Client
Central Saint Martins
Year
2020
Location
London, UK
Services
Creative DirectionIdentity UpdatePublication Design
Central Saint Martins
Afterall Journal
Published twice a year, each issue of Afterall journal includes in-depth considerations of the work of contemporary artists, as well as essays on art history and critical theory. Afterall was launched in 1999 and is published by Central Saint Martins and partners. For the fiftieth anniversary issue, Pacific was tapped to create a new identity for the storied journal, as well as executing a comprehensive redesign.
Issue 50
The fiftieth edition of the storied journal, 50 Minus 1, was produced amid the many turbulences—immunological, social and political—that marked 2020. Faced with these crises, while also working under the sign of a jubilee publication, the journal's editorial group found itself certain of at least one thing: publishing as usual was no option. Pacific spent much of the last year working with Afterall to reimagine how the journal could respond to the times, and continue to stay relevant for the next 50 issues.
Softcover, 8 × 10 inches, 194 pages
Issue 51
Part of an ongoing collaboration with Pacific, Afterall Journal is a curated collection of artists, contexts, events, works and exhibitions that invite you to explore the changes of medium, media, and mediation throughout history and culture.
Issue 51, ‘Mediations’. Today, rethinking the medium in art is about approaching it as a form of mediation through its technical and material dimensions and about recognising and examining the latter in their capacities to shape experience, perception as well as setting the conditions of possibilities for the production, circulation and archiving of visual culture. What is more, with technological change and the expansion of contemporary art practices on a planetary scale, global art occupies a front seat when it comes to questioning the way regimes of the sensible are shaped under technical and material conditions, in their local and cultural specificities. Today, one needs to look at locally specific and differentiated understandings of the technicality of regimes of mediations. Afterall’s long-standing interest in examining and diagnosing ‘minor’ artistic positions – be it from a geographical or historical frame – is furthered by paying attention to a plurality of artistic languages, not only to their regional or cultural conditions, but to their technical-material conditions as well.
Softcover, 8 × 10 inches, 182 pages
Issue 52
Part of an ongoing collaboration with Pacific, Afterall Journal is a curated collection of artists, contexts, events, works and exhibitions that invite you to explore the changes of medium, media, and mediation throughout history and culture.
Issue 52, ‘New Politics’. We seem to experience yet another version of the discontents of civilisation, paralleled by the search for new political responses. The emergence in recent times of new forms of political claims and demands and the structural inequalities, both at local and global level – exacerbated by the biopolitical governmentality of the past two years and by digitisation – has reshaped the maps of the sayable and unsayable and forms of political expression and organisation. The traditional political apparatus and its vertical organisation are increasingly paralleled if not challenged by a proliferation of voices and their calls for recognition.
Softcover, 174 pages, 8 × 10 inches
Issue 53
Part of an ongoing collaboration with Pacific, Afterall Journal is a curated collection of artists, contexts, events, works and exhibitions that invite you to explore the changes of medium, media, and mediation throughout history and culture.
Issue 53 ‘Medium/Metaphor/Milieu’ looks at the exhibitionary in and beyond exhibitions. Gathered through the notions of medium and milieu, it looks at a range of practices and modes of thinking that foreground the exhibitionary in concrete, spatial, architectural and experiential terms. In parallel, the artists and authors included also explore the risks and potential of metaphors as a site of exhibition-making.
Softcover, 8 × 10 inches, 174 pages
Issue 54
Part of an ongoing collaboration with Pacific, Afterall Journal is a curated collection of artists, contexts, events, works and exhibitions that invite you to explore the changes of medium, media, and mediation throughout history and culture.
Issue 54 ‘Voicings’ explores modes of being, perception and expression that have been historically and often violently disabled by society. Focusing on art practices that centre the perspective of D/deaf and non-verbal communicators, it proposes reconfigurations of voice, language and sound. It asks readers to tune into a chorus of voicings, not necessarily audible, but perceivable as ‘atmospheres’, ‘vibrations’, ‘rhythms’.
Softcover, 8 × 10 inches, 174 pages
Issue 55/56
Issue 55/56 aims to provide an ‘out of placeness’ by looking beyond Western-centricity to a transnational, pluralist horizon, exploring the new imaginaries created by artists and thinkers from the Global South, from Brazil to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Softcover, 8 × 10 inches, 348 pages