For this episode of our “Criticism in Conversation” series, a writer and collaborative performer, Jacob Wren, speaks with artist Dayna Danger, about the line between empowerment and objectification and the meaning of community in both their work. Danger is a 2Spirit/Queer, Metis/Saulteaux/Polish artist whose images highlight and queer power dynamics, kinship, representation, and sexuality. Wren makes collaborative performances, exhibitions and literature, including 2014’s Polyamorous Love Song and this year’s Authenticity is a Feeling, a hybrid of history, performance theory, and memoir. Together they cover a lot of ground, from personal narratives and community relationships to speaking against silence and apathy. We ...

In this anthology, edited by Fiktion’s cofounder Ingo Niermann, nineteen writers and researchers address a fiercely contested commodity in digital society: concentration. Ingeborg Harms, Quinn Latimer, Arthur Jacobs, and Raoul Schrott write about the circumstances under which a text or activity can completely draw us into its spell, Dirk Baecker and Amy Patton about a shifting concentration, Jenna Sutela and Elvia Wilk about one that carries us into the spherical, Charis Conn about concentration violently induced; Nina Bußmann writes about the uncertainty as to whether she is currently concentrating or distracting herself; Sophie Jung, Emily Segal, and Alexander Tarakhovsky make ...

This ninth SDUK broadsheet openly engages the nineteenth-century society from which the series takes its name, by considering DIFFUSING: how circulation, dissemination, opacity, transparency, and anonymity shape the way knowledges, materials, and media are transferred. Whereas the original Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge circulated its publications through largely one-way and top-down means, contributors to this issue explore knowledge-sharing as a more open, non-hierarchical practice. One might be prompted by physical processes of diffusion to wonder: How does matter move through bodies, across borders, and into inter-relations? Sophia Jaworski and Zoë Wool (p. 8) offer a reappraisal of the 1979 ...

Themes of movement, memory, histories, and archives animate this eleventh SDUK broadsheet, PACING. In the first issue of 2022, contributors amplify and expand on themes found throughout Blackwood programs here engaging the pace of reading and writing that is unique to publishing. Through a range of forms, contributors to this issue speculate on publications, archives, and file repositories as means for building collective memory. Given the often violent and colonial origins of these forms, how are Black culture workers navigating archives and collections? In a roundtable discussion, Cleopatria Peterson and Adwoa Afful discuss how the respective print and digital platforms they ...

This tenth SDUK broadsheet takes up PRONOUNCING: how speech, performance, language, and poetry shape sociopolitical discourse. In parallel with Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power, a series of leadership portraits and audio addresses from artists-as-leaders, the Blackwood engages discourses of speech and power throughout 2021. Constance Hockaday’s introduction to Artists-in-Presidents outlines the project’s central conceit: What forms of leadership do we need now? In a roundtable discussion in this issue (p. 19), panelists reflect on their changing roles as public figures in and adjacent to healthcare amid the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, under-resourced mental health and addiction services, and intergenerational legacies of ...