Design Against Design Launch

Kevin works at the intersections of graphic design, cultural production, and social change with a research focus on publication practices and social movements. His research is invested in exploring the tensions between material and relational studies of design as a means of fostering greater social and political autonomy. Kevin founded the graphic design studio LOKI in 2014, working alongside community organizations, non-profits, cultural and educational institutions, unions, artists, researchers and activist groups, as part of broader movements for social change. Kevin holds an MA in Typographic Design from the London College of Printing (UAL). Prior to founding LOKI, he worked in interactive design, advertising and fashion. He is a member of the Memefest network and the Justseeds artist co-operative. Kevin is the author of Design Against Design: Cause and consequence of a dissident graphic practice (2024) with Set Margins’ Press.

[excerpted from his website] Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. From western Canada, he lives in Montréal and has roots in Guyana, South America.

Balbir K. Singh is Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is the Director of Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. Using anti-colonial methods of reading and sensing, Singh builds on theories of opacity in her in-progress manuscript “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Currently, she serves as Reviews Editor for Art Journal and is part of the Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Colelctive. Singh has been published in journals including Sikh Formations, Critical Ethnic Studies, QED, Surveillance and Society, Rhizomes, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Spectra, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas.