Matthew Metzger
Over the course of a year, Shifter hosted a series of public discussions, each concentrated on unraveling a keyword – a term that carries with it both a sense of urgency and agency in our present climate. By inviting artists, writers, activists, philosophers and others to propose terms and lead discussions, we opened up our editorial process to the motivations of others. The yearlong series culminates in Shifter’s 22nd issue Dictionary of the Possible. This dictionary catalogs the keywords taken up for discussion over the course of a year, accompanied by a list of questions provoked during each discussion. Rather ...
Shifter’s eighteenth issue gathers conversations and interviews between various cultural practitioners that elaborate on the subject of intention.
To intend is to have a conception of the future. To direct and extend attention to a moment that is yet to arrive. To construct a contingent model of the future, while negotiating and adjusting it at any given moment against countless uncertainties, thus providing the greatest possible chance of this future’s arrival. To reflect upon an action and determine its intention is then to trace the arc of this willed movement – looking back, culling through layers of events, interactions, and gestures, ...
Shifter’s 21st issue, Other Spaces, considers the body as a site where architecture’s traditional polarities of private and public collapse. This polarity, mirrored in the distinctions we draw between individual and social freedoms and domestic and political action are challenged every day by spontaneous, collaborative re-imaginings of space.
Other Spaces considers the body as a self-sufficient albeit precarious architecture. It not only builds, but also becomes the very material with which to build. Tremulous bodies alone and together flout the sacred dictum that not only divides private and public space but also interior and exterior space, improvising and instituting another space ...
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 ...
Re___ing, exists both within Rethinking Marxism’s upcoming issue (Vol. 23 No. 2) as well as a new issue of Shifter. This folding of one identity into another, a re within a Re and the resultant destabilization of both frames of reference, is precisely the nature of Re___ing.
While re proliferates additives, doubles and fissures within the sphere of cultural production, it also implies multiple temporalities – to renew and to rewind. ing on the other hand, asserts the present continuous, it is always and already.
Paradoxically, re is also to reify. When you call me and I respond I am born. When ...
Shifter is a topical publication that aims to illuminate and broaden our understanding of the intersections between contemporary art, politics and philosophy. Shifter remains malleable and responsive in its form and activities, and represents a diversity of positions and backgrounds in its contributors.
Originally conceived as an online magazine in order to create an inter-continental “commons,” Shifter now engages in a multiplicity of formats including print publications, public dialogues and exhibitions. This has allowed for extended discourse and additional access to Shifter’s content by diverse audiences.
Shifter was first published in 2004 by its founding editor Sreshta Rit Premnath. Issues 11 to ...
Shifter’s 20th issue, What We Can Knot draws from George Bernard Shaw’s quip “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.” In this issue we would like to parse out and challenge what we see to be Shaw’s false binary, and to explore the value of negotiation and collaboration as important elements both in the studio and in the classroom. To this end we have invited several individuals who are both artist and educator, to consider the active relation between art practice and teaching in their life. We have invited them to do this through a conversation or correspondence with ...
