about
practice
As an artist, publisher, facilitator, and writer, I cultivate poetic and material interventions into the banal, daily, and intimate operations of imperial fields of power. [1] Through various responsive forms, such as organizations, installations, texts, videos, programs and printed matter, I iterate methods and resources for scaffolding autonomous communities. Feminist, queer, anarchist, and abolitionist frameworks offer me a horizon, while my lived and familial traditions of migration, cultural displacement and legacies of exile offer me a ground. In surfacing that which statist politics suppress, my research stretches forward and backward in time to rewrite possibilities for life-sustaining practices in the present.
Emerging through the ethos of independent publishing, my projects often appropriate mass printing technologies, such as copy machines, risographs, and offset printers, as methods of organizing counterpublics through the distribution of printed and digital matter. The act of distribution, which unravels across space and through intimate networks of relationships, intervenes on and blurs boundaries of “public” and “private.” While emphasizing the intimacy of insurgent modes of address, I am invested in reconfiguring and disordering confines of “permissible” speech and “plausible” worlds.
The most meaningful sites of my work take place in daily encounters and events of life where intimacies, ruptures, and solidarities are nourished. In these contexts, I craft containers for shared study that foreground questions of belonging in legal, social, and psychological spheres. By gathering with those who diverge from normative linguistic traditions to reclaim speech on their/our own terms, I aim to transform language into a location of healing. Ultimately, my practice aims to engage continued and irresolvable attempts at accounting for recurrent moments of original violence. I regard these attempts, alongside the collectivities and contexts they act in concert with, as an unstable ground where other worlds could also grow.
[1] ‘Imperial fields of power’ is a phrase that emerges from my ongoing shared study with Katie Giritlian and our project, ‘neighbor histories.’ Together, we write: “Working with lineage as a point of departure, ‘neighbor histories’ attempts to potentialize modes of being, relating, and sharing that unsettle imperial fields of power.”
say hello
email: kimihanauer@gmaill.com
bio
kimi malka hanauer is an artist, publisher, facilitator, and writer. kimi is a founding collective member of publishing initiative, Press Press (est. 2014), and steward of nomadic political education school, Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry (est. 2021). In their practice, kimi cultivates poetic and material interventions into the intimate operations of imperial fields of power.* Through various responsive forms, such as organizations, installations, texts, videos, programs and printed matter, they iterate methods and resources for scaffolding autonomous communities.
As an assistant professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate and Undergraduate Communication Design Departments, kimi teaches courses in independent publishing, critical theory, writing, research-based and collective practices. Informed by anarchist and abolitionist frameworks, their work as a facilitator and educator aims to deepen our capacities for collective life-sustaining practices. Currently, they are a research faculty fellow with Pratt’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
kimi was a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (’24), earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles (’21), and a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture and concentrated work in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art (’15). Kimi was born in Tel Aviv–Yaffa in occupied Palestine, raised in Pittsburgh, and calls Baltimore home. They are a queer and neurodivergent diasporan; descendant of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Andalusian, Palestinian, and European Jews. They live in Brooklyn, NY on unceded Lenape Land.
kimi’s work is archived in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress, Yale University Library, George Peabody Library, John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Center College of Design Art Library, Virginia Commonwealth University Special Collections, among others.
kimi’s work has been exhibited at Westbeth Gallery (2024), the Mandeville Art Gallery at the University of California, San Diego (2023), Vox Populi (2023), the Sarofim School of Fine Arts Gallery at Southwestern University (2023), Lainer Family Gallery at the University of California, Los Angeles (2022), Southern Exposure (2021), Gas Gallery (2021), Printed Matter (2020), Counterpublic (2019), Tufts University Art Galleries (2019 + 2024), George Peabody Library (2019), ACRE Projects (2018), MoMA PS1 (2018), among others.
kimi has facilitated public programs at conferences and art institutions including the Allied Media Conference, UCLA Center for the Study of Women’s Thinking Gender Conference, Common Field Convening, Open Engagement, Art & Feminism, Contemporary Artist Books Conference, Printed Matter Art Book Fair, Center for Book Arts, Pioneer Works, Knockdown Center, Virtual Care Lab, X-TRA, Active Cultures, ICA Los Angeles, ICA at Virginia Commonwealth University, Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA), the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, among others. kimi has lectured widely at universities including at University of California Berkeley, Yale University, California College for the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, American University, Ithaca College, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Antioch University, Tufts University, Maryland Institute College of Art and was formerly an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.
They have been published by the Women’s Studio Workshop, GenderFail, Wendy’s Subway, Temporary Art Review, Arts of the Working Class, BmoreArt, MARCH, Thick Press, Institute for Expanded Research, and the Contemporary (Baltimore).
kimi is the recipient of grants and awards including the Artist Choice Award from Ruth Arts for Press Press (2024), the Lightening Fund Grant by the Andy Warhol Foundation and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) (2023), Virginia Commonwealth University Research Grant (2023), Louis Vidal Foundation (2021), the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation (2018), the Ruby’s Artist Grants (2017), the Grit Fund by the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Contemporary Museum (2016), the Fred Lazarus Social Change Award (2015), among others.