Box set of four cassettes and zine in a 5.5 x 8.5" cardboard box
Edition of 150
$50

Men Explained Things to Me is an art project about the emotional economy of mixtapes from boys. It was hatched when we (Sonja and Godfre) and Alex Alisauskas were sitting in Sonja’s kitchen in Victoria. We were talking about four mixtapes made for Sonja in the nineties by a very famous musician/artist (who will remain unnamed here), and the power dynamics involved in those “gifts.” A copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me happened to be sitting on the bookshelf above the kitchen table with its cover facing out.

At that kitchen table, Sonja wondered out loud, “Maybe I should erase those tapes…” These four tapes are the result of that idea. We asked a bunch of women and nonbinary artists whose work we admire to contribute unreleased or hard-to-find tracks to this project, or music that they felt was stepped over or never found its audience. Then we “taped over” the four original mixtapes with these songs.

The identities of the artists on these tapes won’t be made known to the public. Their identities, as well as the names of the songs, will only be listed in the liner notes. This project is partially an experiment to see whether it’s possible to recreate a way for these tapes to find their way to the people who want them by word of mouth, the way Sonja’s zines and her friends’ music did back in the nineties, or the way five hundred thousand people in 1993—without the aid of the internet—bought an AIDS benefit comp because someone told them it had a secret new Nirvana song that wasn’t listed on the back of the CD.  This project is also a love letter both to the old penpal networks that Sonja’s zines used to circulate through, and to “whisper networks.”

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Sonja Ahlers is a visual artist and writer based in Victoria, on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Since the early '90s, Ahlers has worked primarily in book and book-adjacent formats, in a medium that she calls visual poetry. She is the author of Temper, Temper and Fatal Distraction (Insomniac Press, 1998 and 2004), The Selves (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010), Swan Song (Conundrum Press, 2021), and was a key contributor to Rookie Mag from 2011 to 2015. Ahlers's art has been exhibited across Canada, as well as in the United States, Japan, and Australia, and in 2023 was the subject of the career retrospective Classification Crisis at the Richmond Art Gallery.

‍Godfre Leung is the curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, where he has organized exhibitions by Maureen Gruben, Kablusiak, Dionne Lee, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Sesemiya. His writing has recently appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, ASAP/Journal, C Magazine, and publications on Gabi Dao (Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin) and Pao Houa Her (Aperture).

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This project was generously funded by the BC Arts Council with the support of The Bows and Richmond Art Gallery.

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