructural, making apparent the very form of the non-descript embassy backdoor and its component parts: greenery as camouflage, the lone face of a strategically positioned surveillance camera, the additional lock or additional gates. These banal representations are the threshold of the exceptional space of the embassy, which in and of itself is the physical manifestation of an agreement between two states of respective sovereignty.” Text by @kat_ditzig (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CQJqfgrlece/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hemanchong]

Last two weekends to see my fucking awesome show @stpi_gallery that’s curated by @kat_ditzig. #PeaceProsperityAndFriendshipWithAllNations brings a number of provocations regarding international #diplomacy, #culturalcapital and the #pandemic into one space. It’s really worth having a look. Or two. Fuck, bring your kids to it. Why not. Seen here is a new work #CallForTheDead where I had #redacted the entire #novel of the same name by #JohnLeCarre, leaving only behind the verbs, forming a landscape of emptied out #actions. Please go check it out before it ends 18 April. #HemanChong #StpiGallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CNY6oLUl3f9/?igshid=b88kf1rqy905

[hemanchong]

I am currently utilising #JohnLeCarre’s first #novel from #1961, #CallForTheDead, as raw material for a new installation that I’ll exhibit next February @stpi_gallery. This is literally a #coldwar classic. I love that he wrote it while still working as a secret agent for #MI6 (he only quit his job after his third novel became a #bestseller... such a businessman...), and where his now #infamous character #GeorgeSmiley first appears. #Smiley is nothing like the #spies we encounter in the #cinema. The polar opposite of #JamesBond. I can’t really tell you more but I’m really enjoying making this piece as it requires me to read the novel in a completely different way from how I have been reading any novel. #HemanChong #bookstagram #booksbooksbooks #bookstagrammer #booknerd #booksofinstagram #bookaddict #bookaddict (at Books Kinokuniya) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEHg-g2lpYZ/?igshid=10kg7cgw1r6zd

[culturespy]

One down, four to go. This is my first book for the @palatinelibrary Summer Reading Program. I read it in high school and remembered it more as a murder mystery than a spy novel, but it is both things equally. Finishing this allowed me to listen to the latest Spybrary podcast, which is a deep dive into this, le Carre's first novel. #johnlecarre #callforthedead #georgesmiley #spynovels #spyfiction #summerreading