Ali Graham - Shop Talk
Veer2 Publication 019 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-41-7] 16x21cms size, 58 pages . December 2023.
£6.00 (+ postage and packing)
Ali Graham - Shop Talk
‘Everyone has got lost in the big Asda as a child, realised how little they matter in the gridded aisles which make up the terminus of various supply chains, getting a sense of the I as it is torn away from a parent's hand amid the rows of shining commodities. Like the more traditional primal scene, this is something you visit and revisit again throughout your life, in all its zany, thirsty, necromantic and medieval variations. We are made into numbers with silly and embarrassing feelings (‘1 is rugged self-sufficiency’), bits of us spread out across the globe in microplastic fragments and the garbage we have given to the sea - the worst and most artificial universality. When I was a child, Wal-Mart bought Asda, and it got even bigger. Like the American supermarket model, this collection is vast and sprawling, with constantly shifting items on display, new aisles to explore, except without the hollowness of such an impoverished type of choice. You will find yourself returning to it (even if you're just nipping to get some bits), and will be picking it out of your cuspids for weeks.’
- Laurel Uziell
‘Ali Graham's Shop Talk is gorgeous sass and lousiness. It mercilessly sifts the world of contracts, symptoms and undercurrent martyrs to dowse a horology of "girl"hood from its dregs. What does it mean to be epitheted, in a world that turns the lover of skies into its publicist? Shop Talk is a remarkable dash between such unavoidable drops; there are always men, whose addressing our wages may depend on, but in spite of them a "girl" can always become 'a princely jug of moving air'. This is apophatic glamour as fiercest survival.‘
- Daisy Lafarge
This is part of a series of works organised by Robert Kiely for Veer2, produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.