ungovernable study
“on the land ... in the poem”

ungovernable study library bundles and publications gathered as part of An Inherent Undoing, a group exhibition curated by Dr. Gervais Marsh at the 8th Floor Gallery in New York. Image: a yellow and green ungovernable study pamphlet hangs over a ladder in the installation, surrounded by wheat-pasted collage in shades of yellow, brown, and black.

Stewarded by kimi malka hanauer alongside the 59th Carnegie International, ungovernable study: “on the land … in the poem” gathers an informal network of practitioners and organizers to co-build a fractal and living curriculum on ungovernability now. ungovernable study, the nomadic effort which has fluctuated in formats and locations since it’s founding in 2021, traces ungovernability as disavowed modes of being and relating within the inherently unassimilable edges and fissures of empire. Through dedicated partnerships and open invitations, ungovernable study tends an online and print-based library, facilitates spaces for shared study, and publishes resources in support of anti-imperial processes within the imperial core.

“on the land…in the poem,” the initiative’s 2026–27 constellation of gatherings and conversations, is facilitated autonomously through dispersed convening in local ecosystems hosted by informal groups, practitioners, and organizations with their constituencies. In partnership with Pittsburgh-headquartered Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, the curriculum’s learning and facilitation resources are distributed as a series of risograph pamphlets and newsprint broadsheets in the mail and on the streets where its activities unfold. The series, produced with ungovernable study assistant editor Anna Cho–Son, grounds multi-format contributions, including popular education resources, conversations with youth and movement elders, and artistic research that surface dislocated lineages and practices of noncooperation and collectivization.

Acting as an urgent document of persistence, “on the land … in the poem” traces insurgent worlds in the before, beyond, and through perpetual repetitions of mass violence rooted in the genocidal orders and origins of empire. Contributors look to actions and inactions that undermine imperial conceptions of order, stability, and progress, inhabiting the borderlines often re-inscribed by public platforms of international artistic and cultural cooperation. As kimi malka hanauer prompts,

To be ungovernable in and as study is not an attempt at transgressing imperially- and colonially-prescribed borders. Rather, ungovernability is a call toward inhabiting the structural and disavowed transgressions that already form the imperial grounds on which we dwell and the fragmented interior worlds which we carry. It’s here—in the tenacity of unchosen embodiments of instability, movement in perpetual excess, speech implausibly out of bounds, ruptured lifeways in perpetual denial—where we might denaturalize empire’s vision of totalizing control. It’s here, where we might prepare a ground for other worlds to grow. [1]

The curriculum’s title, a reference to resistance poet Mahmoud Darwish’s 1992 ode “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia [al-Andalus],” [2] looks to the poet’s life and work as a model for a poetics of liberation. An insurrection, the Invisible Committee declares, spreads by resonance, it “takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.” [3] Thinking alongside mutual-aid groups, independent publishers, tenants unions, political education initiatives, and others, this emergent collection dwells in the intimacies that sustain continuities of revolt, while reckoning with the role of imperial cultural institutions in assimilating efforts aimed at the abolition of empire and diverting them to stabilize the state. [4]

This iteration of ungovernable study is in dialogue with kimi malka hanauer’s ongoing work on the after-ending of al-Andalus, [5] tracing the persistence of imperially dislocated lineages against discourse that inscribes their “ends.” Drawing on the temporal location of the after-ending as an irreconcilable ground, [6] “on the land … in the poem” invites reckonings with the uses and abuses of cultural practices that seek to expand horizons of ungovernability, “The after-ending might begin in language, but it tasks us with material demands: to return that which empire claims as its untouchable ruins.” [7]

To learn more about ungovernable study, please visit the online library and read toward an ungovernable study: disordering the stacks, published with Landscapes by A Blade of Grass.

Please join us for a special program at the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair on Oct 31 – Nov 1, 2026.

Footnotes

[1] See: kimi malka hanauer, “toward an ungovernable study: disordering the stacks,” Landscapes, Issue 2, No Privacy, No Public, A Blade of Grass (Fall 2026): link.

[2] See: Mahmoud Darwish, “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,” al-Quds (1992); repr. Grand Street, no. 48, Oblivion (Winter 1994): 100–11.

[3] See: The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, (France: Editions La Fabrique, Semiotext(e), 2007).

[4] In recent conversations between artist and organizer Bilphena Decontee Yahwon, a contributor to on the land…in the poem with their ongoing initiative Archive Liberia, and ungovernable study steward kimi malka hanauer, the two reckoned with the co-optation of cultural work by imperial institutions toward the appearance of so-called progress, cohesion, and stability, while drawing on the scholarship of Joy James. See: Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal,” Carceral Notebooks, vol. 12, Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (March 2017): 253–296.

[5] The term after-ending is a temporal location that draws on Edward Said’s interpretation of Darwish’s ode, “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia.” It elicits the continuity of lifeworlds that persist despite imperial and colonial pursuits of making an “end” of a people, place, and time. See: Edward W. Said, “On Mahmoud Darwish,” Grand Street, no. 48, Oblivion (Winter 1994): 112–15.

[6] Thinking with Dr. Gervais Marsh on the continuities of imperial rupture as an irresolute ground and “the acute awareness that repair is a fraught concept.” See: Gervais Marsh, An Inherent Undoing, March – June 2026, 8th Floor, Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, NY.

[7] See: kimi malka hanauer, “on the edges of a mother tongue,” C Magazine, Issue 162, Tidal (Winter 2025): link.

About

ungovernable study (est. 2021) is a nomadic education initiative that stewards an online and print-based library, facilitates spaces of study, and publishes resources in support of anti-imperial processes within the imperial core.

With members working from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative (est. 1998) operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. We believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action. To this end, we produce collective portfolios, contribute graphics to grassroots struggles for justice, work collaboratively both in- and outside the co-op, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheatpaste on the streets—all while offering each other daily support as allies and friends.

kimi malka hanauer is an artist, writer, and publisher. They are a founding member of publishing collective Press Press (est. 2014), steward of nomadic education initiative ungovernable study (est. 2021), and an assistant professor at Pratt Institute.