Articles and Book Chapters

April 2025

I will be a visiting fellow at ICI Berlin April-July 2025: https://www.ici-berlin.org/people/sperling/.

December 2024

New publication!

"Nonbinary/Natures." symploke, vol. 32 no. 1, 2024, p. 115-128. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sym.2024.a946613.

October 2024

Several high profile shoutouts (thanks to Jeff VanderMeer) to an essay I wrote in 2017, “Second Skins, A Body Ecology of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy” that inspired a very weird part of Jeff VanderMeer’s (already) bestselling new novel ABSOLUTION in: The New York Times, Esquire, Atmos Earth, and in a recent interview I did on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

MUHANNAD SHONO 2014-2024 Monograph is OUT with Kehrer Verlag Press! Includes my essay on Subterranean Ecologies. More information and purchase here: https://www.kehrerverlag.com/en/muhannad-shono-works-2014-2024-978-3-96900-158-5

Edited by Nat Muller and including texts by Hala Auji, Nat Muller, Todd Reisz, Alison Sperling

This comprehensive monograph offers a critical overview of Saudi artist Muhannad Shono’s oeuvre to date. The publication positions him as one of Saudi Arabia’s most original and daring artistic voices. It sheds light on his unique visual language and contextualizes his work at this particular transformative juncture in the Kingdom and the contemporary art world at large. A storyteller at heart, Shono’s main drivers in his artistic practice—such as his usage of the line, the void, and natural materials to create speculative and generative narratives—are explored in-depth in this publication. This book aims to introduce the artist’s ground-breaking work to a wide international audience and invite them into the complex and evocative world of his imagination.
Muhannad Shono, who represented Saudi Arabia at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and participated in the first Islamic Arts Biennale, has been named the Contemporary Art Curator for the second edition, which will be held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2025.

August 2024

HOLDING PATTERNS, a film co-written by Saša Spačal and Alison Sperling is reviewed in Neural Magazine in the context of Spačal’s exhibition TERRAXENOBIOTICA at Art Laboratory Berlin.

Read it here: https://neural.it/2024/08/terra-xenobiotica-forever-chemicals-airport-soil/

Recording now available:

“Nonbinary/Natures.” “Shifting Natures Symposium,” Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin, March 14-15 2024.

Recording: https://oa.ici-berlin.org/repository/doi/10.25620/e240314_11