CHAPTER TWO

Chapter Two: April 2024-July 2025

We are launching our second Chapter of programming next week! We are incredibly grateful to all the artists, writers, organizers, and supporters who participated in the first chapter, which ran from January 2023 through March 2024, and brought together four exhibitions and discursive programming, as well as performances and films, that explore the limitations of language, potentials of voice, and transmission of sound from a sociopolitical perspective. 


Chapter Two will run from April 2024 through July 2025, and brings together artists and collectives that explore varying communal structures of intervention and support, as experiments towards liberatory futures. Engaging the themes of alternative kinship structures, anarchism, and collective resistance, artists foreground collaborative processes that draw from feminist, queer, and punk networks and organizing strategies, while emphasizing the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman beings. This chapter features varied research undertakings and contexts that include: the possibilities of community within underground party scenes, the politics of technology, critical archival practices that surface historical absences, grassroots resistance efforts against ecological devastation and contamination, among others. Together, the featured projects challenge the colonial logics of individualism, territory, and extraction. They look towards alternative histories and cosmologies that contain new imaginaries of being-in-relation, and in commitment to further approaches and structures of accountability, creativity, and support. Additionally, JOAN will produce a publication as part of select projects through our small imprint, Autograph, that offers a different entry point to artists’ research processes.

We begin on Thursday, April 4th with Ron Athey‘s two-part program: The Eleusinian Projector: Ron Athey’s Post-Porn Mythologies, Memorials, and the launch of t.S/Z, with participants Dominic Johnson, Pony Lee, and Christos Tejada. The evening intersects Greek mythology and post-porn aesthetics with sound and action experiments. 

On May 11th, we will open The Wreck and not the Story of the Wreck, a solo exhibition by Oakland and Puerto Rico-based artist Sofía Córdova. The project presents an extensive body of work that looks to science fiction as alternative revolutionary history. It addresses ecological destruction and collaboration, and the mythic and organizational mechanisms humans employ in making sense of the unimaginable. 

More information about our upcoming programs will be provided soon. We look forward to seeing you soon at JOAN!