Join us at Bar Laika for a series of screenings and presentations featuring Harun Farocki, Tony Cokes, Christian Nyampeta, and Dara Birnbaum, and at e-flux for lectures and presentations featuring Ricardo Basbaum and Alexander Alberro; and David Claerbout.
Program
Bar Laika presents: Harun Farocki, Parallel I and II
Thursday, March 7, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Bar Laika is very pleased to present Harun Farocki’s Parallel, screening parts I and II on Thursday, March 7 at 9pm and parts III and IV on Thursday, April 4 at 9pm.
Farocki’s four-part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape, and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds. Parallel I (15:53 minutes, 2012) opens up a history of styles in computer graphics. The first games of the 1980s consisted of only horizontal and vertical lines. This abstraction was seen as a failing, and today representations are oriented towards photo‐realism. Parallel II (8:38 minutes, 2014) explores the borders and boundaries of game worlds. The work follows characters’ attempts to escape the edges of their animated world by any means, and seeks to reveal what lies outside of these defined spaces and digital borders.
Diagrams, 1994–ongoing, Ricardo Basbaum in conversation with Alexander Alberro
Friday, March 8, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
Join us at e-flux where artist Ricardo Basbaum will present his book Diagrams, 1994–ongoing (Errant Bodies Press, 2016), in conversation with art historian and critic Alexander Alberro. They will discuss Basbaum’s work in relation to the legacy of conceptual art, as well as Latin American neoconcrete art and the role it has opened up for the spectator in the process of production.
Diagrams is the first comprehensive study of Ricardo Basbaum’s diagrams, cataloging a body of work that has been integral to his artistic practice. In turn, the book offers an invaluable resource for anyone engaging with non-linear thinking and compositional work. Produced as a result of the artist’s exhibition at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo (2013), Diagrams, 1994–ongoing brings a survey of the diagrams created and exhibited by Ricardo Basbaum in recent years, both as autonomous pieces or part of installations and other forms of action. In his own words, Basbaum takes the diagram as a “tool for intervention (…) a sort of drawing (or visual poem) that mediates the dynamic flow between words and images—discursive and non-discursive spaces—or literary and plastic spaces, etc.”
Bar Laika presents: Tony Cokes, Could you visit me in dreams? and Della’s House
Sunday, March 10, 7pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Join us at Bar Laika for an evening with artist Tony Cokes. Tony Cokes works in modules and fragments. Often, installation forms are part of the trajectory of his work: sometimes they have been productive contexts from which individual works are later drawn; other times, clusters of existing short works are spatialized and juxtaposed into installations. This presentation will examine selected excerpts from recent installation projects in Los Angeles and Vienna that will likely find their way to become short autonomous pieces, or components in other installations. For this evening, Cokes will present and discuss two recent installation projects: Could you visit me in dreams? (2018), in which constructed an alternative guide to Vienna mostly from internet sources, and Della’s House (2019), which features two sections—“The Will & The Way” and “The Queen is Dead…”—that play with the legibility of architectural space and historic black creative figures.
e-flux lectures: David Claerbout, “Dark Optics”
Monday, March 11, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
Join us for an evening with David Claerbout, discussing the artist’s notion of “dark optics“—looking back at the history of the camera, its relation between light, optics, and the belief-system it represented, as well as the current disintegration of this system.
During the age of the lens, we perceived an analogy of our surroundings, automatically. Photography functioned as a checks-and-balances system, at least conceptually, because it was something you would “capture.” You could—theoretically—subcontract the purpose of a picture to a mere accident of having been there. It made the photograph self-justified. That is now gone, and instead we have a reduction in the diversity of the perceived world, a perception through information that is made to measure. This change in register announces itself like an unavoidable technical evolution—as did the transition from analog to digital—but has far-reaching consequences that will make photography a clearly closed historical chapter. One might refer to this evolution as a dark optics, in which images will no longer be a record of something in reality but exist solely as a mental phenomenon.
Bar Laika presents: Christian Nyampeta, Words After the World
Thursday, March 14, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Join us with artist Christian Nyampeta for an evening of videos, sounds, and recipes, starting with the trailer of Sometimes It Was Beautiful (2018), commissioned by Maria Lind at Tensta Konsthall; followed by Words After the World (2017); and extending with a live streaming of Radius, an online and occasionally inhabitable radio station.
The film Words After the World was developed during a working period at Camden Arts Centre, in which Nyampeta convened a scriptorium, a working group established to translate historical Francophone texts. The scriptorium focused on the work of Abbé Alexis Kagame, one of the earliest contemporary African philosophers emerging from south of the Sahara. This collective structure informed the script for Words after the World, a short fiction about a writer attempting to draft a novella at a time when the use of existing words is restricted by copyright. The version of Words after the World at Bar Laika includes new dialogues issued from ongoing translations, which are added to the film as they become available. Before and after the screenings, Radius channel plays the evening’s soundtrack, with songs, narrations, and poems related to Nyampeta’s films. The menu for the evening is conceived in collaboration with writer Mary Wang, and features bread recipes prepared with Argo, a one-year-old live culture.
Bar Laika presents Satellite 5: Peter Zummo and Eve Essex
Thursday, March 21, 8:30pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Join us at Bar Laika for the fifth edition of Satellite, featuring Peter Zummo and Eve Essex. Peter Zummo is a composer and trombonist whose music encompasses both the contemporary-classical and vernacular genres. His work is informed by five decades of realizing the work of other composers, poets, bandleaders, choreographers, directors, and filmmakers. The way in which he maneuvers the contemporary trombone is genre non-conforming, and still finds a place in any genre. Zummo worked closely with Arthur Russell, appearing on several of his recordings. He has also collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Phil Niblock, and Yasunao Tone. His music has been released by Foom, Optimo Music, and Experimental Intermedia Foundation.
Eve Essex is a Brooklyn-based musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics, harnessing elements of classical, drone, free jazz, and distorted pop. She has performed as Das Audit (with guitarist Craig Kalpakjian), as well as in trios Hesper (with James K and Via App), and HEVM (with MV Carbon and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix). She has also collaborated extensively with Juan Antonio Olivares as installation/performance-art duo Essex Olivares. Her first solo album, Here Appear, was released by Soap Library (cassette) and Sky Walking (LP) in 2018. She also appears on Pan’s compilation Mono No Aware. Select solo performances include Artists Space, Outpost Artists Resources, Safe Gallery, and Meakusma Festival.
Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi.
5 USD cover at the door.
Bar Laika presents: Dara Birnbaum, Selected Video Works
Thursday, March 28, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Bar Laika is very pleased to present an evening with Dara Birnbaum, featuring a screening of selected video works and Q&A with the artist.
Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946) is a pioneering American video and installation artist whose various critiques and transformations of the moving image have inspired artists internationally. An architect and painter by training, Birnbaum entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television’s ever-growing presence within the American household. Her work primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media, involving the re-manipulatiion of television’s idiomatic grammar and various genres, and enacting a complex and critical engagement with the medium’s representation of political events and the public’s reception of history. Her techniques often merge low- and high-end technologies and draw on her background in architecture and painting to invent new pictorial devices. External and psychological reality, past and present, are conjoined through visual motifs such as reframed and layered images, dramatic wipes, and box inserts that function as windows onto other realities. She has described her works as new “ready-mades” that “manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.” Birnbaum is also well known for forming part of the feminist art movement that emerged within video art in the mid-1970s. Today she has a global presence and is widely celebrated for her influential and powerful artworks.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website; or subscribe to our events mailing lists for e-flux and Bar Laika.
New on e-flux Video & Film
Erlkönig by Malik Gaines
Performed with Nick Mauss, Pati Hertling, Ulrike Müller, and Ethan Philbrickas at e-flux at the opening of the exhibition Journeys with the initiated
New e-flux podcast episodes; available for listening on e-flux, iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud
Satellite music series: Keith Fullerton Whitman
Series curator Sanna Almajedi speaks with Keith Fullerton Whitman following his Satellite music performance at Bar Laika.
Collective Intelligence
Artist Agnieszka Kurant and researcher Tobias Rees in conversation with e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk.
Journeys with the initiated
A conversation with curator Yesomi Umolu and artistic directors Diedrich Diederichsen, and Anselm Franke on the occasion of the Journeys with the initiated exhibtion which was on view at e-flux and Participant Inc December 2, 2018 through January 13, 2019.
