Please join us for a CONTEXT-CON, an online book launch (in the form of a Comic Con) event celebrating Alexandro Segade’s new graphic novel The Context, published by Primary Information in 2020. Register here!

Interpreting The Context’s superheroes, special guests include:

Ei Arakawa as Drives

Jennifer Doyle as The Body

Jonah Groeneboer as Form

Mary Kelly as Cathexis

Jennifer Moon as Barelife

Tavia Nyong’o as Objector

David Velasco as Biopower

Followed by Alexandro Segade in conversation with scholar andré carrington

And live drawing with graphic novelist Luciano Vecchio

Co-hosted by Human Resources, Los Angeles and Participant Inc., New York.

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About The Context

The Context reimagines the superhero comic book as a queer parable of belonging. The story follows six powerful beings from different worlds who find themselves inexplicably adrift together in an otherwise lifeless void: Biopower, Cathexis, Barelife, Objector, Drives, and Form. The characters, each named for a concept drawn from critical theory, engage one another in skintight fight scenes that often look like sex scenes, and philosophical debates masked as exposition.

As a lifelong fan and a more recent critic of the superhero genre, artist and performer Alexandro Segade approached his first graphic novel as a solo performance, acting out all the roles: writer, penciller, inker, colorist and letterer. The Context considers the form of the graphic novel through conceptual, minimalist, op art, and constructivist aesthetics, while paying homage to the great cosmic comics of the 1970s and ’80s: Silver Surfer, Legion of Super Heroes, Green Lantern, Adam Warlock and X-Men (to name a few). A meditation on group dynamics, composed of foreshortened figures in flight set against an endless field of stars, The Context illustrates a vastness that extends past the boundaries of different art forms and ways of being.

Alexandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects span video, performance, writing, drawing, and comics. Often collaborating with Malik Gaines, Segade uses genre and theatricality to construct group identities in collectives such as My Barbarian, A.R.M. and Courtesy the Artists. He is assistant professor of art at Cornell University. alexandrosegade.net

For more information, or to purchase a copy, visit Primary Information here. You can explore The Context thanks to Artforum.

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Bios:

Ei Arakawa is a performance artist based in New York.

andré carrington is the author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016).

Jennifer Doyle is the author of Campus Sex, Campus Security (2015), Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013), and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (2006).

Jonah Groeneboer is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York.

Mary Kelly is an American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer.

Jennifer Moon is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles.

Tavia Nyong’o is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018).

Luciano Vecchio is based in Argentina. He is the artist of Marvel Comics’ Ironheart, written by Eve Ewing, and is the author and artist of Sereno.

David Velasco is a New York-based writer and editor-in-chief of Artforum.