SubversivePress is an independent artistic platform for production and dissemination of decolonial work in print, IRL, and/or online. We specialize in generative transdisciplinary, transmedia, and translingual projects that intervene in specific fields by opening alternative spaces of engagement. We aim to cultivate through our publications an ear for language/culture differences (and their effects) as they are threaded through the daily life of artists and writers marked by displacement, migration, dispossession. We are currently focusing on a series of expanded books that are animated by non-extractive and anti-imperialist ethos and centre on place-based cultural production.
Attending to contemporary multimedia literacies, expanded book is a multiplatform publication that integrates print, digital, and real spaces, not by duplication (e.g. a printed book with an e-book version), but by putting different components in conversation (see rumi roaming). The term is inspired by South American ‘expanded cinema’ and Juliana Borrero’s conceptualization of ‘expanded literature’.
Haleh Niazmand and Gita Hashemi started SubversivePress in 2004 as an independent platform for arts-driven publications with a political mission (Locating Afghanistan, In Contact in Iraq). Life intervened and Nizamand left SubversivePress, but she remained a close advisor. Between 2012 and 2025, Hashemi continued as artistic director and publisher, using the name SubversivePress to separate her function as producer/presenter from her work as an artist.
In these years SubversivePress worked with many collaborators that changed from project to project, and characteristically open alternative spaces and forms of public engagement through embodied, participatory and/or generative methodologies (Ephemeral Monument, OusterRe/Union, Passages, Declarations).
In 2025, SubversivePress produced and published its first expanded book, “rumi roaming: contemporary engagements and interventions” curated and edited by Hashemi and involving 20 artists and writers. Elena Basile, joined SubversivePress as associate publisher and editor, after working on ‘rumi roaming’ as editorial consultant and translation and poetry editor, and helped develop the relationships with Guernica Editions and YorkSpace for distribution and online archiving which we are furthering with our current projects.
The original logo designed by Daniel Ellis was retired in 2024. The current logo is designed by Gita Hashemi.