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Join us for a hybrid panel discussion about publishing practice within contemporary art with Bahar Noorizadeh (Weird Economies) andJoud Al-Tamimi (Asphalt Coop) joining in person in the gallery, and Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos (Werker Collective), and Terry Ayugi (Chimurenga) joining online.

Asphalt Coop is a platform for study, research and experimentation, bringing together artists and cultural workers interested in critical modes of artistic and cultural production. Informed by an interest in solidarity economics, self-organisation and pedagogy, the project mutates and moves across multiple forms and formats. Its activities include art residencies, exhibitions, performances, reading groups, screenings, workshops, lectures and symposia. Based in Amman amongst other locations, the platform speaks to/from the Palestinian community across different geographies, while seeking to activate networks that allow us to learn with and from other histories and contexts.

Chimurenga, is a pan African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together a myriad of voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga takes many forms operating as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans. Outputs include a periodic broadsheet called The Chronic; Chimurenganyana – literature project consisting of serialised monographs expanding on themes developed in Chimurenga Magazine; the Chimurenga Library – an ongoing invention into knowledge production and the archive that seeks to re-imagine the library; and the Pan African Space Station (PASS) – an online radio station and pop-up studio. The aim of these activities is not just to produce new knowledge, but rather to express the intensities of our world, to capture those forces and to take action. This has required a stretching of the boundaries, for unless we push form and content beyond what exists, then we merely reproduce the original form – the colonized form, if you will. It requires not only a new set of questions, but its own set of tools; new practices and methodologies that allow us to engage the lines of flight, of fragility, the precariousness, as well as joy, creativity and beauty that defines contemporary African life.

Weird Economies (W.E) is a multi-authored and socially-connected project, journal, programming space and a social experimental site for tracing imaginaries of economic and redistributive justice beyond financialisation. Emphasising the speculative dimension of social relations and its capture by the predatory finance regime, W.E organises study groups, workshops, residencies, and communal spatial interventions to stage alternative scenarios for our future commons.

WERKER operates at the intersection of labour, ecofeminism, and the LGBTQ+ movements, advocating for an image critique of daily life to analyze what becomes visible and what remains hidden or silenced in different political contexts. The art collective, initiated by Marc Roig Blesa and Rogier Delfos in Amsterdam in 2009, released ten issues of a publication called WERKER MAGAZINE. Since then, WERKER has explored a variety of media, including installation, performance, video, sound, textile, digital publishing, and has also developed community projects, reading groups, cine-clubs, radio podcasts, and publishing workshops.

Image: W.E (detail) by Bahar Noorizadeh. Courtesy of the artist.