unbag
697 Grand St. #158
Brooklyn, NY 11211 USA
[email protected]
Issue 2: End, Winter 2018.
Cover: Performance of Acoustic Sound Blanket by
Baseera Khan at the Whitney Museum of American Art, July 21, 2017. Photograph by Filip Wolak. Special thanks to Participant Inc.
unbag is a digital and print publication that promotes dialogue concerning contemporary art, cultural practice, and political action.
All projects and their content copyright the authors unless otherwise noted. All other content copyright unbag.
Thanks
unbag would like to thank the following people who made this project a reality, be it through advice, labor, or support:
Eleana Antonaki, Alexander Chaparro, Angela Chiappara, Endless Editions, K. J. Freeman, Devin Kenny, Dana Kopel, Will Lee, Rui Lin, Peiyuan Li, Jessica Meiselman, Dushko Petrovich, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Peter Rostovsky, Margarita Sánchez Urdaneta, Ryota Sato, Charaighn Sesock, Eileen Isagon Skyers, Shlomit Strutti, Dale & Pete Wentz.
Contributors
Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian artist, activist, and educator. She is the recipient of the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine, and her work has been shown at the Queens Museum, the Tate Modern, Venice Biennale di Archittectura, and Centre Pompidou, among many others.
Justin Allen and Devin Kenny are artists working across mediums. While Justin has worked in writing and performance, Devin has worked in sculpture, video, photography, text, performance, and sound. The duo collaborates to make music that expands their studies in African Diasporic cultural production and aesthetics and methods for circulating histories, traditions, and knowledge amongst peers and across generations.
American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life. They participated in the 2016-17 Whitney Independent Study Program as an artist, and are currently an Artist-in-Residence at Eyebeam.
Thea Ballard is a writer and editor living in New York.
Daniel Cerrejon is an artist living in New York. He earned an MFA from Parsons, The New School in 2015, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2016. His work has been shown at venues such as The Elizabeth Foundation, The Kitchen, and Museum of the Moving Image.
Jesse Darling is an artist living and working. Their work and research is broadly centered on technology and the production of meaning in an attempt to illuminate the concerns of the present with the aggregated weight of future past. JD is usually in LDN or BLN.
Ben Davis is a recent graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology where he earned a BFA in Fine Art Photography and a BS in Photographic and Imaging Technologies. His photographic works examines mundane scenes and questions if there is a deeper level to the banal objects that make up our everyday lives.
Fayen d’Evie is an artist, who lives on an off-grid rural property in Muckleford, Australia. Her art practice now engages with blindness as a radical critical position. She is also the founder of 3-ply, which explores publishing as an experimental site for the creation, translation, dispersal, and re-reading of texts.
Thom Donovan is the author of Withdrawn (Compline, 2017) and The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Withdrawn: A Discourse (Shifter, 2016) and To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2013). With Michael Cross, he publishes and edits ON Contemporary Practice.
Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a new media artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. Her video, sound, and installation works have been exhibited internationally in galleries and online spaces since 2012. She is currently a lecturer in the New Arts Journalism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Baseera Khan is a New York-based artist whose work shares experiences of exile and kinship shaped by economic, social, and political events, with special interests in decolonization practices. She has been published in Artforum Magazine, Art in America, Bomb Magazine, and OSMOS Magazine.
William Lee is an artist who utilizes video, sculpture, and game-design. His visual research draws upon neurophilosophy, aesthetics of games, and slow cinema to interrogate the tenuous function of subjectivity necessitated by the problem of universals. He is currently working in New York.
Ishmael Marika is a director and editor. He is also production officer at The Mulka Project, a production house, recording studio, digital learning center, and cultural archive that protects Yolŋu cultural knowledge in Northeast Arnhem Land, Australia. He is best known for his films “Wanga Watangumirri Dharuk” and “Galka.”
Precious Okoyomon is a Brooklyn-based poet and artist. She is the author of Ajebota (Bottlecap Press, 2016). Her writing has been featured in the Baltic Triennial, the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Exo Exo in Paris, and MoMA PS1 in New York. She loves her sweet toy poodle, Rainbow, and is a Leo that is very low-key evil.
Ashwin Ravikumar is an environmental social scientist, political ecologist, activist, and teacher based in Chicago.
Joe Riley is an artist and sailor. He participated in the 2016-17 Whitney Independent Study Program and was a student organizer for Free Cooper Union. He is a collaborator with the collective Futurefarmers and teaches letterpress printing and metalworking at Cooper Union.
Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor at Emory University whose book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation is forthcoming from Duke University Press. His current project Onticide: Essays on Black Nihilism and Sexuality unravels the metaphysical foundations of black sexuality and argues for a rethinking of sexuality without the human, sexual difference, or coherent bodies.
Intersectional Lexicon Against Xenophobia, Racism, Sexism, Ableism, Homophobia, and Transphobia, etc. was originally a collaborative Google doc produced by an anonymous group of artists and activists online.
Staff
Editors
Aaron Cooper
Charlie Markbreiter
Natalia Tuero
Operations & Production
Andy Wentz
Art Direction & Print Design
American Artist
Web Design & Web Development
Logan Lape
American Artist is a graphic designer from Altadena, California that found a home on the Internet and in Brooklyn. They are interested in decentering whiteness and evoking Black radical imagination. They have no hobbies.
Aaron Cooper is an artist and writer. He is from Australia and lives in Brooklyn. Aaron’s work engages narratives about contested sites and objects. Among his other interests are critical pedagogy, radical publishing, and Italian cooking.
Logan Lape is an artist from Nevada. His expanded practice takes the form of collaborative projects, design, events, sculpture, and temporary architectures. He strives to be a camping scholar and a scholar of camping.
Charlie Markbreiter is a writer and editor. They’re interested in the limitations of “queer theory,” and currently live in New York.
Natalia Tuero is from Latin America. She works in the area of women and girls’ empowerment. Her hobbies are dancing, editing, and thinking about decolonization. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Andy Wentz is an artist, writer, and publisher originally from the great state of Illinois. When making his work he thinks about the multi-racial experience and codeswitching culture. Many of his plants are still alive.