As we move towards reshaping the world into a reality where the most marginalized and oppressed people are able to thrive, unimpeded by state and racial violence, the mediums in which identity manifests are a moving target. Racial and ethnic categories continue to shift, dodge, and take on new forms simultaneous to the expanding social consciousness of systemic racism’s histories. Whiteness in particular continues to evade blame and repercussion for the historical, structural oppression and volatility it has and continues to systematize. Instead, we have witnessed performative allyship from individuals and institutions of power that is as ineffectual as it is performative, undergirded by the circulation of empty rhetoric for change that doesn’t attempt to dismantle the foundations of violent systems. The project of abolition is further troubled by the current Covid-19 pandemic as so much of our knowledge sharing becomes disembodied and mediated by the screen. Much of movement buil...

In recent years, the United States has finally started to formally acknowledge its volatile relationship to the original peoples of the land, despite their long protestation and resistance to erasure. In the U.S. and Canadian art worlds, this recognition, though late, has come with a host of reparative institutional tactics, some of which include the performance of printed and spoken stolen-land acknowledgments or dedicated space in exhibition calendars for Indigenous artists. Though these efforts are certainly worthwhile and should continue, it is important to note that they are merely first steps on a path towards the rematriation of land and cultural autonomy for Indigenous folks in the U.S and Canada. Santiago X is an artist based in Chicago whose work contends with the growing pains of making space—physically and intellectually—for...

Loosening, rethinking, and altering the ways we navigate space and relate to one another are Misael Soto’s bread and butter. The Miami-based artist is currently working on large projects situated in public space, rooted in a practice that has continuously intervened in the systems that govern the everyday. Daily life is often riddled with unexpected and often contradictory phenomena that usually go unnoticed and unquestioned: construction street signs, scaffolding, and crisis-averting equipment are all obvious indicators of change—sometimes even threats —yet their ubiquitous and quotidian deployment eases potential anxieties, certainly staving off the urgency that required their invention in the first place. In a moment heightened by polarizing politics, many artists are looking to the nature of relations and relationships between people. Soto considers the challenges of our time through...

At what Spatio-temporal turning point do images change in meaning, value, and/or audience? Now in a time when images proliferate ad nauseam, the medium of photography speeds towards a precipice of crisis, hinged on its ubiquity, exponentially increased accessibility, immateriality, and now widely understood rehearsed construction. Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez is an artist based in Chicago whose practice contends with photography’s ails, as well as its history, through a formal approach reminiscent of the Information and Systems artists from the 1960s and 70s. In our conversation, he reminds me that, “photography has always been a medium in crisis,” and that our contemporary questioning of its proliferation is just another point of contention along its conflict-ridden timeline. Rodriguez’s work is not preoccupied with a medium-specific version of photography as much as its...