Launch: Montez Press Interjection Calendar 010
Hosted by Rhea Dillon

Friday, May 23, 2025, 7:30pm

Cover of Interjection Calendar 010 (Montez Press 2025)

Join Montez Press and Rhea Dillon for an evening of readings to celebrate the launch of the Interjection Calendar 010. Hosted by guest editor Rhea Dillon, the program will feature reading by contributors, including Octavia Bürgel, Cheryl Clarke, and Yi Wei.

About the Interjection Calendar

The Interjection Calendar is a project devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on the Montez Press website. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain. Contributors to issue 10 include: Mayra A.Rodríguez Castro, raphaëlle red, Oisín Roberts, Issy Wood, Tiana Reid, Taha Afefe, Octavia Bürgel, Ladin Awad, Abiba Coulibaly, Ryan C. Clarke, Yi Wei, and Cheryl Clarke.

About the readers

Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer, and poet based in London. Dillon works across sculpture, painting, olfaction, and wide-ranging materials to articulate an aesthetic of diasporic Blackness grounded in a postcolonial nonbeing. Her charged exhibitions and writing use poet(h)ics, abstraction, and everyday objects to produce distinctive arrangements of sense and affect. Dillon’s work is a long intergenerational study that connects to her ancestors through her eclectic armory and experimentation with different forms. Dillon’s first institutional solo exhibition An Alterable Terrain was recently held at Tate Britain as part of the Art Now series. To accompany this exhibition, a book of the same title was edited by her and published by Tate Publishing in 2024. In 2021 the artist presented Catgut – The Opera as part of Park Nights at the Serpentine Pavilion, and a publication of the same title was published in 2023 by Worms Publishing. Recent solo and group exhibitions from 2024 include Fractal Being at Cordova, Barcelona; Gestural Poetics at Soft Opening at Paul Soto, Los Angeles; Air de Repos (Breathwork) at Capc Bordeaux; Tituba, qui pour nous protéger? at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Conversations at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Each now, is the time, the space at Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore; and Janus at Berggruen Arts & Culture in partnership with The Kitchen, Palazzo Diedo, Venice. She is an Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program 2024/2025 in New York.

Octavia Bürgel is a writer, editor, and photographer, based between Berlin and New York. Her work is concerned with the representational failures of photography and performances of the self. Bürgel has read and performed her work at such institutions as the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, CCA Berlin and Schirn Kunsthalle. She has also contributed texts and reflections to artist monographs including Liz Collins: Motherlode (Hirmer, 2025), Diamond Stingily: Orgasms Happened Here (52 Walker, 2025) and Remembering Songs (PAN, 2023), as well as the publications Flash Art, Frieze and 032c. 

Poet, critic, and activist Cheryl Clarke was born in Washington, DC. She earned her BA from Howard University and her MA and PhD from Rutgers University. Clarke recently published Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems (2024) and is the author of five collections of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1983), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), and By My Precise Haircut (2016), which won a Hilary Tham Capital Competition. She wrote the critical study “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005), and a volume collecting her poetry and prose was published as The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980–2005 (2006). Clarke served as editor for Conditions, an influential journal of lesbian feminist literature. Many of Clarke’s most influential essays, including “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” first appeared in landmark publications such as This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). All of Clarke’s writings advocate for queer communities of color, paying attention to the social implications of language and labels and the possibilities of art and activism to stage resistance to dominant culture. Clarke was an influential administrator and teacher at Rutgers for more than forty years. She founded the Office of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian-Gay Concerns, which became the Office of Social Justice Education and LGBT Communities, and retired as the Livingstone Dean of Students in 2013. For her service to LGBTQ communities, Clarke received a David Kessler Award. She currently lives in Hobart, New York, where she owns and operates Blenheim Hill Books with her partner, Barbara J. Balliet.

Yi Wei is a writer unconditionally supportive of Palestinian resistance and liberation. Her work has been awarded or placed for the Frontier OPEN, the Lois Morrell Poetry Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, the Sappho Prize for Women Poets, Best of the Net, the Lorraine Williams Poetry Prize, and the Writer in the Public Schools fellowship at NYU. She is currently editing at Asian American Writers' Workshop.