to utter sounds of awakening JinJin Xu Solo Exhibition Opening Ceremony

​to utter sounds of awakening

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​Exhibition dates: 10/4-10/20, Tuesdays-Fridays 4-9PM, Saturday-Sunday 2-9PM

​Opening Ceremony and Reading 10/11 3-6PM

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​How we continue to forget is

​How the indescribable is

​How the dead are named out loud is

​How a bookstore transforms into a site for the living is

​How our rememberings stutter is

​How ordinary these rituals of grief is

​How we utter to awaken to erase is

​How we continue to forget

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​“What she learned would force her to describe the indescribable,” reads Iris Chang’s obituary. to utter sounds of awakening is a responsive-site reimagining our complicity in the erasure of collective memory. Here, the site of the bookstore becomes alive with historical hauntings, tracing the grief that threads together mothers and daughters, the implicit failures of language, and our attempts to utter the unspeakable.

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​Bio:

​JinJin Xu’s (b. 1994 Shanghai, based in Macau and New York) docu-poetics practice interrogates mis/remembrance and self/erasure, bearing a poetics of witness to buried soundscapes, censored memories, and the hauntings within our most intimate relationships.

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​JinJin is the winner of Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, she has received honors from Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Press, Best New Poets, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, the Flaherty, Munich Autovision Festival, and more. In 2023, she was named by Forbes China as one of the “100 Most Influential Chinese.”

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​Solo shows include the How Art Museum (Shanghai), Butter Room (Macao); select group shows: the Macao International Art Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Beijing Sound Art Museum, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, and the Harun Farocki Institute.

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​JinJin’s debut poetry chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife was named by the New York Times as “a must-read when visiting Shanghai.” She received her MFA from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow; she is currently the Moving Image Diversity Fellow at Bard College, New York.