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Qatar Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Seoul Mediacity Biennale
White Columns
Slip House
SARA’S / Dunkunsthalle
Independent Curators International
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About
organized by Independent Curators International
PUBLISHING AGAINST THE GRAIN
CURATED BY SANNA ALMAJEDI, ALAINA CLAIRE FELDMAN and BECKY NAHOM
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL
Ongoing touring exhibition
Publishing Against the Grain is a traveling exhibition that provides a space for reading, thinking, and conversing, where slowing down can become a form of intellectual resistance. It encourages discursive public participation, self-reflective investigation, and invites visitors to discover new perspectives while connecting differing and analogous spheres of contemporary art.
In the context of today’s corporatization and commodification of cultural institutions, and in many political situations where free speech becomes ever more precarious, independent publishing has shown extraordinary vitality and importance as a platform for disseminating alternative, progressive and autonomous positions.
Publishing Against the Grain highlights the current state of publishing and art criticism as it exists in small journals, experimental publications, websites, and radio, as well as other innovative forms. It is organized around projects that connect theoretical, social, political, and aesthetic questions with a focus on community, whether understood in relation to a particular place, or defined in identitarian or diasporic terms. Included in the exhibition are print journals like Makhzin (Lebanon) and PISEAGRAMA (Brazil), alongside more experimental forms like tranzit’s interactive Curatorial Dictionary (Hungary).
In bringing these projects together from around the world, Publishing Against the Grain reveals how their material and discursive activities respond to intersecting subjects such as contemporary aesthetics, diaspora, sex and gender, gentrification, race, language, and art history.
A selection of key publications was drawn from ICI’s international network of collaborators. These curators, artists, and scholars involved in independent publishing are represented in the exhibition through their own projects and those of others who have influenced their work and school of thought. The exhibition continues to grow and accumulate as it travels, when new publications are added at every site.
TOURING LOCATIONS
Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos
The Gund Gallery at Kenyon College
Pitzer College Art Galleries
Critical Distance Centre for Curators
McIntosh Gallery
Blue Star Contemporary
Stacion-Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina
April 18 - May 19, 2018
August 24 - December 16, 2018
February 2 - March 28, 2019
July 4 - August 17, 2019
September 14 - October 26, 2019
February 7 - May 3, 2020
August 9, 2021 - August 9, 2023
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