Issue 14 evolved over the last year in conversation with guest editors Amara Antilla and Sandra Teitge about their exhibition Wild Frictions: The Politics and Poetics of Interruption at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati and Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, and functions as an accompanying (anti-) catalogue and reader.

In parallel to the preparations for the exhibition and program, we worked with Amara and Sandra to approach a selection of the artists to produce projects and content for our pages and commission essays by some of the writers and thinkers who were foundational to the exhibitionís theoretical framework.

Wild Frictions: The Politics and Poetics of Interruption 

Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
April 9–September 19, 2021

Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin
June 25–August 22, 2021

Attentive to the ways in which artists monitor, contemplate, and intervene in societies as they change, Wild Frictions brings together works that reflect some of the anxieties, disruptions, and tensions that arose or intensified during 2020. Using sculpture, text, video, sound, digital media, and performance, the artists in the exhibition apply strategies of interruption and obstruction to a critique of the grand narratives, oppressive systems, and unconscious, sometimes violent, organizing rituals that characterize everyday life. The presented works, though made predominantly prior to the pandemic and the social uprisings of the past year, resonate with feelings of disruption, alienation, and loss of control associated with shutdowns, quarantines, and economic pauses. –Amara Antilla /Sandra Teitge

Special thanks to Rebecca Roman whose administrative work was instrumental to the issue, and to exhibition designer Louise Borinski for her collaboration on our cover design.