This evening, the acclaimed New York-based artist Moyra Davey will be reading from her recently-published book, Index Cards (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020).

In these essays, Davey often begins with a daily encounter — with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book — and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists — Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman and Roland Barthes, among many others — in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

Following the reading there will follow a Q&A session with the writer (and tutor on the RCA’s MA Writing programme) Emily LaBarge, who recently commented in Bookforum that ‘The essays in Index Cards gather and swell with invisible force, disperse and settle like the dust Davey blows from the tops of her books.’

‘Her work is steeped in literature and theory without being deformed by contemporary iterations of such. I have a deep admiration of her as an artist, writer, thinker and person.’ - — Maggie Nelson, Artforum

‘A rich anthology of ideas, broad in its scope, and undoubtedly rewarding.’ — Daniel Baksi, The Arts Desk

‘Promises to not only celebrate but also further amplify the schisms in her art, the wonderful confusion of categories (aesthetic, theoretical, political, national, linguistic) that animate her work.’ - Kaelen Wilson Goldie, Artforum

Brilliant.’ - — Lucy Ives, Art in America

‘Her formal, deadpan, off-kilter sensibilities celebrate the worries of a writer, and she will catch you off guard with her smudged, elegant, low-tech intelligence. Just look around where you live and you will see what she sees — tiny, lovely still lifes of neglect that demand respect. It may take you a while to notice, but she’s the real thing.’ - John Waters

‘Moyra Davey is a genius of the aleatory. With this collection, perfectly titled Index Cards, hopefully Davey will finally be positioned within her rightful peers – the note-like lectures of Roland Barthes, the talks of Anne Carson, the strange essays of Susan Howe, the collage spaces of Chris Kraus, the uncanny digressions of W. G. Sebald.’ - — Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts

‘Erudite, subtle, daring thoughts about film and photography, text and image, art and life.’ - Brian Dillon

Register for zoom webinar here: https://rca-ac.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_n5GdvjYeSeyefVIvYpKgTg

Or you can join us on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/rca_writing