Shifter Magazine's new issue Other Spaces rethinks architecture's traditional categories of private and public space in light of the collapse of the housing market, foreclosures, the rise in homelessness, and the Occupy Wall Street movement's use of "squatting" as architecture. Shifter thinks through the fissures that have opened between these traditional categories as a result of spontaneous collaborative imaginings of space during a time of economic and political crisis. In this issue artists, writers, and critical thinkers will reflect upon and imagine those "other spaces" that have come to be and can still be embodied in our present time. While the magazine itself is a collaborative platform for manifesting other spaces, Shifter will also present a panel discussion focused on this topic in conjunction with the launch of this issue. The panel will invite theorists, artists, organizational directors, and cultural critics to further elaborate on the ideas presented within Shifter.

Matthew Metzger (b. 1978, USA) is a practicing visual artist and educator who lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2009. Since then he has exhibited at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis while mounting solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Sikkema & Jenkins Co. in New York, Arratia Beer in Berlin, and Tony Wight Gallery in Chicago. Metzger currently completed the first iteration of his project Be-Longing at Art Statements, Art\43\Basel Switzerland (2012) with Arratia Beer, Berlin. Metzger is also currently on faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago as an assistant professor in studio arts and is coeditor of Shifter Magazine.

Sreshta Rit Premnath (b. 1979, Bangalore) is an artist and educator based in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at KANSAS, New York; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; Art Statements, Art|41|Basel; as well as numerous group exhibitions at venues including YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong; Thomas Erben Gallery and Friedman Benda Gallery, New York. He is the founder and co-editor of the publication Shifter and co-organizes the ongoing Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior. Premnath completed his BFA at The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA at Bard College, and has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan and Smack Mellon. He has received grants from Art Matters and the Civetella Ranieri Foundation, and was awarded the Arthur Levitt Fellowship from Williams College. Based in Brooklyn, Premnath teaches at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

Shifter is a topical magazine that aims to illuminate and broaden our understanding of the intersections between contemporary art, politics, and philosophy.  The magazine remains malleable and responsive in its form and activities, and represents a diversity of positions and backgrounds in its contributors. Shifter was founded in 2004 and is coedited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger.