AA. VV, The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding/Decoding, 2016

This book, and the exhibition it was published for, takes inspiration from the work of cultural theorist Professor Stuart Hall and his ground-breaking essay Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973). Reproduced here in full, Hall encourages readers to think about how meaning is constructed, how it is systematically distorted by audience reception and how it can be detached and drained of its original intent. The Unfinished Conversation: Encoding / Decoding shows us how history agitates and causes anxiety in our personal lives and the political realm. It aims to reveal that national identity is not an essence or a state of being, but a becoming, a process where subjectivities are formed in the interstices between such binary oppositions as us/them, black/white, or native/foreigner. It is in those in-between spaces that marginalized people are the agents and subjects of many possible futures, imagined or real. Featuring images by Terry Adkins, John Akomfrah, Sven Augustinjen, Shelagh Keeley, Steve McQueen and Zineb Sedira; and texts by Nora M. Alter, Stuart Hall, Ranjit Hoskote, Nadira Laggoune-Aklouche, Kobena Mercer, Chantal Pontbriand, Mark Sealy and Gaëtane Verna.