there / is /
only / now 

New York City, NY, Spring 2024 
Center for Art Research and Alliances (CARA)

there / is / only / now is an activation of the CARA bookstore by artist and publisher Kimi Hanauer that acts as a space for collective study, reflection, and conversation on the intimacy of insurgent registers. In their practice, Hanauer often appropriates mass printing technologies such as copy machines, risographs, and offset printers, as methods of organizing counterpublics through the distribution of printed matter. Unraveling across space and through informal relational networks, these acts of distribution intervene on and blur the boundaries between “public” and “private.” Building on these methods, there / is / only / now attempts to ground the revolutionary impulse of the present spread across these networks.

This intervention, which honors the language of community bulletin boards, centers on a pair of panels that aggregate citations of intimacies, kinships, and refusals grounded in Hanauer’s everyday life. Spanning references that include letters, poems, political speech, works of theory, iphone images, and remnants of interpersonal encounters reinterpreted through risograph and photocopied collages and prints, Hanauer aims to surface minor ruptures within invisible dimensions of power. The panels remain in an ongoing process of becoming, resisting their own resolution into a stable form. As sites for non-linear study, these works search for momentary reprieve from the hold of empire.

This activation corresponds with neighbor histories library, a collaboration with Katie Giritlian.