YAK! Reading Group 28th January

Join Alex Stubbs on the 28th January 6 -8pm for a collaborative reading group session.

In our next YAK! Collaborative Reading Group, we'll be reading scenes from Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and Lynn Nottage's Sweat to consider the generational representations of working class identity. Using plays as our inspiration, we'll explore scene setting and dreamscapes through a writing activity, to immerse ourselves in familiar and unfamiliar landscapes.

Sign up here

Materials to be sent to sign ups in advance of the 28th.

About YAK!

YAK! is an open and communal reading group exploring radical histories through conversation and text. Journeying into worlds of protest, art, and writing, we take inspiration from poetry, prose, letters, journals, speeches, and plays to better understand those that came before us and the world we live in today.

YAK! is meant as a forum through which our artistic practices are read, and seeks to offer clarity, introspection, and dialogue for understanding the processes and praxis of our art making. It is a nomadic reading group, facilitating conversations in towns and cities across the UK, hosted in non-institutional spaces. 

In the act of hosting this group, I present the group with a series of exploratory questions, copies of the texts, and related images. Avoiding didactic approaches to facilitation, YAK! is built around free and open conversation led by the interests and knowledge of the group assembled. 

YAK! is a collaborative exercise, its themes and topics planned in conversation with the host of the space it is situated in, to respond appropriately to the moment.

About Alexander

Alexander is the curator of the nomadic reading group project, YAK!, an open and communal reading group exploring radical histories through conversation and text. Alexander is also the curator of Hull Zine Library, an open-source library collecting the works of zine artists and self-publishers across the UK and abroad. .

He is a writer and curator based in Hull. Working primarily in text-based practice, his writing explores the world through imaginary landscapes in order to deconstruct and decode memory, grief, and language. Concerned with the political and social power of self publishing, and the ways in which text and image archives can be reanimated in new contexts, Alexander uses books, zines, and digital platforms to present his work physically. Alexander currently publishes a regular Substack column, SPECTATE, an ongoing series of flash essays recording intimate experiences and research, and his writing has also been published in Art Review, Aesthetica, and Corridor 8. His latest self-publication, I came home, was published as part of a residency at Hull Artist Research Initiative in Summer 2024.