Is ‘identity politics’ still relevant or necessary in art? We wanted to see how and why artists today address issues of identification and subjectivity in their work. We’ve focused specifically on emergent practices, because we think they might help us, and our audience, to understand the here-and-now of art and to speculate on its future.

Who remembers the title of last year’s Venice Biennale? One long year and change later, it seems that nobody’s worst enemy could have made a threat, a promise, or a curse that we may live in times quite as … “interesting” as the ones we find ourselves in now. Arguably, anyone paying even the most distant attention to 2019—or to history and the evolving present in general—could have foreseen what we were heading towards. It’s hard to imagine, though, that someone could have envisioned just how deadly fascinating these times would turn out to be. In any case, here we are. ...

Although it looks like it, == is not the catalogue of an exhibition. It is exactly the opposite, it is an independent project, conceived ahead of an exhibition. In fact, Matt Keegan has devised an exhibition from the publication, rather than the traditional reverse. Even more, an unlimited number of venues may be produced. Emphasizing the wall as a page, each one provides a temporary container for ==’s various parts, allowing Matt Keegan to act as the protagonist for the fictive curatorial project.

A publication is a time capsule & transmitter from here to there, from you to me. Working from this basic statement: how has your work changed since your 2012 or 2015 contribution to ==? This question and timeline could be rephrased as: How has your life & work changed in the wake of Brexit, Trump’s presidency, and the move to the right in Europe. (The majority of contributors are based in the US and this prompt is not intended to romanticize Obama’s presidency or deny repressive administrations that have come before). It is not necessary to root your response in the 1st person, ...

Last Year at Marienbad redux takes the form of an expanded exhibition guide to communicate the visual continuities, subtle overlaps and conceptual intersections among the works of art, design and architecture experienced in the exhibition of the same title. This book is part one in a combined two-volume publication produced as part of the project.

Shifter’s 18th issue considered the temporality of intention as a prior condition for action—an impetus that is often understood only after an action has already been performed and is then reformulated and narrativized in one’s consciousness. For Shifter 19 we have invited a small group of artist-educators to each contribute a “proposal.” We see the proposal as an embodied form of intention that often requires collaboration in order to be realized, trusting in another’s willingness to extend and enact one’s desire. When a proposal enters into a social contract, its pulsating potential constitutes the conditions of possibility for alternate ways ...