Shanzhai Lyric
FREEDON archive
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“FREEDON (and On and On),” seeks to put shanzhai lyrics in conversation with artist practices that take inspiration from the “non-serious” sites of gossip, fashion accessory, glitch, and theft. Drawing on Marxist feminist Silvia Federici’s research on “new enclosures”—contemporary conditions that sustain the historical invisibilizing of women’s labor (for instance, in textile production or as data processors in IT industries)—shanzhai lyrics are considered here as an unauthorized collective creative process that refutes the logic of private ownership and fosters the redistribution of property. Culminating a year as archive-in-residence at the Women’s Art Library, the exhibition draws together the works of women artists employing strategies that can be seen as troubling the neat logic of binaries, residing in a slippery space between high and low, original and counterfeit, and consumer and producer in their practice.


Organized by Althea Greenan at the Women's Art Library, Goldsmiths Special Collections & Archives.

Accompanying essay published in Press & Fold magazine.

FREEDON (and On and On) exhibition catalogue, Women's Art Library, 2019, temporary tattoo cover edition, 100 copies.

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The catalogue brings together interviews with the respondents Aurelia Guo, Silvia Bombardini and Joni Zhu on subversive shoplifting, notions of property and cyberproletarianism. The cover is printed on tattoo paper, which forms the first edition of “Inappropriate Landscape”. ⁣


Designed by 0ffsh0.re.

FREEDON (and On and On), mini-publication, Display Distribute, 2018, 210 × 297 mm, First edition of 50.

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Brief ruminations on mimicry and theft, who has a right to steal, and how notions of property affect our conceptions of freedom. Alongside an array of experimental text-based art practices, these shanzhai lyrics provide an ongoing frame for re-thinking notions of ownership and authorship. Printed on the occasion of preliminary research carried out in residence at clearview, in consultation with the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, London, UK.

FREEDON (and On and On) presented at the ACLA 2019.

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Presentation of paper "FREEDON (and On and On) as part of the Poetic Materiality Today panel at American Comparative Literature Association 2019. Georgetown University, Georgetown, USA.