Ash Moniz is a trans-disciplinary artist working primarily between installation and video/film, with a focus on the politics of infrastructure. After a decade-long research investigation into supply-chain logistics (living on container ships, collaborating with dock-workers at ports around the world, conducting interviews and archival research), Moniz performs the logistics of art-production through its infrastructures of access, agency, and legitimacy. Looking at the representability of loss within shipping (a key feature in the history of supply-chain management), and the representability of loss within an artwork (such as Moniz exhibiting the absence of an artwork after it’s $30,000 production budget was instead sent to families in Gaza), these economies of lack intersect and co-constitute within Moniz’s practice.

Moniz’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions such as Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), Sishang Museum (Beijing), and group exhibitions such as SmackMellon (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art’s ISP Show (New York), Vermillion Sands (Copenhagen), Sheffield DocFest, Berlinale | Forum Expanded (Berlin), and Dakar Biennale. Moniz has participated in many artist residencies such as Art Explora x Cite Des Art (Paris), Triangle Residency (New York), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Madison), Times Museum (Guangzhou), Künstlerhaus Buchsenhausen (Innsbruck), and Trinity Square Video (Toronto). As a writer, Moniz’s essays have been published in Makhzin Magazine, K Verlag Press, Mousse Publishing, MIT Press, Esmat Publishing, and in six articles for Mada Masr.

Stemming from the artist’s work on shipping-logistics, this project with AiR 351 x Art Explora, looks at infrastructures of access/agency by focusing on ship jurisdiction and labour organizing. As shipping is about carving flows and conduits of access, Moniz will performatively research how this access is hijacked/leveraged for infrastructures of solidarity. Contextualized by Art Explora’s museum-boat, this project is based around how a vessel’s jurisdiction can be used for mutual aid (through borrowing the legality that it’s flag allows), and the context of Portugal’s uniquely strong dock-worker’s organizing (disrupting ship-flow through strikes). It frames the museum-boat by the undercurrent forms of internationalism that define maritime politics. Locating where supply-logistics intersects with cultural-logistics, through the flows of legitimacy in art’s infrastructure, this project treats this legitimacy as a medium itself.