Object of Desire

In collaboration with the (Trans–) Sexualities + Psychoanalysis Summer School, this Evening is a program of readings by Elena Comay del Junco, Shiv Kotecha, and Basyma Saad. With an introduction by Maxi Wallenhorst.

Host: Marija Cetinic

Elena Comay del Junco is a writer and philosophy professor. Her work has appeared in The Point, Post45, Texte zur Kunst, and Bæst. She recently published a translation of Ibn Sīnā‘s Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (2025) and a chapbook, Second Nature (2023). She is currently editing and translating a tenth-century Arabic poem on cosmology, and her book Innervation Tasks is forthcoming with La Barba Metafísica. She lives in New York.

Shiv Kotecha is a writer and editor living in New York. He is the author of four books of poetry: The Switch (Wonder, 2018), EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015), Outfits (Troll Thread, 2012), and Paint the Rock (Troll Thread, 2011). His writing appears in publications including 4Columns, Aperture, BOMB, Cultured, frieze, The Nation, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. For the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, he co-edits Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of experimental arts writing, and teaches writing at New York University and in the MFA program at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Basyma Saad is an artist and writer born in Beirut. Her work explores notions of mourning, spontaneity, and surplus, through film, performance, and sculpture, alongside essays and fiction. Basyma‘s work has been presented and screened at MoMA, The Poetry Project, CPH:DOX, and other places. Her writing appears in n+1, The New Inquiry, Protean, Spike Art, Jadaliyya, FailedArchitecture, X-TRA, and The Funambulist. She is currently working on a book of prose and poetry.

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. She’s a doctoral researcher at Leuphana University Lüneburg and a contributing editor to the Berlin Review. She is also working on a fiction project about sex after the city.