UPDATE - July 15, 2024

Printed Matter serves as an important platform for bringing artists to the public through their publishing and printed work. Among the many things that we do is champion projects made in response to today’s difficult political and social landscape, including material that may be charged and controversial. Printed Matter does not censor the artists who take part in our programming, although we understand that some members of our audiences may disagree with or find some of the material they encounter challenging. We respect the perspectives of our diverse audience as well as the rights of artists to share their work and ideas.

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In 1976 Printed Matter co-founder Lucy Lippard launched a series of installations making use of Printed Matter’s storefront windows as a site for public art, and as platform for deeply political work, aiming to raise consciousness around issues such as gentrification, misogyny, nuclear proliferation, and poverty. Today, Printed Matter’s Window Installation series continues that impulse, making space for artists interested in speaking to contemporary themes of political and social justice as well as providing a space for emerging artists to create installations in association with their publications. This month, Printed Matter’s Window Installation series is pleased to host SHADOW COMMS, a zine publisher with an interest in radical left struggles in the South Asian subcontinent.

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Every border is a wound on the face of the earth /
When it breaks open, you can see the brutality of its construction.

This photomontage printed on vinyl flex banner portrays the worldwide continuum of colonial extraction and imperialist warfare that has come into sharper relief from the broadcast of the ongoing siege on Gaza in response to Toufan Al-Aqsa. There are material connections between the border walls gouging through the Americas and the border walls gouging through Palestine—between the drones built in Hyderabad that menace Palestine and the drones built by israel that menace Kashmir. These material connections are at work as the people and lands of the Congo are ravaged for minerals by settler-colonial capitalist firms to sustain the production of their bleeding edge technologies; as Sudan is tormented by arms supplied by the normalizers of the UAE; as immiserated Indian workers clamor for bonded labor in israel and the Emirates; as Haiti and Kashmir suffocate from military occupation; as people in Palestine, Lebanon, and Kashmir are attacked by white phosphorous. Free Palestine, Free the World. Long live the resistance.

– SHADOW COMMS

Shadow Comms #2
Shadow Comms #3