Spot 1: LATEST ON ARTPAPERS.org
Bump and Grind / Search and Destroy
Simphiwe Mbunyuza has something to say —
Inkobe, Umnandi Ngo Chubelana
A Letter to Our Readers
We are launching a three-year strategic plan designed to celebrate the legacy of Art Papers, to mobilize the organization’s resources in service to the cultural community, and to thoughtfully arrive at meaningful and controlled conclusion of operations in 2026, at 50 years.
End of Year Letter: 2023 -> 2024
Spot 2: COUNTER ECOLOGIES
Bioshelter Toilet
Nature’s Intelligence
Flipper, Cousteau, and Homo aquaticus
Arata Isozaki, Re-Ruined Hiroshima, Photomontage, 1968
Spot 3: HIGHLIGHTING BLACK VOICES
Refusing the Here—Now: An Afrofuturist Period Room and Black Fugitivity in the Undercommons
By mixing the historical and the contemporary, the analogue and the digital, the obsolete and the futuristic, the concrete and the speculative, the installation proposes a malleable reality, an undercommons existing not in the here-now but for, and toward, the future.
Toward a Monumental Black Body
The Black body has been objectified and used to incite terror, just as it has been used to revise and shift narratives. To address the growing call for diverse representation in public space, the question is: can artists succeed where the state fails?
Not The Only One (N’TOO)
1988 Special Issue on Contemporary Black Artists
We hope these archival texts provide history and context to current conversations, as well as an insightful glimpse into the thoughts of our predecessors from more than three decades ago.
Spot 4: DEPICTION OF THE BODY
Milk
Charting the historical, cultural, and scientific resonances of milk, the exhibition draws connections between protection and power. Across the works, milk closes the space between bodies. It destabilizes those things we typically consider natural, and it asks who gets to participate in the fantasy of motherhood.
Erotics of the Image
Why would it be important, right now, to defend such ambiguity and indeterminacy? Why might I counterpose, to an agenda straightforward, “in your face” lesbian representation, an alternate erotics of surrogacy and displacement? There is no question that we are in a period of intense commodification of identity, with an attendant demand for extremely reductive and normalizing approaches to image-making.
I Seek to Steal the Sexual Body
Against Cultural Amnesia
Spot 5: ADDRESSING IMPERIALISM
Constructing the Environmental Imaginary
Liv Bugge: The Consequence of Touching Oil
“What is the consequence of touching oil—of coming to know it in an embodied sense? What gets destabilized when oil slips out of the category of the inhuman, even momentarily? To make an image with the body requires revaluation of the discursive function of touch. I propose that Bugge’s document of people touching oil and becoming aware of its aliveness, its animateness, awakens those people to the violent relationship humans have not only with oil, but also with the world beings that humans broadly consider inanimate.”
The American Garden in Nineteenth-Century Canton
Spot 6: CULTURAL CONSUMPTION
Boy With Luv
BTS’ offers a new incarnation of the boy band, one that refuses the limitations of Western, propagandized stereotypes and White supremacist ideals, intent instead on promoting self-acceptance.
Wong Ping: Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Urban life can be alienating; it limits our mobility and entraps us in fantasy. In Hong Kong, an artist’s erotic animations offer brief release.
The Zombies Are Real
Kojo Griffin has a theory about the undead, the art world, and you.