My Own Words: Afterall at 25
Reflecting on ‘Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry’ in its 25th year
By Adeena Mey
This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.
'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.
Cover of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 55–56, 2023.
The first issue of ‘Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry’—a ‘pilot’ Issue 0—came out in 1998–99. Having very recently published the double Issue 55–56, the invitation from Art & Market to reflect on Afterall’s trajectory is timely. Indeed, Afterall is 25 years old. However, beyond the arbitrary as supposed cause for celebration, relevant is what the coincidental nature of an anniversary can tell us about art and publishing and what has made and continues to make a project like Afterall possible. Established in 1998 out of Central Saint Martins, now one of the six colleges of University of the Arts London, Afterall, as an organisation, started with its eponymous journal, founded by curator Charles Esche and artist Mark Lewis, becoming only later, in 2016, a research centre of University of the Arts London (UAL).
Cover of Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 0, 1998–99.
Issue 0 opened with a foreword and closed with an afterword, both penned by the two founding editors. The foreword included an epigraph by Pierre Bourdieu, the late French sociologist’s notion of the “critical intellectual”—characterised by her questioning of “the things that are self-evident, in particular those that present themselves in the form of questions, her own as much as other people’s”.¹ This offered the conceptual basis for Afterall’s programmatic editorial. As Esche and Lewis wrote, “It is such a notion of the critical intellectual, broadly and fluidly defined, that Afterall claims for contemporary artists—artists who are researchers and experimenters as much as producers, and whose work tests out propositions in ways related to, but different from, both the philosopher and the scientist.”² In the afterword, Esche and Lewis pondered “the end of utopia as a utopian possibility” and on “the art work”, seeing in the unnecessariness of the labour of the work of art a space of negotiation for post-utopian artistic operations.³
Talk by curator Hyunjin Kim at the Afterall office, Central St Martins, London, 1 June 2023.
25 years later, the organisation is reflecting on its trajectory to anticipate what is to come, in the present, a present significantly shaped by austerity measures in the spheres of art and academia in the UK. In the foreword to our 55–56th Issue, I wrote:
“Today, in mainstream art media, there is no shortage of artists from the Global South and whose practice engages Decolonial ideas. As a non-profit platform, operating between the art world and academia, what distinguishes us and what our hybridity, our non-compliance to standards and standardisation, our preference for heterodoxy, enable us, is to maintain a distinct approach and a singular position.”⁴
Based in an art and design and university, Afterall is explicitly exploratory and conscious of our in-betweenness since the beginning. Afterall’s intellectual scope and the way it has redefined itself over the years, writer Hussain Mitha summed it up as a move from “a position of ‘criticality’ to one of ‘decoloniality’”.⁵ Moreover, it has been intimately interwoven with and co-dependent on its singular model of editorial and institutional partnerships.
Recent titles in the Exhibition Histories book series.
Recent titles in the One Work book series.
Indeed, with the exception of the One Work series, Afterall projects all operate through such partnerships. Currently, the journal is produced with M HKA, Antwerp, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, in association with The University of Chicago Press. As for the Exhibition Histories book series, it is an imprint of Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, documenta Institut, and the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg. From 2017 to 2020, Nanyang Technological University’s Centre for Contemporary Arts Singapore was an editorial partner of the journal.
Spread of an essay by Mi You published in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 55–56, 2023.
Spread of an essay by Vuth Lyno published in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 50, 2020.
This was a partnership which can be seen as having contributed to the move to decoloniality mentioned above. To be sure, it amplified Afterall’s work of attempting to de-centre contemporary art discourse from Western paradigms as primary anchorage, and of rethinking its idiomaticity by engaging with multiple trans-regional perspectives previously repressed or ignored by mainstream art discourses. Regarding our relationship with Southeast Asia, the most visible effect of these conversations were features on artists Yee I-Lann (Issue 45), Lee Wen (46), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (47), Thao Nguyên Phan (47), as well as contextual essays by Yin Ker on Burmese contemporary (46), and by Vuth Lyno on Phnom Penh’s White Building (50), among others.
Online session of ‘Terms and Conditions of Art Writing and Publishing in Southeast Asia’ Writing Workshops, 2021.
More recently, our engagement with Southeast Asia has revolved around pedagogy and the transmission of our work as editors, researchers, writers and publishers. In collaboration with Thanavi Chotpradit (Silpakorn University, Bangkok), Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez (University of the Philippines, Diliman), Brigitta Isabella (KUNCI Study Forum and Collective, Yogyakarta), Vuth Lyno (Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh), Simon Soon (University of Malaya, Malaysia) and the Singapore-based journal Southeast of Now, my colleagues Wing Chan, David Morris and myself have been conducting a series of art writing workshops, working together with a cohort of writers, researchers, curators, art workers based in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam. Funded by a British Academy International Writing Workshop Grant, a first iteration took place fully online in 2021. Thanks to a successful second funding scheme, a second iteration will be held both online and with a three-day intensive workshop facilitated with Sa Sa Art Projects and Dambaul reading room in Phnom Penh in July 2024.
This writing workshop series is designed to address fundamental questions related to research and publishing, including methodologies, archives, modes of writing and editing, issues of labour and funding. In addition to its commitment to mentoring and nurturing emerging voices, it is also a testament to current dynamic processes that speak to the region’s identity. On the one hand, being mindful of the fact that the region is made of different local ecosystems opens up to an expanded understanding of forms of writing, discourses and knowledge production about contemporary art. This acknowledges a diversity of epistemes, languages, forms and formats with regards to the (im-)possibility of acts of translation.
On the other hand, while reckoning with the colonial imagination that underpins Southeast Asia as a regional identity and the desire to understand it as a whole, engaging with its inherent cultural hybridity, its kaleidoscopic-like composition, and acknowledging both differences and continuities across its various localities is a way to engage with its reality. The latter is not defined by a geopolitical map, but rather produced through our desires for polyphony and for troubling the laws of genres to produce new discourses and imaginaries for the Southeast Asia of tomorrow.
This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.
2Ibid.
3Esche and Lewis, "Afterword: The End of Utopia", Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Pilot Issue 0, 1998–99, 110–13.
4Adeena Mey, ‘Foreword’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 55–56, 2023, 5.
5This has been synthesised in a report we commissioned in 2019 from writer Hussein Mitha: "Afterall Back Catalogue Reading Report", 2019, unpublished.
About the Writer
Adeena Mey is an editor, researcher and curator based at the Afterall Research Centre, Central St Martins, University of the Arts London. His publications and curatorial projects engage with contemporary art and the history of exhibitions, artists’ film and video, non-Western epistemologies, and their intersections.
