there / is / only / now + neighbor histories library with Katie Giritlian
bookstore intervention, library, + self-guided workshop tools | Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) Bookstore, New York, NY, 2024
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.
In collaboration with artist and publisher, Katie Giritlian, this intervention will live alongside neighbor histories, a reading library that has guided their mutual, ongoing practice of study, co-making, and conversation. neighbor histories holds space for a slow and sustained collaborative writing of histories. This library emerges through Hanauer and Giritlian’s personal investigations into their respective Jewish and Armenian lineages, imagining their entanglement with the many who live(d) in pre-partition lands in South West Asia and North Africa and their kin, while reckoning with the limitations of this pursuit. 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.
Inviting visitors into the unstable study of potential history, there / is / only / now and neighbor histories ask: How do recurrent moments of violence implicate us to demand the “impossible”?
Throughout the project’s duration, a new risograph-printed edition by Kimi Hanauer and Katie Giritlian will be available in the CARA Bookstore. Proceeds from the sale of this edition will be sold to raise funds for Gaza mutual-aid relief projects.
This activation sits in conversation with CARA's current exhibition Paloma Contreras Lomas and Ines Doujak, a part of ongoing programmatic considerations of collaboration and intimate storytelling as strategies for resistance.