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 Karen Archey, Head of the Curatorial Department at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, whose 2014 exhibition Art Post-Internet, co-curated with Robin Peckham at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, featured a version of Coburn’s monologue NaturallySpeaking.
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.
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.
Karen Archey is Head of the Curatorial Department of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. From 2017 until 2025, she was Curator of Contemporary Art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where she cared for the contemporary art and time-based media collections. She has curated numerous group and solo exhibitions, often focusing on performance and the moving image. For the Kunstsammlung, she is currently preparing a solo exhibition by artist Jon Rafman and an artist-designed playground by Sonia Kazovsky. Archey is an established writer and public speaker, contributing to conferences and exhibition catalogues in collaboration with museums throughout the world. Her essay-length book After Institutions (Floating Opera Press, 2022) examines museums as a rapidly changing public space subject to radical political and economic shifts.
