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Join us at e-flux for our March programs featuring Keller Easterling and Pelin Tan; Nick Axel, Ingrid Burrington, Elizabeth Diller, Keller Easterling, Shannon Harvey, Nikolaus Hirsch, Sukjong Hong, Laura Kurgan, Ann Lui, Enrique Ramirez, and Mimi Zeiger; Keren Cytter, Jen Liu, and Kathy Noble; Jacopo Galimberti; and Boris Groys, Claire Bishop, and Anton Vidokle.
Program
Lecture: “The Infrastructure as Symptom”
Keller Easterling and Pelin Tan
Wednesday, March 7, 7pm
“We see this as an effort to embank in lines of humans, ridges of ancestors, forces of pumping and tunneling. At the straining, extimate interface, new forms are coming. The question is what efforts and energies are directed toward which regions of our entangled existence.”
—Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Through case studies from the Southeast borderlines of Turkey to the Pearl River Delta in China, Pelin Tan and Keller Easterling discuss how to approach infrastructure spaces and their territorial affects.
Roundtable: Dimensions of Citizenship
With Ingrid Burrington, Elizabeth Diller, Keller Easterling, Shannon Harvey, Sukjong Hong, Laura Kurgan, and Enrique Ramirez
Moderated by Ann Lui, Mimi Zeiger, Nick Axel, and Nikolaus Hirsch
Monday, March 12, 7pm
Dimensions of Citizenship, the theme of the US Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, co-commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the University of Chicago, challenges architects and designers to envision what it means to be a citizen today. As transnational flows of capital, digital technologies, and geopolitical transformations expand, conventional notions of citizenship are undermined. How might architecture, then, express, and engage with today’s rhizomatic and paradoxical conditions of citizenship?
US Pavilion curators Niall Atkinson, Ann Lui, and Mimi Zeiger, and associate curator Iker GIl, are collaborating with e-flux Architecture editors Nick Axel and Nikolaus Hirsch on an online publication that will respond to contemporary and historical understandings of the concept of citizenship and how questions of inclusions and exclusion (and points in between) are spatially constructed. The Dimensions of Citizenship roundtable discussion brings together US Pavilion curators and e-flux Architecture editors with New York-based contributors to the pavilion and publication series for the first time.
Film screening: Middle of Beyond
Filmmaker Keren Cytter in conversation with Jen Liu and Kathy Noble
Wednesday, March 14, 7pm
Middle of Beyond blends fiction, news clips, and animation recounting ten days in the life of Malte Krumm, a month after the latest US elections. The film depicts the numbness of a world flooded by information and social media activity, where the borders between reality and illusion are crumbling and narcissism and self-promotion overshadow moral values. Based on a true story.
Lecture: “The Worker, the Militant, and the Monster”
Jacopo Galimberti
Monday, March 26, 7pm
Over the past 20 years, and particularly after the publication of Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), the radicalism of Italian militants in the 1960s and 1970s has been reappraised by artists, activists, and scholars. However, little has been written about the production of artists who viewed operaismo and autonomia as an inspiring conceptual toolbox and a repository of images and motifs.
A shared concern of operaismo-minded artists was to devise images that mirrored the material culture of the struggles and the “the workers’ point of view.” This lecture will focus on the visualization of the novel political subjectivities that emerged in 1960s and 1970s Italy. First, we will examine the drawings that appeared in classe operaia, which is possibly the first operaista magazine. Its iconography of the worker stood in stark contrast with what the main parties of the left had crafted up until that point. The second part will focus on Archizoom’s installation Center for Eclectic Conspiracy, which was, in reality, a cenotaph for Malcolm X. The work engaged with the figure of the political leader and the issue of working-class counterculture in the USA. The third and final part will be devoted to the drawings of Pablo Echaurren that were published in Lotta Continua in 1977. Delineated at the end of 15 years of struggle, his political teratology shows how new ideas of subjectivity and agency were refracted through the prism of militant art.
Book launch: Russian Cosmism
Editor Boris Groys in conversation with Claire Bishop and Anton Vidokle
Tuesday, March 27, 7pm
Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. This volume, edited by Boris Groys and published by e-flux and MIT Press (January 2018), collects crucial texts—many available in English for the first time—by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.
Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov’s vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov’s writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists are newly alive and relevant.
Admission is free; no RSVP necessary. Seating is first come, first-served.
Events will be livestreamed on e-flux.com/live.
For a list of our upcoming programs, visit our website. For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
New on e-flux Video & Film
e-flux at the Guggenheim: Duty Free Art and Supercommunity
With Julieta Aranda, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Liam Gillick, Hito Steyerl, and Brian Kuan Wood
“After Midnight: Fast Forward Art History”
With Molly Nesbit, Hilton Als, Yasmin Ramirez, and Ann Reynolds
Cosmic Shift
With Alex Anikina, Boris Groys, Anton Vidokle, and Elena Zaytseva
New on e-flux podcasts; available for listening on iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud
Peggy Ahwesh and Adam Khalil: “time-bombs showing the fault lines of history”
Artists and filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Adam Khalil in conversation. Peggy Ahwesh has produced a range of work since the 1980s challenging traditional forms of film and video, and investigating cultural identity and the role of the subject. Adam Shingwak Khalil (Ojibway)’s practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression.
Contra-Internet with Zach Blas and Laurel Ptak
Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General’s Executive Director & Curator, on the occasion of Blas’s exhibition Contra-Internet at Art in General and his lecture-performance Metric Mysticism at e-flux. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent works respond to biometric governmentality and network hegemony.
