Interview with Hamja Ahsan
by Anna lina litz
Anna Lina Litz: Can you tell me about the program you are curating for the Radical Accessibility Studium Generale at the Rietveldt Academy?
Hamja Ahsan: My book Shy Radicals has inspired a trail of other artworks, other collectives around the world which take concepts from the book and vocabulary. Among these is the artist Ipek Burçak, who's from Turkey and based in Germany. The utopic homeland I imagined, called Aspergistan, makes an appearance in her book The Autistic Turn. Ipek was based in Kassel in Germany and just wrote to me randomly. So it's not the case that I'm curating or commissioning, it's sort of self-generative, almost cellular. Sarah Browne made this beautiful film called Echo’s Bones set in the landscape of Ireland with younger people with autism and she's got a story from Samuel Beckett, rereading Samuel Beckett via neurodiversity, which I find quite interesting. We'll be speaking together about all the landscapes which appear in all these various works. There's taking landscapes in the imaginary way, in the virtual way…
AL: I have the book [Shy Radicals] here and I've been reading it over the past days. I recognize a lot of the resentments that you describe in it, especially after graduating from university and realizing I have to market myself and all that. I was wondering, because a lot of art institutions are starting to work with neurodivergence as a topic and we've also been doing it for three years. You have a section about curating a film program in the book, but how do you imagine cultural events and talks to ideally look in Aspergistan?
HA: I don't fit into some of the social networking of contemporary art. I generally don't go to private viewings, I don't like open ceremonies, the sort of ostentatiousness of big biennials… Aspergistan has existed in me probably since the days of playground bullying and imagining in your heart that there could be another place. I find the aspect of the noisy playground sort of reoccurs in other places and also hierarchies. The book presents a serious utopic constitution, but within that it also draws on the language of teen movies. I re-watched old Winona Ryder films and 80s teen movies to look at the power structures, and those replicate themselves in the art world. There is a mean girls table in the art world. I was attracted to art because I liked the silences of galleries and this self-absorption, something that was outside of the noisy playground. You'll see it again in Sarah's film, when the children engage in parallel play. They walk around the basketball court in their own way and find those torturous and depressive aspects of the high school experience which also replicate themselves in the art world and the workplace.
AL: I was also thinking in a very practical sense, since we are organizing an event, a talk, how do we do it right so that it's actually a pleasant experience?
HA: I think it will be nice because of the space, with the cats, that automatically makes it different.
white in conversation with Hamja
AL: This event will not be about Shy Radicals. You proposed Trauma, solidarity and chicken as the topic.
HA: I was in documenta15 and it was probably one of my most suppressive experiences racially and institutionally. There are still many unresolved problems within German society around McCarthyism and repression and xenophobia, and all that came together in documenta. I feel like my side of the story has never been fully told. There was an attempt to create a counter-hegemonic narrative of documenta15 at Framer Framed in Amsterdam where I was spoken about but wasn't allowed to speak for myself, so I find that ethically wrong, and the bits where they spoke about me were also cut from the online publishing of it for whatever reason. And it's not just the art world, you can look at the way Germany treated Greta Thunberg, you had like six different newspapers trying to ruin her and damage her, although she's far more resilient than that. I find her quite a heroic figure.
I don’t like some of the new canon of neurodiversity, like Judy Singer who is credited with coining the term, although it’s far more contested and was developed through 90s internet forums. She’s an awful person, really racist, anti-muslim, just look at her twitter account. There’s the academic discourse around Nick Walker, Robert Chapman…but I love Greta Thunberg. And the sort of vernacular use of neurodiversity is more about an intuitive sense of friendship between people. I've certainly developed friendships and social networks in a different way through that term. Some of my friends organize neurodivergent gatherings, but they have no idea about this academic discourse. It's almost a unity of people who experience disadvantage. In terms of employment, income, there's a disproportionality of low pay. My friends who I bond with are often people who didn't develop in a straight line in the way others did. And just not feeling collective shame and stigma for things like never having earned an average adult salary. Although that is the case for 99 percent of artists anyway.
I’ve also been thinking about creating a speculative organization called Neurodivergents Against Genocide and Apartheid, spelling NAGA, because during the current genocide in Gaza there were murders — Mohammed Bhar was probably the most high profile, he was a young man with autism and down syndrome who was attacked by an IDF dog. He was actually quite trusting towards the dog and it ended up killing him. Other cases are the killings of Fulla Masalmeh and Eyad al-Hallaq, with no accountability. Within the huge street mobilizations since the genocide unfolded, sometimes a million or half a million people, there are sub-groups, which is where NAGA would be situated. I used to actually cut and carry a big placard of Mohammed Bhar’s photograph across on the demo and write #autisticlivesmatter. I lost studio in October, so I have less space to make these things, but it's something I'd like to do for the future certainly, developing that into some sort of series of slogans and banners on those demos.
I unintentionally developed this huge collection archive of neurodiverse zines, which I represented again at the academy in Amsterdam recently. I realised oh, have I got the world's only and first neurodiversity zine archive? Probably yes! I also collected zines around ADHD and bipolar disorder, dysbraxia, the health service and diagnosis institutionalization…
AL: Yes, I heard that you left with a whole suitcase full of zines the last time um that you were around here. Where does your passion for the zine medium come from and what can people expect from the workshop that you're going to host with us?
HA: I've been collecting zines since the early 1990s. I made my first zine in 1994. It was inspired by a figure called Richey Edwards from the band Manic Street Preachers who retrospectively gets identified as autistic these days, but spoke about other forms of vulnerability, depression and eating disorders. He eventually disappeared in the mid-1990s and now he's declared dead, and that inspired a huge zine culture around him. He had quite a cult following. Also Riot Grrrl zines, because my brother got the first bikini kill album. So that was the first phase. And then zines had a revival in the last 10 years. I got back into zine culture maybe 10-15 years later in a big way, I did an art collective called Other Asias in London with an artist from Lahore in Pakistan and we made a zine. We did this project called Redo Pakistan which was a newspaper store traveling from city to city, and we made zines as part of that journey. Then I started applying back for zine fairs — it was still a 99% White-dominated space, even in 2009-10. I made friendships and deals with the handful of people of color I met in the zine fair, and then I did DIY Cultures that re-centered other oppressions not written into the zine fair. My brother was detained without trial under war on terror for a number of years and I was involved in the Guantanamo Bay detainees return home, and those things weren't written into some of these anarchist spaces. There's often this economic segregation, because artists often move into places of cheaper rent, which often tend to be migrant areas, so you see this pattern again in Queens or Brooklyn New York, so you have this large migrant community and this large art community, and so having affection for both worlds and also entrenched activist scenes..
Some people just haven't connected with that side of themselves, they got so into adulting that they forgot the love of drawing or playing, making the world more playful, but in a good, serious way. I feel like zines are all these various stages of life, like retirement, childhood, teen angst, and maybe a bit of grown-upness just to keep it running all at the same time. I find it quite endearing to meet older people who make their first zine. In Bradford zine fair one of the guys who ran it made his first zine at age 70. I've made a friend called Rahul, he’s been making zines uh in University Arts London, he’s in his 60s and he uses the zine culture — he's part of the staff network also very involved in a Palestine solidarity movement, and he's a trade unionist, so he's very much using his zines to make a more just world. And that's also the university I used to go to, so often things are very much tied to like managerialism, big grants, and maybe zines offer a more immediate and intuitive and improvised way of engagement.
AL: What connects you to the Netherlands?
HA: The Netherlands have been very important to me. I think it's quite a special place, there are these state-subsidized art book shops, so I met a print room in Rotterdam it's quite a special place and also Worm which I really like, so I've been part of Rotterdam zine camp several years and I actually gave a talk about neurodiversities and zines there quite recently. Karin, who runs print room I've called my adopted Dutch auntie. page not found have also been really good to me, they helped let me curate a season called Solitary Solidarity during the Covid crisis. I looked at artists in solitary confinement, and my brother was also in solitary confinement, so we did the screening of Herman's house and how artists and zine makers during the Covid pandemic and how they dealt with it. I invited Brett Blum from the Chicago uh Zine Collective, he was posting zines around the city during pandemic times and made a zine every day whilst under lockdown. We've also done events at Perdu in Amsterdam. An event called I Love Psychiatrists with the poet Jonathan Griffin and the poet Ashok Rami, we were just reflecting on the dead Kurt Cobain. In Utero by Nirvana that was the first album I ever bought and I also reflect a lot on Kurt Cobain's suicide even 30 years later because I remember it quite vividly at the time. There was also a Japanese group who developed the choreography based on the gestures from Shy Radicals. I've also been an artist in residence in at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht —
AL: Actually this morning I read the article you wrote at one point for the Metropolis M magazine.
HA: yeah I feel a bit strange because it's Ramadan now and I'm in a different place. I wrote that article and I think it's a good article and it's insightful - but I'm quite a spiritually fluctuating person. I left atheism in my 20s, but I still don't fit into various communities and I'm not the same person that wrote the article. I'm not saying I will not not be that person's article ever again.
I don't know what it is exactly, if I'm living in another country — the last time I was a fully practicing person was when I was alone in South Korea and then also when I was in the academy I was also quite isolated, which actually made me more motivated to be observant and practicing. I don't know why that is, maybe some deep-seated psychological reason. I think people say it in a negative way, but I don't view that as a bad thing because I think the only thing universal to all cultures is everyone is lacking in something. Everyone does have something imbalanced or a color that's missing from the palette, so if I was maybe living in Saudi Arabia I wouldn't be practicing just to balance that space out, but if I was living in France I would probably be very practicing to balance out some of the excesses of the state secularism. In London there are a million Muslims, so…
Metropolis M asked me to write a follow-up article and they're very interested in my documenta experience. I started writing that article and I sort of had a breakdown — when I was at Documenta, for the first time I felt the rise of fascism which is now 20% of the electorate. I would get a flood of hatred every single day. And there's no institutional mechanism of people listening or people representing your experiences. I still feel very aggrieved and injured by the whole thing.The next documenta cycle will be in 2027, and there are already discussions around whether Germany is really the place where artists can really test ideas. A very high percentage, I think even a fifth of the audience of Documenta, three quarters of a million people at the last one, is from the Netherlands. And the Netherlands is quite an important forum for having that discussion. That was part of the reason I couldn't finish the article, I don't know, there's fragments, broken fragments in like various podcasts and vlogs of this very traumatic experience, but I think there's some complicity in some of the institutions upholding the dominant narrative. It's still something I feel the immediate need to speak about. And it hasn't ended for me because there was an attempted lawsuit against me.
So they first tried to, the new CEO shut down one of my Instagram accounts and threatened me. It gets really ridiculous. So the curators of Documenta, ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective, some of whom are based in the Netherlands, like Reza and Iswanto, they liked one of my Instagram posts on an Instagram account, that was it. And it's just some Arabs singing “Palestine will be free” in the streets of Berlin. And that generated something like two dozen headlines in the German press just because they liked this post. And then the Documenta's institution wrote this really long statement where they, I don't know, somehow linked us to ISIS and Hamas, which is awful.
And then they had to apologize, unlike my post. And did a whole public relations thing just about liking a post. And I feel like what happens in Germany could be exported elsewhere.
So the first thing that happened was the fascist party, the AFD, made this anti-BDS motion against boycott, divestment and sanctions, which the whole parliament adopted. And there was an attempt to introduce that into the UK. I don't know, I just don't see how an international arts space can function, expecting everyone to be in line with German foreign policy. And that being a prerequisite to doing anything. Everyone is being persecuted or cancelled to silence. There's this group called Archive of Silence, and it has like over 200 cancellations of people. I mean, the last person who was silenced at a really high profile level was the United Nations Special Rapporteur.
All my friends and people I've curated, I curated this German Jewish filmmaker, he's going through the courts now. Shardul Alon, who's someone I've worked with, the Bangladeshi curator, had the entire Biennial cancelled for a Palestine Facebook post. In some way, it's a royal honour, it's all the best people in the world. Like if you look at the people in Archive of Silence, like Laurie Anderson, Naomi Klein, all the best artists are being cancelled or silenced. Britain's not as bad as Germany, but I don't know. I feel like it's a very urgent thing that needs to be addressed.
The zine community has been quite supportive. So you have the resale printers, page masters, they give out free resale prints to Palestine activists. And also if you go to the student encampments in Goldsmith and other places, they always have a zine library. And zine making is also part of the activities on site resistance. I started a hashtag zines for Palestine in Germany, actually. One of the main zine fair was really pro genocide. And it was quite grim. And the person ended up trolling and like, I don't know, just attacking me. So even in the world of zines, this current crisis is reflected.
AL: I also wanted to ask about what initially drew you to fried chicken and why you wanted to celebrate it. Which I think the Metropolis M article goes into a little bit. And it was actually a bit sad to read, because it had this kind of hopeful tone about going to documenta.
HA: It’s quite sad. The whole thing's quite tragic. It's something you look forward to when you get selected. It's the peak of someone's career. And now it's turned into a bit of a prolonged nightmare. It hasn't ended. I got prosecuted and that hasn't ended. So I'm actually a bit worried. If you don't pay it, it turns into a prison sentence. I don't want to pay it because it's like giving money to someone who bullied you or your abuser. So it's just bullshit. So I don't know. I haven't got that type of money. And it just doesn't end because every week another person who I know personally is prosecuted or canceled or whatever. .
Hamja Ahsan: My book Shy Radicals has inspired a trail of other artworks, other collectives around the world which take concepts from the book and vocabulary. Among these is the artist Ipek Burçak, who's from Turkey and based in Germany. The utopic homeland I imagined, called Aspergistan, makes an appearance in her book The Autistic Turn. Ipek was based in Kassel in Germany and just wrote to me randomly. So it's not the case that I'm curating or commissioning, it's sort of self-generative, almost cellular. Sarah Browne made this beautiful film called Echo’s Bones set in the landscape of Ireland with younger people with autism and she's got a story from Samuel Beckett, rereading Samuel Beckett via neurodiversity, which I find quite interesting. We'll be speaking together about all the landscapes which appear in all these various works. There's taking landscapes in the imaginary way, in the virtual way…
AL: I have the book [Shy Radicals] here and I've been reading it over the past days. I recognize a lot of the resentments that you describe in it, especially after graduating from university and realizing I have to market myself and all that. I was wondering, because a lot of art institutions are starting to work with neurodivergence as a topic and we've also been doing it for three years. You have a section about curating a film program in the book, but how do you imagine cultural events and talks to ideally look in Aspergistan?
HA: I don't fit into some of the social networking of contemporary art. I generally don't go to private viewings, I don't like open ceremonies, the sort of ostentatiousness of big biennials… Aspergistan has existed in me probably since the days of playground bullying and imagining in your heart that there could be another place. I find the aspect of the noisy playground sort of reoccurs in other places and also hierarchies. The book presents a serious utopic constitution, but within that it also draws on the language of teen movies. I re-watched old Winona Ryder films and 80s teen movies to look at the power structures, and those replicate themselves in the art world. There is a mean girls table in the art world. I was attracted to art because I liked the silences of galleries and this self-absorption, something that was outside of the noisy playground. You'll see it again in Sarah's film, when the children engage in parallel play. They walk around the basketball court in their own way and find those torturous and depressive aspects of the high school experience which also replicate themselves in the art world and the workplace.
AL: I was also thinking in a very practical sense, since we are organizing an event, a talk, how do we do it right so that it's actually a pleasant experience?
HA: I think it will be nice because of the space, with the cats, that automatically makes it different.
AL: This event will not be about Shy Radicals. You proposed Trauma, solidarity and chicken as the topic.
HA: I was in documenta15 and it was probably one of my most suppressive experiences racially and institutionally. There are still many unresolved problems within German society around McCarthyism and repression and xenophobia, and all that came together in documenta. I feel like my side of the story has never been fully told. There was an attempt to create a counter-hegemonic narrative of documenta15 at Framer Framed in Amsterdam where I was spoken about but wasn't allowed to speak for myself, so I find that ethically wrong, and the bits where they spoke about me were also cut from the online publishing of it for whatever reason. And it's not just the art world, you can look at the way Germany treated Greta Thunberg, you had like six different newspapers trying to ruin her and damage her, although she's far more resilient than that. I find her quite a heroic figure.
I don’t like some of the new canon of neurodiversity, like Judy Singer who is credited with coining the term, although it’s far more contested and was developed through 90s internet forums. She’s an awful person, really racist, anti-muslim, just look at her twitter account. There’s the academic discourse around Nick Walker, Robert Chapman…but I love Greta Thunberg. And the sort of vernacular use of neurodiversity is more about an intuitive sense of friendship between people. I've certainly developed friendships and social networks in a different way through that term. Some of my friends organize neurodivergent gatherings, but they have no idea about this academic discourse. It's almost a unity of people who experience disadvantage. In terms of employment, income, there's a disproportionality of low pay. My friends who I bond with are often people who didn't develop in a straight line in the way others did. And just not feeling collective shame and stigma for things like never having earned an average adult salary. Although that is the case for 99 percent of artists anyway.
I’ve also been thinking about creating a speculative organization called Neurodivergents Against Genocide and Apartheid, spelling NAGA, because during the current genocide in Gaza there were murders — Mohammed Bhar was probably the most high profile, he was a young man with autism and down syndrome who was attacked by an IDF dog. He was actually quite trusting towards the dog and it ended up killing him. Other cases are the killings of Fulla Masalmeh and Eyad al-Hallaq, with no accountability. Within the huge street mobilizations since the genocide unfolded, sometimes a million or half a million people, there are sub-groups, which is where NAGA would be situated. I used to actually cut and carry a big placard of Mohammed Bhar’s photograph across on the demo and write #autisticlivesmatter. I lost studio in October, so I have less space to make these things, but it's something I'd like to do for the future certainly, developing that into some sort of series of slogans and banners on those demos.
I unintentionally developed this huge collection archive of neurodiverse zines, which I represented again at the academy in Amsterdam recently. I realised oh, have I got the world's only and first neurodiversity zine archive? Probably yes! I also collected zines around ADHD and bipolar disorder, dysbraxia, the health service and diagnosis institutionalization…
AL: Yes, I heard that you left with a whole suitcase full of zines the last time um that you were around here. Where does your passion for the zine medium come from and what can people expect from the workshop that you're going to host with us?
HA: I've been collecting zines since the early 1990s. I made my first zine in 1994. It was inspired by a figure called Richey Edwards from the band Manic Street Preachers who retrospectively gets identified as autistic these days, but spoke about other forms of vulnerability, depression and eating disorders. He eventually disappeared in the mid-1990s and now he's declared dead, and that inspired a huge zine culture around him. He had quite a cult following. Also Riot Grrrl zines, because my brother got the first bikini kill album. So that was the first phase. And then zines had a revival in the last 10 years. I got back into zine culture maybe 10-15 years later in a big way, I did an art collective called Other Asias in London with an artist from Lahore in Pakistan and we made a zine. We did this project called Redo Pakistan which was a newspaper store traveling from city to city, and we made zines as part of that journey. Then I started applying back for zine fairs — it was still a 99% White-dominated space, even in 2009-10. I made friendships and deals with the handful of people of color I met in the zine fair, and then I did DIY Cultures that re-centered other oppressions not written into the zine fair. My brother was detained without trial under war on terror for a number of years and I was involved in the Guantanamo Bay detainees return home, and those things weren't written into some of these anarchist spaces. There's often this economic segregation, because artists often move into places of cheaper rent, which often tend to be migrant areas, so you see this pattern again in Queens or Brooklyn New York, so you have this large migrant community and this large art community, and so having affection for both worlds and also entrenched activist scenes..
Some people just haven't connected with that side of themselves, they got so into adulting that they forgot the love of drawing or playing, making the world more playful, but in a good, serious way. I feel like zines are all these various stages of life, like retirement, childhood, teen angst, and maybe a bit of grown-upness just to keep it running all at the same time. I find it quite endearing to meet older people who make their first zine. In Bradford zine fair one of the guys who ran it made his first zine at age 70. I've made a friend called Rahul, he’s been making zines uh in University Arts London, he’s in his 60s and he uses the zine culture — he's part of the staff network also very involved in a Palestine solidarity movement, and he's a trade unionist, so he's very much using his zines to make a more just world. And that's also the university I used to go to, so often things are very much tied to like managerialism, big grants, and maybe zines offer a more immediate and intuitive and improvised way of engagement.
AL: What connects you to the Netherlands?
HA: The Netherlands have been very important to me. I think it's quite a special place, there are these state-subsidized art book shops, so I met a print room in Rotterdam it's quite a special place and also Worm which I really like, so I've been part of Rotterdam zine camp several years and I actually gave a talk about neurodiversities and zines there quite recently. Karin, who runs print room I've called my adopted Dutch auntie. page not found have also been really good to me, they helped let me curate a season called Solitary Solidarity during the Covid crisis. I looked at artists in solitary confinement, and my brother was also in solitary confinement, so we did the screening of Herman's house and how artists and zine makers during the Covid pandemic and how they dealt with it. I invited Brett Blum from the Chicago uh Zine Collective, he was posting zines around the city during pandemic times and made a zine every day whilst under lockdown. We've also done events at Perdu in Amsterdam. An event called I Love Psychiatrists with the poet Jonathan Griffin and the poet Ashok Rami, we were just reflecting on the dead Kurt Cobain. In Utero by Nirvana that was the first album I ever bought and I also reflect a lot on Kurt Cobain's suicide even 30 years later because I remember it quite vividly at the time. There was also a Japanese group who developed the choreography based on the gestures from Shy Radicals. I've also been an artist in residence in at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht —
AL: Actually this morning I read the article you wrote at one point for the Metropolis M magazine.
HA: yeah I feel a bit strange because it's Ramadan now and I'm in a different place. I wrote that article and I think it's a good article and it's insightful - but I'm quite a spiritually fluctuating person. I left atheism in my 20s, but I still don't fit into various communities and I'm not the same person that wrote the article. I'm not saying I will not not be that person's article ever again.
I don't know what it is exactly, if I'm living in another country — the last time I was a fully practicing person was when I was alone in South Korea and then also when I was in the academy I was also quite isolated, which actually made me more motivated to be observant and practicing. I don't know why that is, maybe some deep-seated psychological reason. I think people say it in a negative way, but I don't view that as a bad thing because I think the only thing universal to all cultures is everyone is lacking in something. Everyone does have something imbalanced or a color that's missing from the palette, so if I was maybe living in Saudi Arabia I wouldn't be practicing just to balance that space out, but if I was living in France I would probably be very practicing to balance out some of the excesses of the state secularism. In London there are a million Muslims, so…
Metropolis M asked me to write a follow-up article and they're very interested in my documenta experience. I started writing that article and I sort of had a breakdown — when I was at Documenta, for the first time I felt the rise of fascism which is now 20% of the electorate. I would get a flood of hatred every single day. And there's no institutional mechanism of people listening or people representing your experiences. I still feel very aggrieved and injured by the whole thing.The next documenta cycle will be in 2027, and there are already discussions around whether Germany is really the place where artists can really test ideas. A very high percentage, I think even a fifth of the audience of Documenta, three quarters of a million people at the last one, is from the Netherlands. And the Netherlands is quite an important forum for having that discussion. That was part of the reason I couldn't finish the article, I don't know, there's fragments, broken fragments in like various podcasts and vlogs of this very traumatic experience, but I think there's some complicity in some of the institutions upholding the dominant narrative. It's still something I feel the immediate need to speak about. And it hasn't ended for me because there was an attempted lawsuit against me.
So they first tried to, the new CEO shut down one of my Instagram accounts and threatened me. It gets really ridiculous. So the curators of Documenta, ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective, some of whom are based in the Netherlands, like Reza and Iswanto, they liked one of my Instagram posts on an Instagram account, that was it. And it's just some Arabs singing “Palestine will be free” in the streets of Berlin. And that generated something like two dozen headlines in the German press just because they liked this post. And then the Documenta's institution wrote this really long statement where they, I don't know, somehow linked us to ISIS and Hamas, which is awful.
And then they had to apologize, unlike my post. And did a whole public relations thing just about liking a post. And I feel like what happens in Germany could be exported elsewhere.
So the first thing that happened was the fascist party, the AFD, made this anti-BDS motion against boycott, divestment and sanctions, which the whole parliament adopted. And there was an attempt to introduce that into the UK. I don't know, I just don't see how an international arts space can function, expecting everyone to be in line with German foreign policy. And that being a prerequisite to doing anything. Everyone is being persecuted or cancelled to silence. There's this group called Archive of Silence, and it has like over 200 cancellations of people. I mean, the last person who was silenced at a really high profile level was the United Nations Special Rapporteur.
All my friends and people I've curated, I curated this German Jewish filmmaker, he's going through the courts now. Shardul Alon, who's someone I've worked with, the Bangladeshi curator, had the entire Biennial cancelled for a Palestine Facebook post. In some way, it's a royal honour, it's all the best people in the world. Like if you look at the people in Archive of Silence, like Laurie Anderson, Naomi Klein, all the best artists are being cancelled or silenced. Britain's not as bad as Germany, but I don't know. I feel like it's a very urgent thing that needs to be addressed.
The zine community has been quite supportive. So you have the resale printers, page masters, they give out free resale prints to Palestine activists. And also if you go to the student encampments in Goldsmith and other places, they always have a zine library. And zine making is also part of the activities on site resistance. I started a hashtag zines for Palestine in Germany, actually. One of the main zine fair was really pro genocide. And it was quite grim. And the person ended up trolling and like, I don't know, just attacking me. So even in the world of zines, this current crisis is reflected.
AL: I also wanted to ask about what initially drew you to fried chicken and why you wanted to celebrate it. Which I think the Metropolis M article goes into a little bit. And it was actually a bit sad to read, because it had this kind of hopeful tone about going to documenta.
HA: It’s quite sad. The whole thing's quite tragic. It's something you look forward to when you get selected. It's the peak of someone's career. And now it's turned into a bit of a prolonged nightmare. It hasn't ended. I got prosecuted and that hasn't ended. So I'm actually a bit worried. If you don't pay it, it turns into a prison sentence. I don't want to pay it because it's like giving money to someone who bullied you or your abuser. So it's just bullshit. So I don't know. I haven't got that type of money. And it just doesn't end because every week another person who I know personally is prosecuted or canceled or whatever. .
> Documenta 15:
Trauma, Solidarity and Chicken
Trauma, Solidarity and Chicken
FRIED CHICKEN SALON
with Hamja Ahsan & friends
monday
24 march
18:00-22.00
