Kameelah Janan Rasheed

The mysteries of finding ourselves in the trap doors of language. Artist, writer, and educator, Kameelah Janan Rasheed contemplates the textures and opacities of language as liberatory acts.

Lynn Hershman Leeson

From the ubiquity of Botox and plastic surgery to far more niche and extreme attempts to battle the effects of aging, artist Lynn Hershman Leeson reflects on the human obsession with youth and immortality. Now, with new serums being developed that use an individual’s DNA, these technologies go beyond surface interventions in human biology. Could the age-old quest for immortality be closer at hand? What questions should we be asking?

A co-commission of Protodispatch and Lux Magazine

Kridpuj Dhansandors

Writer/Artist Kridpuj Dhansandors questions the ecological precarity that is entangled within political traumas in Thailand via Motions Pictures, an installation by artist/filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Tamara Khasanova

Curator and writer Tamara Khasanova contemplates movement between embodied and liminal states of presence as a means of constructing meaning, and as a balm for conflict, desire, alienation, and chaos.

Dika Ofoma and Innocent Ekejiuba

Filmmaker Dika Ofoma and curator Innocent Ekejiuba discuss Ofoma’s film A Quiet Monday, which faces living in Nigeria and what happens when governments create a vacuum that allows violence to fester.

by Alper Turan on Kübra Uzun

Flipping the script, curator Alper Turan writes on artist/performer Kübra Uzun, a.k.a. Q-BRA, trans muse for both local and international artists, who redefines the traditional concept of a gendered muse. Turan tells Kübra’s story, how she asserts her agency and shares knowledge of the past four decades of LGBTQIA+ history in Turkey as well as the artistic lineage of Bülent Ersoy, Zeki Müren, and Huysuz Virjin (Cranky Virjin). Q-BRA’s unanswered question is on the lips of those in many countries: “Is it harder to leave, or harder to stay?”

Gülsün Karamustafa and Alex Klein

In this conversation Gülsün Karamustafa and Alex Klein delve into the formative years of Karamustafa’s trajectory shaped by the geopolitical landscape, political engagement, and artistic tools for resistance. From the Iron Curtain confining her childhood in Turkey to reporting on the ground for BBC Radio in politically charged 1970s London, Karamustafa's experiences set the stage for her powerful artistic practice. Denied passports for 16 years, she and her husband found themselves imprisoned within Turkey, leading to a profound exploration of migration and adaptation in her art. The lifting of travel restrictions in 1986 marked a transformative period, enabling extensive global travel that influenced her work's evolution. From collaborative ventures in cinema to exhibitions worldwide, Karamustafa's art becomes a literal and metaphorical passport, fostering mutual exchange and solidarity across borders. Karamustafa shares her personal experiences, a down to earth life review, in advance of her exhibition in the Turkish Pavilion at the 60th edition of the Venice Art Biennale, itself a conundrum of the continuing contradictions of nationhood, intangible cultural heritage, and man-made borders.

Mayra Santos-Febres

Poet and writer Mayra Santos Febres contextualizes the survival of Afro-Borinquen artmaking within legacies of colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, highlighting liberatory methodologies and refusals to be unseen. In 2022 Protodispatch published another exploration of cultural survivance in Puerto Rico titled Relearning the Ancient: Paths to the Indigenous land rights in Boriquén by Jorge González and Angela Brown.

Himali Singh Soin

In a time of profound loss, artist Himali Singh Soin offers a ballad and manifesto on spaces of occluded clarity, and the relationships between human and non-human survival therein. She suggests this inbetween as a zone of safety, opacity, and potential for permeable binaries and selves.

Ana María Millán

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Abbas and Abou-Rahme combine video, music, and poems on the regenerative cycles of destruction and regrowth, by both nature and human hands.

Chitra Ganesh

Artist Chitra Ganesh maps how the visual language of childhood is produced by powerful ideologies, unpacking a nearly ubiquitous Indian food chart as evidence the Indian government’s attempts to systematically erase a multivalent, secular, and diverse India.

Simone Leigh and Rashida Bumbray

Simone Leigh and Rashida Bumbray discuss an intertwined practice of building cultural infrastructures with care, friendship, and generosity, with Laura Raicovich

Mel Chin

Thirty years after Mel Chin pointed a rifle at the heads of an audience assembled for a public talk, the artist re-examines this eerily prescient work in our current moment of resurgent fascisms, rampant viral scares—both medical and digital—and the need to reimagine everything.

Jordan Deal

How a group of transnational artists are using archiving and accelerated storytelling as radical acts of resistance.

Homa and Saba*

How a group of transnational artists are using archiving and accelerated storytelling as radical acts of resistance.

Kenya (Robinson)

Through a hyperlinked lyric essay, and a forthcoming month-long social media takeover, Kenya (Robinson) explores the relationship between Black people and water—both fresh and saltwater—as an essential part of the storytelling of US histories.

Ximena Garrido-Lecca & Ishmael Randall-Weeks

Ximena Garrido & Ishmael Randal Weeks describe a process of building a structure communally out of materials brought by participants, revealing the strength of collective memory and its capacity to unveil corruption and lies in the context of Peru’s recent and deep pasts.

Jorge González and Angela Brown

An email exchange accompanied by a diary of images and texts, practices and reflects on the relearning of traditional crafts in Boriquén (Puerto Rico) as a recuperative strategy for colonial erasure.

Alper Turan with B. Toprak Karakaya, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, and Koli Art Space (Yasemin Kalaycı & Elçin Acun)

The illusory victimhood of ultranationalists draws passionate responses from queer culture workers from Turkey who are committed to undoing their hate.

Tiffany Sia with Emilie Sin Yi Choi and Chan Tze-Woon

Three Hongkongers got together in July 2022 to talk about the relationships between documentary filmmaking, protest, who gets to record history, and the challenges of working and screening films under the gaze of the state.