[Performance] Some Monologues by Tyler Coburn

Join us for the release of Some Monologues by Tyler Coburn, a publication that gathers fifteen years of the artist’s scripts (Wendy’s Subway, 2025). On this occasion, Coburn presents a new monologue entitled People that draws influence from A Personal History of American Theatre (1980), a one-person performance by the American actor and writer Spalding Gray (1941–2004). Moving through a set of index cards bearing the names of plays he acted in, Gray told stories related to those productions, dwelling on events unfolding behind the scenes. As the order of the index cards was random, no two performances were ever the same. In Coburn’s version, each of his cards indicates the name of a person who has a role in the book: an academic he interviewed for a project, an amorous attendee to one of his monologues, his collaborator Susan Bennett (the original voice actress of Siri), a data center employee who insulted him, and more. People brings focus to Coburn's many collaborators and the monologues they helped create.

After performing People, Coburn is joined in conversation by artist Eoghan Ryan.

Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/some-monologues

Schedule

19h00-19h45 Performance
19h45-20h30 Conversation between Tyler Coburn and Eoghan Ryan. 

About

About Some Monologues
Working at the nexus of performance, art writing, and fiction, Tyler Coburn creates monologues that explore how the “I” is marked in speech. His myriad topics—alternate history, legal personhood, digital labor, and resonant frequency, to name a few—defy straightforward modes of presentation, often insisting on site-specificity and social intimacy at the expense of conventional documentation. 

Some Monologues collects, for the first time, the scripts of Coburn’s work from the past fifteen years, many of which have not previously been published. Accompanying them are texts by eleven artists, writers, curators, and scholars who experienced these performances firsthand, collaborated in their making, conversed with the artist about them, or share an interest in the subjects they engage. Written in theoretical, poetic, and autobiographical registers, these contributions offer new perspectives on the monologue as an expansive and relational form.

About Tyler Coburn
Tyler Coburn is an artist, writer, and professor based in New York. He received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, BOMB, C Magazine, Dis, e-flux journal, frieze, LEAP, Metropolis M, Mousse, and Rhizome. Coburn is the author of four books: I’m that angel (self-published, 2012), Robots Building Robots (CCA Glasgow, 2013), Richard Roe (Sternberg, 2019), and Solitary (Sternberg and Art Sonje Center, 2022). He has presented artwork at such venues as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Kunsthall; Hayward Gallery, London; Para Site, Hong Kong; and Kunstverein Munich. 

About Eoghan Ryan
Eoghan Ryan (b. 1987, Dublin) engages moving image, installation, performance, puppetry, and collage to explore how power circulates socially and through mediated culture. His process involves long periods of editing; documenting a specific person, site, object, or song; and developing fable-like takes on the collective and the personal as institutions. These institutions range from states of being and nation-states to the cultivation of provisional culture, in art as in bacteria. Selected shows, performances, and screenings have taken place at EVA International 2025, Limerick; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Viewmaster Projects, Maastricht; Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin; Fundazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; The Complex, Dublin; Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg; Centrale Fies, Dro; BFI London Film Festival and ICA London; Busan Biennale 2022; International Film Festival Rotterdam;  VISIO European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images; Kunstverein Freiburg; South London Gallery; and Serralves Museum, Porto.