Lectures, screenings, and panels in September

Join us for a new season of programs at e-flux. This September features a series of events organzied in parallel to e-flux journal’s current double issue dedicated to feminism(s), with Mirene Arsanios and Simone White; Martha Rosler, Xin Wang, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk; Peggy Ahwesh and Michele Pierson; as well as a symposium on Allan Sekula’s Fish Story with Benjamin Buchloh, Eduardo Cadava, Nadja Millner-Larsen, and Benjamin Young.

Program

Mirene Arsanios and Simone White: “Motherless Tongues” and “on being the other woman”
Duo lecture
Friday, September 14, 7pm

In this duo presentation, Arsanios and White draw parallels to their respective texts “E autobiography di un idioma” and “or, on being the other woman”—both of which appeared in the recent e-flux journal #92.

Mirene Arsanios, “Motherless Tongues”
“My father had at last died and he died not knowing me, not ever speaking to me in a language in which I could have faith, a language in which I could believe the things he said.”—Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996

“Motherless Tongues” is a series of notes, reflections, and speculations on mother tongues—how the reproductive bond has been instrumentalized in the service of the nation-state, relying on the mother to perform the labor of cultural and ideological transmission. Imagining mother tongues outside biologically sanctioned bonds, beyond the labor of reproduction—languages that exist in troubled ecosystems where lacks and disconnections aren’t exclusive of repair—this presentation will rely on biographical material as it reflects on the negotiation of selfhood to find a language from which to emerge and in which to believe. 

Simone White, “on being the other woman”
I’ll talk about some of the formal and material problems presented by this ongoing project. Key questions or terms that continue to occupy me: What is the work’s register or key? How to reflect upon linguistic density and speed as durational challenges reflecting the theme of labor, especially various forms of uncompensated emotional labor performed by black women?

Allan Sekula, Fish Story
Symposium with Benjamin Buchloh, Eduardo Cadava, Nadja Millner-Larsen, and Benjamin Young
Introduced by Sally Stein
Friday, September 21, 7pm
RSVP on Eventbrite.

MACK is pleased to present the symposium Fish Story, on the occasion of the republication of Allan Sekula’s landmark book. Allan Sekula (1951–2013) was a renowned photographer, filmmaker, theorist, photography historian, and critic. His magnum opus Fish Story was realized as a book and exhibition, investigating the maritime world as a site of class conflict, and the ocean as a key space of globalization.

Today, Fish Story is regarded as a seminal early critique of global capitalism, as well as a landmark body of work that challenged perceptions about the role of photography as a documentary medium. Now that it’s been nearly 25 years since the book was first published, this symposium asks four art historians, critics, and writers variously engaged with Sekula’s ideals to discuss its enduring value, principal concerns, and elaborate structure.

On feminism(s): Martha Rosler, Xin Wang, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk
Double issue launch of e-flux journal #92 and #93 
Wednesday, September 26, 7pm

In ten seconds, how many synonyms can you think of for the word “power”?
And then, just when you thought that you finally got the hang of how the power structures around you function, they seem to be coming undone. But are they really coming undone, or is the current that’s pushing and pulling at them not much more than a massage, a way to keep them up to date that stays only on the surface and is not able to touch the center?
What is feminism, precisely? What are feminisms today?

To answer these questions and myriad others, the summer and September issues of e-flux journal are dedicated to feminism(s). It is a particular pleasure to embark on an exploration and an unfolding of the many complex realities and iterations that feminism can accommodate. Not one feminism, but many.

Join us in celebration of the work and words of thinkers, artists, workers, mothers, poets, historians, collaborators, fighters, conveners, killjoys, teachers, men of trans experience, women of trans experience, womyn, women, woman, men, man too who contributed to e-flux journal’s issues #92 and #93. 

The launch features contributing authors Martha Rosler, Xin Wang, McKenzie Wark, and Elvia Wilk, introduced by editor Kaye Cain-Nielsen.

Peggy Ahwesh in conversation with Michele Pierson
Screening of Ahwesh’s The Star Eaters (2003, 24 min), Alluvium (2015, 25 min), The Blackest Sea (2017, 9 min), and The Falling Sky (2017, 10 min) followed by discussion
Saturday, September 29, 6pm

Join us for a special evening with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh and film scholar Michele Pierson, organized in parallel to e-flux journal’s current double issue on feminism(s), and featuring a selection of Ahwesh’s films:

The Star Eaters is a short and inconclusive treatise on women and gambling, a sentimental education at the seashore, off-season, set in the landscape of abandoned decay that was once a glamorous Atlantic City. Inspired by Jalal Toufic’s 1993 book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, Alluvium is a visual essay based on Ahwesh’s experience being embedded in a foreign place that is both a beautiful ancient land and an abysmal war zone—the occupied West Bank. Constructed from “found footage” animations on YouTube made by a Taiwanese news agency, The Blackest Sea and The Falling Sky take us on a lyrical tour through the dense landscape of human foibles and crises increasingly out of alignment with the forces of nature.

Admission is free; 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

Dave McKenzie and Mary Walling Blackburn, “Hostile Witness”
Screening, reading, and conversation

The Otolith Group, The Third Part of the Third Measure
Featuring a dicsussion with The Otolith Groups’ Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun and music scholar George Lewis, and a perfomance by artist travis, on the occasion of the New York premiere film of the Otolith’s film on Julian Eastman

e-flux lectures: Keti Chukhrov, “What Makes Communism Unbearable” 
Or, a Few Notes on the Political Economy of the Common Good

“Thinking Matter, Thinking Body, Talking Hands”
Featuring artist Emanuel Almborg and philosophers Maria Chehonadskih and Alexei Penzin

New e-flux podcast episodes; available for listening on iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud

Lawrence Weiner, Julieta Aranda, and Liam Gillick in conversation
Julieta Aranda and Liam Gillick join Lawrence Weiner in his New York studio for a conversation spanning art education and cosmetic dentistry. 

Mary Walling Blackburn on “Sticky Notes”
Mary Walling Blackburn discusses her text, “Sticky Notes, 1-3,” published in e-flux journal #92—“on feminisms” (Summer 2018), with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen. “The video editing suite sat directly across from 1607 Broadway. My mother’s boyfriend was editing a sequence of two figures fighting with long sticks. They were aiming for one another’s heads.” Excerpt from “Sticky Notes, 1-3”

Mirene Arsanios on mother tongues
Mirene Arsanios discusses her text, “E Autobiography di un Idioma,” published in e-flux journal #92—“on feminisms” (Summer 2018). In conversation with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen.