Gower St Indie spotlight: Kirsty Bell in Conversation with Lavinia Greenlaw

Join us for an evening with Kirsty Bell who will be discussing her new dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism, The Undercurrents (Fitzcarraldo Editions), with poet Lavinia Greenlaw.

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the west but looking east, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma.

When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell – a British-American art critic, in her mid-forties, adrift – becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxembourg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place
that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.

Kirsty Bell is a British-American writer and art critic living in Berlin. She has published widely in magazines and journals including Tate Etc. and Art in America, and was contributing editor of frieze from 2011-2021. She was awarded a Warhol Foundation Grant for her book The Artist’s House, and her essays have appeared in over seventy exhibition catalogues for major international museums and institutions such as the Whitney Museum for American Art, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Tate, UK. Her approach to writing is rooted less in her degree in Art History and English Literature from Cambridge University (1990-93) than in her hands-on experience with contemporary art production, while working in galleries and curating exhibitions.

Lavinia Greenlaw's most recent collection of poems is The Built Moment (2019). It includes the sequence about her father’s dementia that was the basis for her short film, The Sea is an Edge and an Ending (2016). Her non-fiction includes The Importance of Music to Girls (2007) and Some Answers Without Questions (2021).  Her interest in vision, optical technologies and image-making led to her being the first artist in residence at London’s Science Museum, the setting of her novel, In the City of Love’s Sleep (2018). Her immersive sound work, Audio Obscura, a study of interrupted perception, won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, and is working on a book of exploded essays about seeing and not seeing further.

Don't forget to include a copy of The Undercurrents with your ticket. Books will also be available to purchase on the evening.