Join Ulises for the opening reception of PLATES: The Politics of Layout an exhibition organized by RELATED DEPARTMENT for Ulises' Project Space.
Conversation with members of RELATED DEPARTMENT begins at 6:30 PM, facilitated by Ulises.
The Politics of Layout surveys the ongoing experimental publication PLATES by RELATED DEPARTMENT and Page Bureau. Conceived as an editorial and curatorial response to contemporary design practice and criticism, PLATES investigates timely questions through thematic issues articulated in a series of textual and visual plates—organic, iterative, and evolving. Following its inaugural edition, the second issue, PLATES 2: The Body Issue, turns to the body: its material presence and its shifting significations within capitalism, technology, politics, and media. Here, the body appears as surface, machine, system, or assemblage, oscillating between opacity and function, abstraction and identity. This exhibition draws from PLATES 2, and serves as its alternative iteration, foregrounding not only the contributions themselves but also the logic of its editorial layout as a critical and collaborative act. By staging excerpts and visual fragments as an exhibitionary apparatus, The Politics of Layout investigates the role of layout as active agent in revealing ideologies and hierarchies, framing discourses, and orchestrating rhythms, attention, power relations and knowledge production.
About RELATED DEPARTMENT:
RELATED DEPARTMENT is an award-winning design practice based in Shanghai and New York, working with a variety of design forms in response to shifting contexts of post-colonial and digital landscapes. While dedicated to alternative design approaches for image-making and textual production, they also initiate discourses and events like design criticism, exhibitions, distribution, consumption and beyond. They founded their publishing practice Page Bureau in 2018 and a research division est.dept in 2022. Their work has been exhibited at Power Station of Art in Shanghai, Asia Culture Center in Gwangju and Queens Museum in New York, and has been collected by institutions such as Asia Art Archive, BY ART MATTERS, Asymmetry Art Foundation and Yale University Library.
