This fiftieth edition of Afterall journal, ‘50 Minus 1’, has been produced amid the many turbulences – immunological, social and political – that have marked 2020. Faced with these crises and the uncertainties they have brought about while also working under the sign of a jubilee publication, our editorial group found itself certain of at least one thing: publishing as usual was no option.
Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras, Isaac Julien, Chantal Akerman, Raoul Peck, Zarina Bhimji, Amar Kanwar, Pier Paolo Pasolini & Hannah Arendt; Seyla Benhabib; Stuart Hall; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; Frantz Fanon; Paul Gilroy; Chantal Mouffe; Edward Said; Peter Weiss; Cornel West
Amanda Carneiro diarises a disrupted sense of consciousness. Forced into a virtual void, she is haunted by the works of Adrian Piper, Belkis Ayón, Dalton Paula, Arthur Dispo do Rosário, Rosana Paulino, Black Quantum Futurism and Lorna Simpson.
The book launch of Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000, the latest title in the Afterall Books Exhibition Histories series, published in association with Asia Art Archive and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
Sara Deraedt's first solo exhibition in Brussels, where the artist is based, closed for months due to government regulations. Eleanor Ivory Weber discusses this situation which echoes the (anti-)logic at work in Deraedts' work, which itself unfolds by obstructing and by resisting both the viewer's and the artist's masteries.
This title in the Exhibition Histories series explores exhibitionary activity in Shanghai in 2000.
For her final piece as Writer in Residence Adjoa Armah maps key sites in the construction of Black subjects on the African coast. In our language the word for the sea means the 'spirit that returns' responds to the strategies provided by other artists and thinkers attending to Black spatial consciousness; addressing cartography as a colonising technology and the possibilities of its use as a liberatory one.