Organized by Amsterdam’s De Appel contemporary arts center, Steffani Jemison and Samson Young’s double bill “Decoders-Recorders” took as its starting point the violence inherent to and resulting from the systematization and standardization of communication. Mobilizing artistic strategies—such as intuitive mark-making, erasure, nonsyntactic repetition, and layering—as tools of negation and transgression, the show expanded its critical gaze onto the tyranny of all bounded and binding systems.

The exhibition opened with the series “To Fanon,” 2016–, Young’s rejoinder to the optimization of information