Afterall

OUT NOW: Issue 58 – Geo-Imaginaries of Technology

Conceived during a period of rapid and often unchecked technological development, the current issue of Afterall aims at reconsidering and expanding our understanding of what ‘technology’ is. A multifarious category, we approach technology here as always embedded within and informed by the particular conditions of the geopolitical, cultural and environmental contexts in which it is used and developed. Through this situated approach we hope to move away from a Eurocentric concept of technology and to make room instead for the multiple perspectives which shape what philosopher Yuk Hui calls ‘technodiversity’.

Exploring an array of disparate technologies – ranging from AI and cyborgs to bioengineering and surfing – as well as diverse geocultural contexts, the issue includes contributions from Li Qi , Ingrid Pui Yee Chu , Christin Yu , Filipa Ramos , Joël Vacheron , Nicolas Vamvouklis and Dorota Jagoda Michalska. It features artists Lawrence Lek , Lee Bul .bul , Revital Cohen .e.v.i.t.a.l.c.o.h.e.n and Tuur Van B***n .vanbalen , Sojung Jun, Im Heung-soon , Flaka Haliti and Kateryna Lysovenko.

On the occasion of the publication of this issue, we have made freely available on our website ‘Natural Causes: The Deaths and Afterlives of Art at the Digital Precipice’ by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and ‘A Method with Plasticity: Sojung Jun in Conversation with Nav Haq & Adeena Mey’.

Our third episode in this series is with Mike Fok , an Yixing teapot collector and consultant. Ha Bik Chuen was known as a collector and hoarder of all sorts of things such as books, photographs, documents, to name but these. Reflecting on the drive of collectors and hoarders and in an associative move that expands from Ha to other collecting practices in Hong Kong, Afterall editor spoke to Mike Fok about his lifelong passion for Yixing teapots and Chinese tea culture. Mike shares how his journey began more than twenty years ago, when a taste of aged pu’er tea sparked his curiosity. The search for good tea soon led him to teaware, and eventually to the world of Yixing clay teapots – renowned for their craftsmanship and unique brewing qualities.

He recalls starting out in Hong Kong’s markets and on early online platforms, before realising that much of the best material had already been collected in the 1980s and ’90s. His quest took him further afield, to mainland China, Japan and Thailand, where he encountered antique teapots and learned from handling real examples. For Mike, using teapots daily – washing, touching and brewing – is the key to understanding their qualities, much like testing different sound systems with music, a learning process akin to how Ha taught himself to make motherboards through tactile experiences.

Follow Mike on instagram at

🔗in bio

Our second episode in our podcast series in collaboration with .hk is with and from the Yogyakarta-based collective Hyphen— . Founded in 2011, Hyphen— is a research initiative that puts forward curiosity and common wellbeing as the estuary of artistic practices. Their work is most often focused on practices from and in Indonesia, bringing historical legacies into dialogue with contemporary concerns, work that has taken various forms, from exhibitions and publications to jam sessions and radio broadcasts. For this episode, Grace and Intan are in conversation with Afterall research fellow and editor David Morris. We explore how their work as part of Hyphen— extends some of the questions of Reframing Strangeness on different practices of history: how and why do we remember? How are creative legacies cared for, carried and brought into the present?

Stay tuned for Hyphen—’s Danarto research on hyphen.wed.id.

Commercial
‘From Jerusalem to Armageddon’ from Nayamullah Station. The book can be downloaded for free via Project MUSE.

Musics
‘Arena Semangka’ by Nayamullah

Homemade tunes by David Morris and baby Maia

New Writing series

We’re excited to launch New Writing, an online publishing platform that centres new voices in the field of art writing dedicated to complexifying narratives around art in a global context. The contributors are part of the community of writers we have been building via our writing workshops series supported by since 2021. The workshops have been co-facilitated by Wing Chan , Thanavi Chotpradit , Brigitta Isabella, Trâm Lương .luong , Adeena Mey , David Morris, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez , Simon Soon and Vuth Lyno .

Visit our website to read the latest articles: ‘Changes in the Cambodian Contemporary Art Scene and tiSamjort’s Community-Centred Vision’ by Danielle Khleang and Lyna Kourn , ‘The Passive Gaze’ by Roma Estrada and ‘A Feast of Sound’, ​​Nguyễn Trinh Thi in Conversation with Hùng Dương .

We welcome these new voices and appreciate the fresh perspectives and questions they have brought to us. Stay tuned for updates on this platform.

🔗in bio.

Podcast series: Afterall x Para Site, Reframing Strangeness
Episodes airing between July and September 2025

In collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong .hk , as part of the exhibition ‘Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs’ (2025), Afterall have initiated a series of conversations with artists, curators and scholars. The exhibition reframes Ha’s motherboards from functional tools to aesthetic objects. We depart from Ha’s unconventional printing practice to generate new interpretations and intergenerational conversations, extending from Hong Kong to the world beyond.

Focused on Hong Kong-based artist Ha Bik Chuen’s printmaking practice, ‘Reframing Strangeness’ stages a selection of his ‘motherboards’, a term Ha coined to designate the printing plates he labouriously assembled from wood and other found materials to produce over 3,000 editioned collagraphs. In this first episode, Afterall editors Elisa Adami and Wing Chan talk to the exhibition’s curator Michelle Wun Ting Wong . We explore how the materials the motherboards are made of can help us read Hong Kong’s history from the 1970s and its changing landscape.

🔗in bio

📕Out now: Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea by Janine Armin

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, Sung Hwan Kim parses and reanimates the archival and embodied traces left by undocumented Korean migrants who on their way to the US at the turn of the twentieth century took up residency in Hawai‘i. Comprising multiple chapters (some still in progress), this ongoing film and installation series unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’. In her speculative inquiry, Janine Armin illuminates the stories of non-sovereign coexistence between indigenous and migrant communities that Kim’s work points us towards.

This is the fiftieth title in our One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.

📗Also available now: a Korean edition has been published by Hyunsil Publishing . The book was translated by Jinjinni Han and Maya West.

🔗 in bio.

NoteBook – In the Fabric of Resistance: Htein Lin’s ‘Escape’ at Ikon Gallery

MRes Art: Exhibition Studies student Ana Luisa Cubas reviews ‘Htein Lin: Escape’ at Ikon Gallery Birmingham and discusses how Lin’s practice, rooted in Myanmar’s political turmoil – from prison-made paintings to cast hands of political prisoners – navigates political resistance and collective suffering.

🔗in bio

[Image: Htein Lin, Biology of Art (1999). Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.]

Talk: Writing and Publishing Ecosystems

14th April 2025, 3-5pm
National Taipei University of Education (NTUE)

On 14 April Afterall researchers David Morris and Wing Chan will give a talk exploring recent and upcoming research and publishing activities of the Exhibition Histories series, ‘Writing and Publishing Ecosystems: Afterall’s Exhibition Histories Series’. The talk will take place between 3-5pm, hosted by and NTUE’s Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art.

Afterall at Hawai‘i Triennial 2025 ALOHA NŌ

2–4 April, Writing Workshop at HT25 HUB Taro Patch Community Space
5 April, Book Launch at HT25 HUB and Native Books

Editors Elisa Adami and Wing Chan will facilitate a three-day writing workshop as part of the Hawai‘i Triennial 2025 ALOHA NŌ curated by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Binna Choi and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu. With local practitioners we will explore how to write art hi/stories that are rooted in place and that decentre anthropocentric perspectives. The workshops resonate with HT25’s focus on the practice of aloha ʻāina (or love of the land) as a means of claiming indigenous sovereignty and nurturing a deep connectivity to the oceanic environment.

We will also launch our latest One Work book, Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, with author Janine Armin

More information in bio

Out now: Issue 57 – Palestine and the World

Afterall Journal Issue 57 ‘Palestine and the World’ is premised on the intention to examine some of the collectives included in lumbung one and their work with the attention we deem they deserve but have not been given yet. If only three of the nine contributions in this issue directly engage with projects in lumbung one, the escalation of the attacks and destruction of Gaza since October 2023 have magnified, retrospectively and in horrific ways, the West’s resistance to, if not its attempts to suppress subaltern and Global South worldviews that had played out in Kassel. Following lumbung one’s cascading logic, this issue then branches out, on the one hand, towards further engagements with Palestinian art and visual culture as a way to fend off ongoing erasure and, on the other, towards new understandings of geographies of art practices and histories.

This issue includes contributions from Haseeb Ahmed, Janine Armin , Kegham Djeghalian Jr , Melissa Gronlund , Han Mengyun , Hazem Harb , Sung Hwan Kim , Furqat Palvan-Zade ,Julian Ross ,Tokyo Reels, Hanan Toukan, and Xin Wang .

On the occasion of the publication of this issue, we have made four essays freely available on our website. They are Melissa Gronlund’s ‘Hazem Harb: “My Heart Is Still in Gaza”’, Kegham Djeghalian Jr’s ‘Unboxing Gaza’, Julian Ross’s ‘Tokyo Reels: The Solidarity Image’ and Hanan Toukan’s ‘Refusing Epistemic Violence: Guernica-Gaza and the “German Context”’.

Links in bio!

🎂  Staff Picks: Camille Crichlow 📖

For our 25th anniversary, we are inviting current and past members of Afterall’s staff to select their favourite articles or chapters across our publications. Throughout the course of the year, we will republish and make public several texts from our journal and book series!

This month, we have invited our project coordinator Camille Crichlow to share her favourite text. Outside of her work at Afterall, Camille is pursuing a PhD in Race, Ethnicity, and Postcolonial Studies at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at University College London.

👉 ‘Holding Hands with Ghosts: A Conversation with Paul Gilroy’, originally published for Afterall ArtSchool’s Black Atlantic Museum project

In this interview, Camille interviews her PhD supervisor Paul Gilory, on the 30th anniversary of his seminal book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. In the interview, they discuss how The Black Atlantic has been remobilised, appropriated, and repurposed for the demands of contemporary life, and explore the potentialities of its future.

🔗 in the bio to read Camille’s pick!

[Photo: Portrait of Paul Gilroy.]
Image: Photograph by Eddie Otchere/The Observer

🛍️ Order a copy of MARG1N!

is an independent Southeast Asian film magazine that celebrates and bridges together passionate writers, artists, and filmmakers through the lenses of marginalised cinema.

We have several copies of their first issue on hand in our office. This issue collates conversations between friends on piracy raised the ethical dilemmas of stealing, saving, and sharing.

📩 Email Adeena at [email protected] to buy your copy!