The Shoplifters

This conversation begins with a discussion on Joe Wakeman’s feature film, The Shoplifters. A video artist based in Brooklyn, NY. 


Full interview click HERE.

Situated within an extended pedagogical encounter, this conversation develops from a student–teacher relationship grounded in trust and articulated through the reciprocal exchange of knowledge and lived experience, taking Joe Wakeman’s film The Shoplifter as a point of departure. Spanning ideology, philosophy, activism, and politics, what originates in the art school is reconfigured here as an ongoing dialogue—where the meanings of words and symbols are negotiated, destabilized, and reconstituted. Amid a contemporary culture abound by life-threatening nihilism that cuts across race, class, gender, and nationality, as what follows, the conversation unfolds as a form of spiritual communion through the possibility of healing. What emerges is a shared commitment to imagining futures, embodied not only in thought but in their action, in their habits of being.

Credit: Visual identity for the film, The shoplifter, featuring Artist Hanlei Wang’s editorial narrative design.