Calling for Art Submissions for a special issue of Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics on Abolitionist Feminisms
What are the impacts and challenges of carceral systems/logics on racialized, poor, and criminalized women, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people? Carceral systems structure and secure a racist and sexist world; legacies of abolitionist feminisms have created insurgent possibilities that dismantle those systems and invent new forms of relationality. How can art be a tool and a site for this dismantling, this invention? For our upcoming special issue, we’re looking for art that engages with the themes of gender and carcerality–we’re looking for abolitionist feminist art.
The voices of artists, and the unique insights enabled by artistic engagement, are integral to abolitionist resistance. This includes responding to existing systems of oppression, uncovering resistant forms of lifemaking, and imagining transformative futures. In Abolition Journal, we aim to include art as abolitionist praxis, recognizing art as a central and powerful tool for re-making the world. This is a specific acknowledgement that academia (and also the written word, with whatever cultural understandings the primacy of literacy implies) doesn’t have a monopoly on producing or representing knowledge. Art is part of the critical presence-making project of abolition: abolition is made possible by, and is impossible without, art.
Recognizing that the best movement-relevant work unfolds in both official movement spaces and within communities from which social movements emerge, the journal aims to support and feature artists whose work represents and amplifies insights from these locations of resistance. We invite submissions by artists whose individual practice, themes or interventions meaningfully engage with feminism and abolition. We understand ‘art’ broadly to include many different forms and media: painting, video, drawing, performance, poetry, multi-media, and documentary, among others.
Works accepted for the pages of the journal will be printed in grayscale. Images will be in full color in our online, open-access form.
The Abolition Collective is offering artists a modest honorarium of $100 for use of their work in this issue.
Work by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated artists will be prioritized.
More on this special issue: https://abolitionjournal.org/abolitionist-feminisms-a-call-for-submissions/
Please send us:
A short (200-300 word) artist statement and up to five works in pdf format. For video works, please send us the vimeo/Youtube/website link(s).
Feel free to provide a link to your website or portfolio in addition to these five images, but submissions sending only a website link cannot be considered.
Please send your submissions to [email protected]
Deadline: December 30, 2020.
We look forward to receiving your work!
[The featured image above is “ÇAPULCULAR BAHÇESI (FLAG)” by Amanda Priebe]