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Classification Crisis is an important survey of artist Sonja Ahlers' 30-year career, published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery in British Columbia in 2023.
The first half of the publication functions as an exhibition catalogue, featuring texts reflecting on different periods of Ahlers' career by Tavi Gevinson, Kathleen Hanna, Doretta Lau, and Lisa Prentice; a methodological essay by archival theorists Alexandra Alisauskas and Jennifer Douglas; and lavish illustrations of artwork from throughout Ahlers' career - all anchored by a career-spanning survey essay by curator Godfre Leung. Revisiting Ahlers' work and celebrating its place within the Riot Grrrl movement of the nineties and its influence on the Rookie Mag generation that came of age in the late aughts, these texts make a compelling case for Ahlers' relevance today to a third generation of feminist culture.
The second half of the publication is a substantial new book-length collage work by Ahlers - a book within a book titled "Rabbit-Hole." Classification Crisis began as a project by Ahlers to prepare her archive, an ongoing endeavour that grew to include both the exhibition and "Rabbit-Hole," which reassembles documents from her archive to create a fragmented autobiography that Ahlers describes as a "feminist memoir/scrapbook/confessional commentary on the art world and my place within it."
