Classification Crisis is an critical survey of the first 30 years of Sonja Ahlers’ career. It was published on the occasion of her 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 book is a substantial new book-length collage work by Ahlers— a book-within-a-book, titled “Rabbit-Hole.” Classification Crisis began as an archive preparation project and 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 something like a “feminist memoir/scrapbook/confessional commentary on the art world and my place within it.”
Classification Crisis exhibition curated by Godfre Leung, Richmond Art Gallery, 2023
all photos by Michael Love
The exhibition includes her Riot Grrrl zines of the nineties, one-of-a-kind chapbooks spanning thirty years, a decade of unseen work after she “quit art” in the wake of the Vancouver art boom, and other artworks and ephemera from a career of collecting images and scraps of language.
