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Decolonize This Place

MTL+

Aida Youth Center—Palestine, AKA Exit, Al-Awda NY, Black Poets Speak Out, Bronx Not For Sale, BUFU (By Us For Us) Chinatown Arts Brigade, Common Practice New York, Direct Action Front for Palestine, El Salón, Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), Hyperallergic, Insurgent Poets Society, Jive Poetic, Mahina Movement, NYC Stands for Standing Rock Organizing Committee, Queens Anti-Gentrification Network, Take Back The Bronx, Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, Wing On Wo & Co., Woman Writers Of Color

Artists Space Books & Talks55 Walker StreetNew York, NY 10013

Saturday, September 17, 2016, 6-9pmSeptember 17 – December 17, 2016Monday – Sunday

The Friends of Artists SpaceThe Artists Space Program FundCommon Practice New York

press@decolonizethisplace.org+1 212 226 3970

Decolonize This PlaceSeptember 17 – December 17, 2016

Opening Saturday, September 17, 2016, 6-9pm

The last few years have seen a sharp resurgence of social movements. Artists and cultural workers are playing a leading role in these initiatives. Decolonization, not only of the mind, but also of land, institutions and social relationships, has emerged as a common, sweeping imperative. In direct dialogue with these new waves of active politics, Decolonize This Place will convert Artists Space Books & Talks at 55 Walker Street into a shared resource for art, research, organizing, and action.

Join the collective MTL+ (Nitasha Dhillon, Amin Husain, Yates McKee, Andrew Ross) this Saturday, September 17th for the launch and orientation party for Decolonize This Place, featuring DJ sets and performances by traxsessions (Devin Kenny, Jesse Hlebo and special guests). Organized at the invitation of Common Practice New York, this three-month project will engage a wide circle of collaborators across the arts, academia, and grassroots activism.

Collaborators whose participation is confirmed include Aida Youth Center—Palestine, AKA Exit, Al-Awda NY, Black Poets Speak Out, Bronx Not For Sale, BUFU (By Us For Us), Chinatown Arts Brigade, Common Practice New York, Direct Action Front for Palestine, El Salón, Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), Hyperallergic, Insurgent Poets Society, Jive Poetic, Mahina Movement, NYC Stands for Standing Rock Organizing Committee, Queens Anti-Gentrification Network, Take Back The Bronx, Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, Wing On Wo & Co., Woman Writers Of Color, with many more in the works.

Decolonize This Place will be informed by five lines of political inquiry: Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Free Palestine, Global Wage Workers and De-Gentrification. The events, workshops, and campaigns hosted at 55 Walker Street will be aimed at connecting these strands, and helping to build bridges between organizations that tend to focus on a single issue. Decolonize This Place will prioritize the presence and work of people of color and will be inclusive of queer, immigrant, and disabled participants—challenging the white supremacy that continues to characterize the economies and institutions of art through the rearrangement of relationships and desires and the redistribution of power.

For Immediate Release

Artists Space Books & Talks will be open seven days a week and will be set up as an action-oriented space. At the core of its process is a weekly program of public events, with collaborators coming from across the five boroughs to anchor assemblies, trainings, skill-shares, readings, screenings, meals, and healing sessions. There will be a specially equipped zone—including a print station and a kitchen—for artmaking, custom-designed to feed into organized political actions in and around the city. The banners and posters produced will be displayed in the gallery and used in actions citywide, closing a feedback loop between exhibition and demonstration.

Just as Artists Space itself is transformed into a self-regulated commons, Decolonize This Place will “strike art” to “liberate art from itself”—in the words of MTL+ member Nitasha Dhillon: “not to end art, but to unleash its powers of direct action and radical imagination.” The fluid intersection between grassroots organizing and creative activism is key to this process. When communities make artwork, and artists become organizers, the normal hierarchy of artistic production falls apart.

Through its three-month duration, Decolonize This Place will question how the alternative arts organization, pressured to justify ever-escalating real estate values, can re-interpret its traditional function as holdout within an art world increasingly quarried for ultra-luxury assets. At a time when so many neighborhoods see art crudely utilized to drive gentrification, what further models of community engagement can nonprofit institutions devise?

The members of MTL+ have a long record of arts-driven activism in the post-Occupy milieu. These include initiatives such as the journal Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, Direct Action Front for Palestine, Rolling Jubilee, Strike Debt, and Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.). In May 2016, members of MTL+ brought together more than 150 artists and activists for a protest-action at the Brooklyn Museum entitled Decolonize This Place, targeting two exhibitions—This Place and Agitprop!—which utilized arts and artists to normalize the ongoing displacement of populations, from Brooklyn to Palestine.

A website with further information, documentation and a calendar of daily activities will be launched on September 17th at www.decolonizethisplace.org. The first event, Casbah, will be a 50th anniversary screening of Battle of Algiers (1966), with a conversation organized by Sohail Daulatzai and MTL+, on Sunday, September 18th.

Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain are founding members of MTL, a collective that combines research, aesthetics and organizing. MTL is a founder of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, and a founding member of Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Direct Action Front for Palestine, Strike Debt, Rolling Jubilee and Decolonial Cultural Front. MTL is also a core member of Gulf Labor Coalition. Currently, MTL is working on a film on Palestine in post-production titled, On This Land (onthislandfilm.wordpress.com).

Yates McKee is an art historian whose work has appeared in venues including October, Grey Room, Oxford Art Journal, e-flux Journal, Texte zur Kunst, South Atlantic Quarterly, and The Nation. He is the author of Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Verso Books, 2016)

Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He has authored and edited more than twenty books, including, most recently, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal; Bird on Fire: Lessons From the World’s Least Sustainable City; and Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor In Precarious Times. He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera, and was a founding member of Occupy Student Debt Campaign, Gulf Labor Coalition, Strike Debt, and Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.).

Common Practice New York is an advocacy group that fosters research and discussionsabout the role of small-scale arts organizations in New York City. The members of CommonPractice New York are Anthology Film Archives, Artists Space, Bidoun, Blank Forms,Danspace Project, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), ISSUE Project Room, The Kitchen, LightIndustry, Participant Inc, Primary Information, Printed Matter, Recess, SculptureCenter,Storefront for Art and Architecture, Triple Canopy, and White Columns. Common PracticeNew York draws inspiration from Common Practice, London, an affiliated advocacy groupworking for the recognition and fostering of the small-scale contemporary visual arts sectorin England, and founder of the Common Practice Network.

Founded in 1972 in Downtown New York, Artists Space has for four decades successfully contributed to changing the landscape for contemporary art–lending support to emerging artists and emerging ideas alike. Artists Space has been the site of provocative discussion within contemporary debate, from the postmodern image (Douglas Crimp’s Pictures, 1977) to identity politics (Adrian Piper’s It’s Just Art, 1981), to institutional critique (Michael Asher’s Untitled, 1988) to the AIDS crisis (Nan Goldin’s Witnesses: Against our Vanishing, 1989). More recently, conversations around Working Artists for the Greater Economy

(W.A.G.E.), Suhail Malik’s On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art and Strike Debt have taken place at Artists Space. Artists Space has introduced a number of artists to a wider public, among them Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Bloom, John Baldessari, Jack Smith, Andrea Fraser, Haim Steinbach, Tim Rollins, Lari Pittman, Group Material, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons, Fred Wilson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mike Kelley, Judith Barry, Jenny Holzer, Danh Vo, Laura Poitras, Hito Steyerl, and Cameron Rowland.

MTL+Decolonize This Place 1, 2016Image courtesy MTL+

MTL+Decolonize This Place 2, 2016Image courtesy MTL+

Millions March NYCBlack Lives Matter banner, Brooklyn, December 13, 2014Image courtesy Millions March NYC

Action at the Guggenheim Museum, April 27, 2016Image courtesy Global Ultra Luxury Faction and the Illuminator

Gulf Labor action at The Guggenheim Museum, March 29, 2014Image courtesy Global Ultra Luxury Faction/Gulf Labor

Gulf Labor amend their own posterVenice Biennale, 2015Image courtesy Gulf Labor

Decolonial Cultural FrontDump The Fine Art of Gentrification, 2016Image courtesy Decolonial Cultural Front

Decolonize This Place protest outside the Brooklyn Museum, May 7, 2016Image courtesy MTL. Photo: Benjamin Young

MTLWall, Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2012Published in Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, Summer 2012Image courtesy MTL

MTLStill from On This Land, 2016Image courtesy MTL

Protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, August 20, 2014Image courtesy MTL. Photo: Jeff Brandt

MTLArab Spring Newspapers, 2011Still from videoImage courtesy MTL

Cover from Yates McKee, Strike Art (Verso, 2016)Image courtesy the author and Verso