Sun with Teeth or, A Literature Beyond the Book

At this event Quinn Latimer reads from her novel-in-progress, a kind of poetics of exposure. Her project is about the violence of language and the unreality of images, about documentary signatures and evidentiary aesthetics, about the artifice necessary to invoke what is real and true. It raises the question: Is the novel real? Certainly, the desire to understand its work on the world as some fiction is. Ranging between the I of the confessional and the eye of the observational – that is, between the entanglement of literary and moving-image technologies, especially in the context of transnational political movements – Latimer’s novel records the transition between language and image, poetics and politics, our social worlds and death cults of violence.

Sun with Teeth is built around a series of so-called Rome Reports – by Ingeborg Bachmann, Jacques Lacan and the UN Genocide Convention, among others – and is itself its own Rome Report, written from the present but reaching back into the near and distant past. Throughout is a concern with the production of images: how they are made and how they move; their work as art or surveillance, profit or violence. The novel attempts a new kind of radical realism, both in the language in which it might be constructed and that which will necessarily exceed it.

Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, editor, and occasional curator. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2013), and Rumored Animals (2012). Her writings have appeared widely in Artforum, The Paris Review, The White Review, and Texte zur Kunst, and in many critical anthologies and artist monographs.

She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14, in Athens and Kassel, and is the editor and coeditor of numerous books, including SIREN (some poetics) (2024), Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021), Simone Forti: The Bear in the Mirror (2019), and The documenta 14 Reader (2017).

She recently curated the exhibition SIREN (some poetics), which explored technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, at Amant, New York, and Perpetual Language: Patricia L. Boyd and Na Mira, made under the signs and spirits of Roland Barthes and Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, at Croy Nielsen, in Vienna.

Her writings and readings have been featured widely, including at REDCAT, Los Angeles; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Radio Athènes, Athens; the Poetry Project, New York; the Venice Architecture Biennale; and Sharjah Biennial 13. She is Head of the MA at the Institut Kunst Gender Natur HGK FHNW Basel, where she is also a PhD candidate.