emergent archive and publication studio | Printed Matter, New York, NY, 2025

Printed Matter presents ungovernable, a site-specific project by artist, writer, and publisher kimi malka hanauer. Across a print-based installation and series of on-site activations facilitated with the artist’s ongoing initiative, Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry (CLPP), ungovernable rehearses methods of noncooperation and collectivization that undermine imperial modes of order, time, and history. The exhibition emerges through the artist’s everyday archive of time stolen back, tracing practices of ungovernability across dislocated lineages of rupture and refusal. Guided by the ethos of independent publishing, the initiatives gathered within ungovernable aim to seed an unstable ground for the shared study intercommunal coalitions that manifest in the cracks of imperial and colonial rule. 

ungovernable will be on view from March 14th – May 15th. Please join us for an opening reception on Wednesday, March 19, 6:00 – 8:00 PM.

ungovernable is grounded in hanauer’s everyday archive of time stolen back, realized at Printed Matter as a series of composite copy-machine made works on plywood, an aggregating print-based library, and new iPhone videos by the artist. This collection takes as its point of departure poet and author Mahmoud Darwish’s 1992 ode “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia.” In the poem, Darwish mobilizes the collective memory of Andalusia, or al-Andalus in Arabic and Sefarad in Hebrew, as a metaphor for a “lost paradise,” recalling the nightmare through which it eroded. Picking up where Darwish’s ode leaves off–hanauer’s archive aims to potentialize what they call the after-ending of this commons and engage the material conditions of its return. In the everyday archive’s accompany text, hanauer uncovers the mirrored demands of Darwish’s political positioning of al-Andalus with their familial recollections of Sefarad, 

In the after-ending, we find that many “worlds” have already ended, and yet, here we still are as carriers of their potential: agents of their possible reemergence and/or participants in their continued destruction. The after-ending might begin in language, but it tasks us with material demands: to return that which empire claims as its “ruins.” In the after-ending, Darwish writes, “Soon we will search / in the margins of your history, in distant countries, / for what was once our history.” And I attempt a response: We return with many Andalusias—and all they represent—“on the land” and “in the poem.” This, afterall, is what Darwish exemplifies as the everyday work of a resistance poet—to steal back imperial conceptions of time and wield, in language, the unmaking of the “world order” that they require. [1]

Emerging through this ground, the everyday archive invites visitors into a space for shared study, making, and unmaking where ungovernability manifests as an intimate practice of disordering empire’s unending abuses. It calls on those it gathers to extend these aims by dwelling in the continued possibilities of ungovernability as divergent and embodied modes of being. Drawing on neighbor histories, hanauer’s ongoing collaborative project with artist and publisher Katie Giritlian of Paper Cameras Press, the everyday archive utilizes the duo’s study tools, consisting of reading viewfinders and question cards, to support visitors’ self-guided explorations. 

Ungovernable Study with the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry

The everyday archive stretches across the bookstore walls and into the project space, where it grounds CLPP's nimble copy-machine operated publication studio, resource library, and an informal publishers working group. Guided by the aims of its 2025 publication series, Ungovernable Study edited by hanauer and produced with assistant editor Anna Cho-Son, CLPP will gather with publics and co-conspirators to surface the seemingly contradictory yet interwoven threads of ungovernability. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, studio and library materials will aggregate on-site and online through CLPP’s digital platform. 

Ungovernable Study hours: By publishing a series of freely distributed pamphlets and facilitating shared study, CLPP aims to weave together learnings that evolve through collective processes of building and sustaining networks of collective care, alongside manifold personal reflections on actions and inactions that antagonize, disorder, refuse, and unveil the violence embedded in so-called “law and order.” Visitors are invited to attend Ungovernable Study open hours for shared discussion, quiet reading, and publication-making over coffee, tea, and snacks. Please RSVP here for Ungovernable Study Hours. 

Resource Library open call: The small-scale on-site publishing studio materializes the Center’s online Resource Library into a printed form––encouraging visitors to access an on-site photocopier to create readers for personal use and wider distribution. Visitors are invited to contribute to the aggregate library through the Center’s online open call and/or directly into the stacks throughout the duration of the exhibition. 

Publishers Working Group: Convened off-site through a series of informal Zoom gatherings and conversations, the Publishers Working Group convenes independent publishers to share and co-develop a guide for building and sustaining autonomous networks of support beyond institutional and nonprofit frameworks. Interested independent publishers and kindred practitioners are encouraged to reach out to CLPP to get involved.