SIGNS FOR A GATHERING
This project commissions graphics and prints by politically-engaged artists in the Great Lakes region. Individual artists choose the content and themes of their contribution. Two works have been realized to-date: No One is Safe by Linda Abdullah and TRANS LIBERATION MEANS AN END TO ALL U.S. INVASION by Jamie John.
Roman Susan is partnering with Spudnik Press to print and distribute open editions of the work. You may also download the works, and print them yourself. If you are an artist or organizer printing cause-oriented signs to share, check out Spudnik’s riso for resistance materials and our giveaway project.
Jamie John
TRANS LIBERATION MEANS AN END TO ALL U.S. INVASION
Jamie John is a two-spirit trans and queer Anishinaabe and Korean-American multi-disciplinary artist. Jamie’s body of work spans over multiple mediums including printmaking, public art, collage, zines, poetry, and film. From early on, art has offered a way to connect and communicate ideas of Indigenous lived experience under settler colonialism, relationships to land, water, family, and ancestry, as well as queer and trans joy and survival. More info at jamierjohn.com.
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Linda Abdullah
No One is Safe
Civilian forced displacements in Palestine, Sudan, and the US
No One is Safe examines the ongoing forced displacement in Gaza and Sudan, the deportation campaign in the US, and the parallels between these three powers.
Displacement, although appears to be a protective measure for civilians in areas under attack, is a tactic to terrorize civilians forcing them to live in a devastating and life-threatening conditions with one end goal: land control and the expansion of colonial territories. Displacement is not what follows an attack; it is what the attack is designed to do.
Civilians are forced to flee for their lives when they receive a leaflet instructing them to move to the nearest “safe shelter” such as the case in Gaza. Others are trapped in the crossfire of active gun battles between armed forces as civilians are in Sudan. In the United States, policing practices against civilians rely on racial profiling, public execution, protest control, mass deportation, inhumane detention, and separating families apart.
No One is Safe project performs an act of solidarity – from mother to mother, woman to woman, from one stateless immigrant to another. Each of these identities I embody has been marked by fear and anxiety for myself, my children, my family, and my community. Watching people across these three regions be forcibly displaced, detained or deported again and again, with nowhere left to go, is trauma-triggering. It lands like a needle piercing the skin, leaving me with one truth: No one is safe.
Linda Abdullah is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, curator, and daughter of Historic Palestine. Linda majored in Visual Communications at the American University of Sharjah (UAE) and received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design from OCAD University in Canada. Her critical graphic design practice examines social, cultural, and political identity through the lens of diaspora, displacement, and intellectual exile. She currently resides in Chicago. For more information, please visit lindaabdullah.io.
Download and Print – PNG // PDF
