Writer-in-Residence

Mapping Debris

In this essay, Adiva Lawrence enters into a dialogue with artists Nguyen Smith and Minia Biabiany in order to explore the entanglement of life and history with territory and place, considering Caribbean epistemologies as a means to navigate these questions in the present.

Silence into sound, erasure into being. A review of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s Postscript: after everything is extracted

In this review, Afterall writer in residence Anahita Delcorde considers the first chapter of Basel Abbas’ and Ruanne Abou Rahme’s web-based work: a postscript that inhabits a space of multiple aftermaths. In a fragmentary prose that mimics the artwork’s own fractured form, Delcorde reads the piece as an embodiment of Palestinian dispossession, which found temporary resonance in a world brought to a halt by the pandemic.

Writing Between the Lines: an Interview with Sophia Al-Maria

In this conversation, Afterall Writer in Residence Anahita Delcorde and Sophia Al-Maria address the artist’s protean and multi-layered practice. From published work via the complexities of the aesthetics of Gulf Futurism to recent public sculptures, Delcorde and Al-Maria retrace the artist’s works and her multiple interest between writing, the visual and dance, as well as science fiction, or the relationships between ruins and futurity.

Let Me Sleep. Dreaming About Maria Eichhorn’s 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours. Part II

In the second part of her essay on Maria Eichhorn’s 2016 exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, Afterall Writer in Residence Anahita Delcorde discusses the politics of time giving and the difficulties of articulating an emancipatory art practice with regards to labour in the art world.

Let me sleep. Dreaming about Maria Eichhorn’s 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours. Part I

As the art world rushes back to pre-pandemic hectic pace, Afterall Writer in Residence Anahita Delcorde takes the time to look back at Maria Eichhorn’s gesture of closure and refusal for her solo show at Chisenhale Gallery in 2016. In the first part of this long form essay, Delcorde ponders over what a time-giving and generating practice might look like in the face of contemporary capitalism’s ever-advancing occupation of any interstice of our lives.

In Residence

Priya Jay was Afterall Writer in Residence between January and June 2021. Priya Jay reflects on what it meant to be a writer in residence in the first half of 2021, during a period of protracted national lockdown, isolation and mourning.

In our language the word for the sea means the ‘spirit that returns’

For her final piece as Writer in Residence Adjoa Armah maps key sites in the construction of Black subjects on the African coast. In our language the word for the sea means the ‘spirit that returns’ responds to the strategies provided by other artists and thinkers attending to Black spatial consciousness; addressing cartography as a colonising technology and the possibilities of its use as a liberatory one.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: ‘(15,952km) via Trans-Sahara Hwy N1’

Reviewing Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s first institutional solo show, Adjoa Armah addresses the complex set of ideas and histories from Shona culture inscribed in her work. Armah discusses Hwami’s paintings as surfaces where the relationships between magic and science, dreams and political history, or the physical and the digital, are renegotiated along non-linear temporalities.

Artists at Work: Tiona Nekkia McClodden

In a conversation with Afterall’s first writer in residence Adjoa Armah, Tiona Nekkia McClodden discusses how her various identities – as Black, Queer woman, BDSM practitioner, priestess – inform her work, and how she operates in the art world and across other practices.