Performance artist, poet, writer Gabrielle Civil to present at KU

LAWRENCE — Supported by the Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture, performance artist Gabrielle Civil will visit the University of Kansas on Feb. 13. While at KU, Civil will perform her latest work, “The Déjà Vu,” at 6 p.m. in the Forum in Marvin Hall. The performance is free and open to the public.

During her visit, she also will host a student writing workshop in conjunction with ENGL 352, taught by Megan Kaminski, associate professor of English.

Civil is a Black feminist performance artist, poet and writer, originally from Detroit. She has premiered 50 performance artworks around the world. Her performance memoirs include “The Déjà Vu,” “Swallow the Fish,” “Experiments in Joy,” “(Ghost Gestures )” and “In and Out of Place” Through her work, Civil says, her “aim is to open up space.” Among her praxes are embodied remembering.

“Gabrielle Civil’s poetry, performance and scholarship open up space for dreaming liberatory futures, re-visioning the past and seeing ourselves anew,” Kaminski said. “In sharing her practices as a socially engaged artist and scholar, her workshop will help students to see the potency in their own writing to inspire and guide us collectively towards understanding our present moment and towards creating the worlds that we long for.”

Currently, Civil teaches graduate-level creative writing and undergraduate-level critical studies at the California Institute of the Arts. Her art writing has appeared in The Third Rail, Art21, Small Axe and Obsidian. Her essays and translations have appeared in Something on Paper, Aster(ix) and Two Lines. Her memoir in performance art “Swallow the Fish” was named by Entropy as a best nonfiction book of 2017. Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, her most recent book, “The Déjà Vu,” activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech and lyric essay into performance memoir.

In addition to the Richard W. Gunn Memorial Lecture fund, Civil’s visit is supported by The Commons; the KU departments of English, African & African-American Studies, Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Visual Art; the History of Black Writing (HBW); the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity; the Office of Multicultural Affairs; the School of Architecture & Design and the J. Wayne & Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.