Issue 4

This cover shows the artist studio of artist collective the Tennant Creek Brio, where the backs of multimedia works using discarded poker machines take on a kind of figurative presence, standing in for the shifting set of collective artistic formations that constitute their practice.

This introduction explores the urgency of addressing collaboration. Contextualizing each published contribution, the text also discusses the ‘comeback’ of artistic autonomy, the political ramifications of the notion of ‘project’, and the strange collaborations of translation work. Finally, the editors write letters about working with each other.

Francois Blom, Garth Erasmus, and Esther Marie Pauw engage in a form of re-performance, listening back to recordings of the music theatre production Khoi’npsalms. Together, the musicians explore the work’s multiple meanings as a work of decolonial art, and its creation of both tensions and intimacies through collective sound-making.

Elisabeth Lebovici connects the fabric of New York with the transformation of contemporary exhibitions. In the 1980s and early 90s, HIV/AIDS provoked panic and silence. Collaborative exhibitions – in which Lebovici participated – opened up time and space for the epidemic’s political visibility. Translated from the original French.

This performance is a re-enactment and reinvention of Site, originally performed by Robert Morris and Carolee Schneeman. In addition to swapping the gender roles, Martina Schmuecker’s Re:Site explores the role of physical labour and strength in contemporary art, the meaning of following instructions, and power relations in performance.

We Are Here (WAH) is a self-organized group of undocumented people based in the Netherlands. This text considers the practice (by a group called ‘Here to Support’) that quietly orchestrated the insertion of WAH into the Dutch art system. It also examines the growing participation of undocumented people in contemporary art.

The Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC) formed to conceive of alternate models of teaching and research that would overturn the art and architecture historical canon. In this contribution, Katherine Guinness, Charlotte Kent, and Martina Tanga share their personal experiences of the workshop FAAC YOUR SYLLABUS.

This sound work interweaves conversations between Rib Davis and three other oral historians. It explores the ethics of oral history, the benefits of just listening, the glimpses of other worlds that oral history gives us, the celebration of the spoken word, and how interviewees shape their own narratives by expressing them.

Marie Caffari and Johanne Mohs consider the ways that literary mentoring scenes engender highly collaborative processes and relationships within creative writing courses. Disrupting persistent images of the author as a solitary figure, they attend to a little considered area: the involvement of mentors in processes of literary production.

Adopting the format of a durational (un)boxing video this work is filmed with the shipping specialists of Pack&Send featuring their packaging method Foam-In-Place. These foam moulds, used to create customised cradles for fragile objects in transit, are used for a bespoke series of new sculptures.

Mihai Florea’s essay considers the dilemmas of preferring to work alone as a researcher in a Theatre Studies department through the ludic proposition of collaboration with a stick. The work reflects on a video work based on two of the main characters in Chekhov’s The Seagull, who become alter ego and stick collaborator.