Afterall's One Work Series Explores Art as Research Fulcrum

Afterall's One Work series treats a single artwork as a generative node for scholarly reflection and artistic creativity. The Two Works series examines visual art's encounter with text and its participation in thought regimes beyond the visual. In collaboration with Central Saint Martins's Fine Art Programme, Afterall's Art School project gathers scholars, artists, curators, and students to reflect on the work of art as a lens for questions of education—its contested histories and contemporary forms. Recent One Work titles include Sung Hwan Kim's A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2025), Isa Genzken's Fuck the Bauhaus (2024), Alfredo Jaar's Studies on Happiness (2023), and Donald Rodney's Autoicon (2023). Related articles feature Julian Ross on Tokyo Reels, a research project reconstructing Japan-Palestine solidarity networks through 16mm films found in Tokyo in 2015, presented at documenta fifteen. Jacob Korczynski examines Justin Hicks and Steffani Jemison's Mikrokosmos, a vinyl record and performance series archiving Black American music. Renata Bittencourt analyzes capoeira's Mandinga quality in a painting, while Felipe Martinez discusses Paul Cézanne's presence in Alexis Reads a Manuscript to Émile Zola, held at MASP.