S.A. Bachman is a photographer and the co-founder of the artist-activist collaborative THINK AGAIN. THINK AGAIN (founded in 1997 with David John Attyah) expects something political from art and uses images to challenge indifference. THINK AGAIN recruits art-making in the service of public address and seeks to dissolve the boundary between critique and action while prompting the political imagination. They create billboards, public projections, and interventions, and have distributed tens of thousands of posters, postcards and books worldwide. Their artwork interrogates social issues including: the dynamics of economic inequality, gentrification, and displacement; labor and the deleterious effects of free-trade policy; the xenophobic rhetoric of immigration "reform" and the criminalization of undocumented workers; queer rights and sexual liberation; and the logic of militarization.
"ACTIONS SPEAK," currently on view at the Worcester Art Museum through March 2010, includes a 67-foot mural and an outdoor projection that examines connections between public policy and brutality, and reconsiders the ongoing social problems of HIV/AIDS and violence against women. Another recent project, "SALT IN THE WOUND: The NAFTA Effect" is a three-channel video installation and outdoor projection that highlights the contributions of immigrant laborers and reveals how the 700-mile U.S./Mexican border fence insidiously reshapes the way families live and work on both sides of the border.
Bachman's photographs, as well as interventionist projects by THINK AGAIN, have been exhibited at the Institutes of Contemporary Art in Boston and Philadelphia, The Alternative Museum, Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, Exit Art, Track 16 Gallery, and The Grey Art Gallery. Her awards include: National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and LEF Foundation. Her work has been published in Artforum, Ms. Magazine, Social Text, Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies, Graphic Agitation 2, and Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated. A monograph of THINK AGAIN's work entitled A Brief History of Outrage was published in 2003. Bachman received her M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art.