Time is the Sentence

Please join us this Juneteenth for an intimate gathering and conversation that explores themes of abolition, censorship, and freedom of speech with artist Sue Jeong Ka and activist, organizer, and educator Mariame Kaba. This conversation responds to Ka's exhibition Explicit!!!, currently on view at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space.

Grounded in an inquiry: Abolition begins with a broken sentence, what was erased, what lingers, and how we keep time in its absence; this discussion aims to illuminate censorship as part of a larger framework of control, connecting the educational and prison systems through policies related to policing practices, identity formation, and desires. From obscenity regulations to curriculum bans, we observe a pipeline of erasure, domination, and unequal power structures that dictate not only what can be read but also who is allowed to be seen. Here, abolition serves as a method of witnessing the remains of censorship.

About the speakers:

Sue Jeong Ka is a visual artist whose work confronts carceral censorship, gendered surveillance, and systemic erasure. Her practice spans commemorating 19th-century Asian immigrant women, producing trilingual community newspapers, and building a database of banned prison publications to expose patterns of censorship targeting racially marginalized and sexually liberal subjects. She seeks to transform traditional art spaces into platforms for community service and public critique. Ka is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Laundromat Project, among others. She has also been an artist-in-residence at Artists Alliance Inc., Banff Centre, The Drawing Center, Queens Museum, Soma Summer, and more.

Inspired by Asian American women artist-led social movements in downtown Manhattan, Ka has created works exploring carceral information exchange between incarcerated and free communities, with support from NYC Books Through Bars, the New York Public Library, and the San Francisco Public Library.

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, librarian/archivist, curator, zinemaker and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba co-leads Interrupting Criminalization, an organization she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) & the National Bestseller Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes (Haymarket, 2023) among several other books that offer support and tools for repair, transformation, and moving toward a future without incarceration and policing.