Embodied Knowledge
All My …/All My— Designing Motherhood and the Labyrinth of Reproductive Health
The breathtaking range of topics in Designing Motherhood—choices of whether to conceive children or take a pregnancy to term, infant mortality, sterilization abuse, thalidomide, cesarean birth curtains, masculine birth, baby formula, the faja (a wrap for binding a postpartum abdomen), gender reveals, the Del Em Device, car seats, carers and carrying, the tie-waist skirt, the breast pump, and so on—reveals the immense, intricate knowledge necessary to understand reproductive health, and to advocate for conditions that promote wellbeing.
Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive
Hito Steyerl is one of the most important artists of her generation, a landmark thinker of the image and its status under late capitalist accelerationism. Yet her recent retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, I Will Survive, was marked by a semiotic complexity that did not coincide with what had been happening to the body in the past two years—my body, but also the body in a broader philosophical sense.
Gone But Not Disrespected
On the last Sunday in June 2022, a particularly hot day in Philadelphia, about 100 of us gathered in front of Saint Luke’s landing for the culmination of an experimental AIDS memorial called Gone and for Ever, a community-informed spectacle of sight, sound, and grief—part of Remembrance, a project of the William Way LGBT Community Center and funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage—to grapple with the question of how to memorialize amid the ongoing crisis.
Azza El Siddique: In the place of annihilation, where all the past was present and returned transformed
A Movement of the Earth Against the World
12th Berlin Biennale: Still Present!
TJ Shin: Unbecoming Human
Charmaine Minniefield:
Indigo Prayers: A Creation Story
Insurrectional Evolution: The Cronenbergian Revisited
Film critic Nathan Lee explores the insurrectional body in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” and asks “What do we mean when we speak of the ‘Cronenbergian’?”