From 2014-2021 I co-edited Shifter with its founder, Sreshta Rit Premnath. Shifter explores the intersection of contemporary art, theory and experimental writing. We convene public dialogues and produce publications.
My three main projects with Shifter were:
Waiting (2020-21)
Waiting is usually what we do between things. It is the space between two destinations, an empty and anxious time to fill with distractions. But when we look more closely, we see that waiting is also an activity in itself, bristling with energy, uncertainty, and inequality. What does the condition of waiting reveal about us, our world, and the natural environment that sustains it?
This series of eight sessions offer glimpses into the thought and practices of artists, architects, historians, and theorists who grapple with this question. In each hour-long session, participants will share their own research into an aspect of waiting while touching on some of its registers: enforced waiting, chronic waiting, natural waiting, existential waiting, and even those desirable modes of waiting that we long for. A brief moderated discussion and audience Q&A will follow.
Co-sponsored by MIT List Visual Arts Center and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
Learning and Unlearning (2017-19)
Our first three events took place at Art in General in fall 2017 around Danilo Correale’s show At Work’s End. We led discussion on “unlearning work” with Abou Farman (on pleasure), Marina van Zuylen (on boredom) and Sandro Mezzadra (on refusal). More information is available here. The series continued with “Unlearning Dystopia” in Spring 2018 and in fall 2018-spring 2019 focused on the general theme of learning and unlearning. Premnath and I completed the edits for the book through 2019 and launched the new issue at the New York Arts Book Fair in September 2019.
Dictionary of the Possible (2014-16)
The Dictionary grew out of three semesters of public conversations co-hosted by myself and Sreshta Rit Premnath at the New School in New York. For each session, two presenters (an invited speaker or frequent participant in the conversations) would offer some readings, and then give a short, 10 minute set of thoughts about a keyword. These mini-presentations functioned as platforms to build on an open discussion about what words might mean. The project went against what William James reportedly spoke of as “the tyranny of the dictionary.” We wanted to show how words could mean many different things to different people across time and space, without falling into incoherency. We published a version of the dictionary that combined questions generated from these discussions with solicited entries from artists and writers. The final product was published as Volume 22 of Shifter and launched at the 2016 New York Arts Book Fair