Hamja Ahsan discusses his project The Aspergistan Referendum, his book Shy Radicals and extrovert supremacy

“I was actually a bit nervous about staging this kind of project in a biennial so rooted in the graphic medium. I wondered if I was doing the right thing. But in the end, I saw it like any other contemporary art biennial, post-medium and multidisciplinary. (…) I want terms like ‘extrovert supremacy’ to circulate, to have people identifying ‘extrovert supremacists’ in their own communities and in their own nations, in their own history. I come to these events and these exhibitions, and while Shy Radicals is obviously an imaginative speculative fiction that’s supposed to make people laugh, every single discussion that occurs afterward is always deadly serious.”

Hamja Ahsan in the Interview with Kate Sutton, Artforum, September 24, 2019. You can read the interview by following this link.

The national anthem of the Republic of Aspergistan is the sound of a seashell. Photo: MGLC Archive.