12 May 2008

Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art

Cover Image: Neil Stewart

Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art http://www.ctrlp-artjournal.org

Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art (And Now China? Issue No. 11 March-June 2008)

A survey issue, its editors ask: what place is there for critical voices within current hegemonic interests in China and contemporary Chinese Art? In light of China-as-hegemonic force, it has become crucial to uphold the idea of the production of culture as site of struggle over power and meaning: as site of discursive formations and closures by dominant forces and by cultural producers marginalized and excluded precisely because of their project to resist, contest, evade capture and assimilation by such dominant forces. Oppositional-meaning making is now the lot and responsibility and perhaps a fatal space of those who continue to be consigned to the margins.

But while no new epistemic change has occurred, independent voices are much more difficult to sustain with China on everyone’s horizon. With Chinese artists arrogating the language of resistance coined during the advent of post-colonialism, exclusion is now effected by a double-silencing. Rejecting assimilation or eluding capture means devising a whole new language of resistance. How is this language to be shaped? Who will now speak from the margins when margins and centres are already a too-appropriated site?

Contributions to this survey are from Hans Ulrich Obrist, Katy Deepwell, Saskia Sassen, Ken Lum, Thomas Berghuis, Neferti Tadiar, Jonathan Beller, Kelly Baum, David Cross,  Patrick Flores, Oscar Ho Hing-kay, Lee Weng Choy, Andrew Maerkle, Caroline Turner, Eliza Tan, Neil Stewart. Essays are by Sonya Dyer "Why China Now” and Marian Pastor Roces "The Dimensions of the Long March."

Featured too are works by Ken Lum (Homage to Chen Zhen), Cornford and Cross (The End of History),  Neil Stewart (Shanghai) and Lee Wen (More China Than You).

Issue No. 11 is produced in partnership with the Chelsea Programme, Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.

Ctrl+P was founded in 2006 by Judy Freya Sibayan and Flaudette May V. Datuin as a response to the dearth of critical art publications in the Philippines. It is produced in Manila and published on the Web 4 times a year. Circulated as a PDF file via the Net, it is a downloadable and printable publication that takes advantage of the digital medium’s fluidity, immediacy, ease and accessibility. Ctrl+P provides a testing ground for a whole new culture and praxis of publishing that addresses very specifically the difficulties of publishing art writing and criticism in the Philippines.  It took part  in documenta 12 magazines project, a journal of 97 journals from all over the world (http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/).

Next issue will appear in July 2008 focusing on art archives and archiving.

Issue editors: Judy Freya Sibayan and Erika Tan

Editorial Board: Flaudette May V. Datuin, Varsha Nair, Judy Freya Sibayan

For free subscription online, email Ctrl+P at ctrl_p_artjournal@yahoo.com.