Publications (2025)

April 08, 2025

Publications (2025)

Autobiography of a Performance (the87press): October 2025

This forthcoming book, written and dreamed with dramaturg+ Blue Pieta, has just been announced on Instagram by the87press.

"Established in 2018, the87press is an Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse led publishing collective and events curator in South London. We prioritize modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and environmentalism in our print publications of poetry, fiction, and essays." -- https://www.the87press.co.uk/about-us

Pre-order link:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/autobiography-of-a-performance/bhanu-kapil/blue-pieta/9781068751592

"This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta, a multidisciplinary artist, director, dramaturg and performer and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025. A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork). This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds. Both writers also change roles during the course of a performance, a mode of autobiography that most closely resembles mutation. A dramaturg is also an artist, a dancer, the poet of the work. A poet stands up from the table where they are seated to enter the domain of gesture and movement. Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can't be written, but only staged."

This Long Century (Speciwomen)

A pamphlet that appears in a box set. Perhaps ten years ago, I wrote about the sun as a thoroughfare, a conduit, something that opens and closes, on my blog. I submitted a blog entry (typed up, with an image of Olafur Elliason's Tate turbine-sun) to This Long Century, a durational project, long ago long ago. Now here is the box set. A blog entry is now a pamphlet, my preferred form. I think I love it. I think this is how I want the novel to be, a succession of pamphlets. Also, who is Banu Cennetoğlu?

RENEWAL (Prototype Press)

Beautiful broadsides of paragraphs, poems, by -- writers/artists. Mine is an Incubation chunk.

Autobiography on 40 Scraps of Paper

https://www.berliner-kuenstlerprogramm.de/en/events/for-real-for-real/

Currently installed as part of a group show at daadgalerie in Berlin. Open the makeshift envelope and there they are, the scraps, formulated from the brown and white envelopes that arrive every day, every day, every day, with requests for payment or acknowledgment of the same.

The curators punched holes in the top left hand corner and connected them with string. I thought it would be loose-leaf, and so I am adapting to the image of the book as an entity. Some part of me wants the potential of the crumple, the discarded page, as a preference. Harder to do that now.

Conversation with Precious Okoyomon and Christina Sharpe + Existential Detective Questionaire (catalogue contribution, Precious Okoyomon's One Either Loves Oneself or Knows Oneself, Kunsthaus Bregenz):

https://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/publikationen

Poem for a Non-Genetic Descendant in Cormorant Garamond (illustrated by Haifei Yuan)

This beautiful book is not for sale. It was created as part of a collaboration between local poets and design students at Anglia Ruskin University. I was so moved by Haifei Yuan's cormorant, which is the cormorant I often see on the wooden platform in the middle of the pond behind the Eddington Sainsbury's in Cambridge, on walks with my mother. Sometimes you write a poem on a walk, in your mind, not knowing it will take another form. I believe there is an opening or reading on June 21st, but that is my birthday and I am already committed to reading a poem about the sun from a pulpit (with a triangle)!

Prose-poem written for Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority

https://www.faber.co.uk/journal/faber-unveils-vital-new-anthology-of-nature-poetry-from-global-majority-writers/

Tate Magazine: Poem written [for] [near] [beneath] Bharti Kher’s Weather painting

https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-65-spring-2025/poem-written-for-near-beneath-bharti-khers-weather-painting

Kathy Acker's Desk: Poem written for Zurich University of the Arts (Degree Publication, OBITUARY)

"The ATLAS studio in Zurich is handling our graphic design, we’ll print on book-paper in color size 17x24cm and we will be printing 300 copies of the publication."

This is the email I sent to the editor, in lieu of a photo of the publication itself, which I have not received yet:

"Dear [ ],

I had a memory of seeing Jean Genet's obituary taped to the side of Kathy Acker's desk.

In Los Angeles.

Here it is.

Thank you for your beautiful words, and wishes, from ZHdK.

Your deadline is coming up. I am very busy after tomorrow, and so I have written this/recomposed this -- fast.

Would you like it?

Are you a poet too?

I am not sure what a poet is in this moment.

Bhanu."

An essay on mutation for Klima's Mutabilities edition