Ashley Hunt is an artist, activist, and writer who engages the ideas of social movements, public discourse, and intersections between politics and subjectivity. Rather than seeing art and activism as two exclusive spheres of practice, he approaches them as complementary fields of knowledge and action—the theorization and practices of one informing and challenging the other.
His primary work of the past eight years has been The Corrections Documentary Project (correctionsproject.com), which deals with the contemporary growth of prisons and their centrality to today’s economic restructuring and the malleable politics of race; and 9 Scripts from a Nation at War (9scripts.info), a collaboration with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander, and David Thorne for Documenta 12, which considers the positions individuals are given to occupy during war. He also continues an ongoing collaboration with dance artist Taisha Paggett investigating individual agency through movement, thought, and politics. Hunt’s work has also been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the 3rd Bucharest Biennial, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, and numerous community-based venues throughout the United States. Recent publications include On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (’08), Radical History Review (’08), Art Journal (’07), Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (‘07), and Rethinking Marxism (‘06).