Description:Q5912

Shanzhai Lyric: “FREEDON (and on and on)” exhibition catalogue w/ Inappropriate Landscape first edition artist cover, 2019

“FREEDON (and on and on)” is a body of research examining the contemporary conditions that sustain the invisibilizing of women’s labor—from fashion production in factories to data processing in IT industries. Drawing upon Marxist feminist discourse, the work considers errant T-shirt phrases as evidencing an unauthorized collective creative process that slyly refutes the logic of individual ownership, accumulation, and enclosure.

Over the course of the year in residence, respondents were invited to consult Shanzhai Lyric’s growing archive of shanzhai (counterfeit) garments and to contemplate shanzhai tactics within a lineage of feminist strategies of everyday resistance that often go unrecognized. “FREEDON (and on and on)” assembles this accumulating set of traces, threads, and interventions alongside selected ephemera from the Special Collections at the Women’s Art Library. Weaving together fragments and copies from the Library in conversation with the hybrid idiom of shanzhai lyrics, “FREEDON (and on and on)” finds in both counterfeit t-shirt text and subversive modes of feminist art practice a shared gesture to transgress the norms of individual authorship and move instead towards a joyous, cacophonous reclaiming of the commons.

Featuring an excerpt from a new text commissioned by Press & Fold magazine, interviews with respondents Silvia Bombardini, Aurelia Guo, and Joni Zhu, and a complete set of references from the Women’s Art Library.

Created as a catalogue and artist edition for “FREEDON (and on and on),” an exhibition at the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths in London culminating Shanzhai Lyric’s year as the inaugural Archive-in-Residence.

Artist edition cover: Inappropriate Landscape, first edition of 100, temporary tattoo paper & inkjet, 2019. Book design: 0ffsh0.re Published by Display Distribute with support from Life Sport.