Presented by Infinity Land Press
Jeremy Reed & Martin Bladh
EXHIBITION: Weds 12th to Weds 19th APR; 12 – 6pm
LAUNCH + MULTIMEDIA EVENT: Tues 11th APR, 7:30pm
Darkleaks - The Ripper Genome is a unique collaboration between Jeremy Reed and Martin Bladh that revisits the Jack the Ripper case from a brave new angle. Reed and Bladh are preoccupied less with who Jack the Ripper was than with who he became, his compulsions genetically scrambled into amalgams of hardwired obsession that re-manifest themselves in the figures of Ballard, Burroughs, Bacon, Peter Christopherson and Valerie Solanas, as though history were being driven on by the haywire velocity of Lou Reed's Metal M achine Music, backfiring for a few instants into the poetry of Baudelaire but always centrifuged into the contemporary moment. The figure of Jack the Ripper disintegrates into multiple entities of obsessional creativity and murderous fixations, across London's wastelanded, scorchearthed streets, only navigable via the blood-spurted vectors emitted from that multiplied figure's victims.
The evening will include readings from both authors accompanied by a sound installation by Karolina Urbaniak and an exhibition of Martin Bladh’s collages which will run till Wednesday 19th April.
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Jeremy Reed The author of over forty books of award-winning poetry, fiction and non-fiction Jeremy Reed is a long standing icon to the underground for his uncompromising, distinctly London-flavoured work, saturated in an imagination JG Ballard called 'almost extraterrestrial in its talent.' Writing on the edges of society Reed consistently celebrates the generic outlaw as anti-hero. His recent non-fiction books The Dilly: A Secret History of Piccadilly Rent Boys, Waiting For The Man: The Life and Career of Lou Reed, the poetry collections Piccadilly Bongo, Sooner or Later Frank and Voodoo Excess, and the novel Here Comes The Nice, all confirm Pete Doherty's estimation of Reed as 'a legend, what more can you fucking ask?' He performs with the Ginger Light and wrote the libretto to Marc Almond's pop operetta Against Nature (2015).
Martin Bladh Martin Bladh (1976-) is a Swedish-born artist of multiple mediums. His work lays bare themes of violence, obsession, fantasy, domination, submission and narcissism. Bladh is a founding member of the post-industrial band IRM, the musical avant-garde unit Skin Area and co-founder of the publishing company Infinity Land Press. His other books include To Putrefaction, Qualis Artifex Pereo, DES, and The Hurtin' Club. He lives and works in London.