Join us this month at Bar Laika for screenings and events featuring Metahaven; Ja’tovia Gary, Johan Grimonprez, John Smith, Michael Smith, Patty Chang, Phoebe Osborne, Samantha Nye, Sondra Perry, Suzie Silver, and Shelly Silver; and others.
And join us at e-flux for lectures, presentations, an exhibition, and workshops featuring Minouk Lim, Yoshua Okón, Ming Wong, and Asakusa; Tom Holert; Marta Caldeira, Tao Sule DuFour, Mario Gooden, Sophie Hochhäusl, Dora Epstein Jones, Sanford Kwinter, Peter Laurence, Sylvia Lavin, John May, Ana Miljacki, Meredith Tenhoor, David Theodore, Matthew Allen, Joseph Bedford, Elisa Dainese, Gabriel Fuentes, Antonio Furgiuele, Joseph Godlewski, Jeremy Lecomte, Jake Matatyaou, Ginger Nolan, Bryan Norwood, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Marrikka Trotter, and Nick Axel; Joan Kee and Brian Kuan Wood; and Sophia Al-Maria and Michael Vazquez.
Program
e-flux presents: The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA)
With Minouk Lim, Yoshua Okón, and Ming Wong; curated by Asakusa
Exhibition on view April 30–June 8, open Tuesday–Saturday 12–6pm
Conversation with Yoshua Okón and Osaka Koichiro on Monday, May 22, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
e-flux is very pleased to present the exhibition The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA) curated by the Tokyo-based project space Asakusa and featuring artists Minouk Lim, Yoshua Okón, and Ming Wong. The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) efforts to purge sites of communism was a global operation—and Japan was no exception. Key officials from the agency described acts of espionage and strategic coordination in the 1950s and ’60s that ranged from the mobilization of controlled media and Yakuza mafia groups, to the violent suppression of socialist movements. The CIA’s clandestine activities succeeded in transforming economic policies, sovereign histories, and global perception, irrevocably altering the world’s cultural and political landscape. This exhibition considers the incarnations and reverberations of their strategies, and how they continue to infiltrate today’s political imagination. With its title alluding to mind-body dualism, the exhibition contends with past machinations that are still corporeally present, albeit camouflaged in other forms of manipulation and continuing to shift control and coerce power under new terms.
Bar Laika presents: Metahaven, Information Skies
Thursday, May 2, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Along with the damp landscapes of the Black Forest and space anime, Information Skies comprises yet another visual dimension—that is, the graphic framing in grey, blue, and indigo, at times resembling torn and melted film or, perhaps, a deconstructed digital control panel. Metahaven perspicaciously call it “interfacial ruins.” Ruins are inevitably a beginning, a potentiality; they have an “existentialising function,” as coined by Félix Guattari in his essay “Cracks in the Street,” where he wrote about “Cracks in the text of the State, cracks in the state of things, in the state of places, in the state of norms… Cracks leading us despite ourselves to new social practices and to new aesthetic practices which will reveal themselves as less and less separate from each other, and more and more in complicity.” Information Skies is not a dystopia but rather a poetically rendered document of the current evolutionary mutations that concern changes in communication tools and reality processing.
e-flux lectures: Tom Holert, “Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics”
Friday, May 3, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
Questioning the functions and claims of contemporary art within economic and political systems that rely on the management of data and affects, this talk takes issue with a peculiar emphasis—placed for quite some time, e.g. in curatorial statements and the self-descriptions of art institutions—on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.” Understood both in terms of artistic practices articulated as “of the present,” as well as a specific, expansive mode of culture industry, contemporary art moreover should be discussed as a strategic bet on the social distinctions and value extractions thought to be made possible by claiming a different, though certainly privileged and privileging access to “knowledge.” Contemporary art’s various liaisons with the humanities, with “technology,” with the social and natural sciences (its practitioners increasingly embedded in transdisciplinary research environments and educational settings) create a sense of epistemological and aesthetic departure. It concurs with the impression that art is transforming to become a conduit or catalyst of “knowledge.” Considering the realities of cognitive capitalism and machine learning, this gambit of framing contemporary art as an exploratory, essentially epistemic enterprise is to be problematized. The talk will present passages from the manuscript of Knowledge Beside Itself, a book scheduled for publication in October 2019 (with Sternberg Press).
Bar Laika presents: Launch for e-flux journal’s spring 2019 issues
Wednesday, May 15, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Since we started with issue zero, issue #99 (April) is actually our hundredth issue, amounting to nearly a thousand essays. Issue #100 (May) will mark a big milestone in itself, too. Thinking ahead can be tricky, because the future always harbors a hidden object. Time does not move in one direction; it is not only the period we think we’re living in. Looking sideways, backward, at multiple shared timelines at once, we plan and we think ahead—but ahead of what? The restoration of many buried futures is long overdue. In this situation—which is also marked by imminent planetary precarity—how do we put the future together again? Join the editors and local authors for a launch of our spring 2019 issues (#96–#100) at Bar Laika.
e-flux Architecture presents: Theory’s Curriculum
Saturday, May 18, 10am–5pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
Syllabi are theory’s infrastructure. They set a program for study, give structure to vast networks of ideas, and define an interpretative stance on the world. This one–day event will address who our theory syllabi represent, what theoretical objects or concerns they should address, and why we should continue to teach architectural theory today? The program will include the launch and presentation of the e–flux Architecture project Theory’s Curriculum as well as responses to the project by 12 panelists who will discuss the who, what, and why of architectural theory today in a series of panel sessions. With Marta Caldeira, Tao Sule DuFour, Mario Gooden, Sophie Hochhäusl, Dora Epstein Jones, Sanford Kwinter, Peter Laurence, Sylvia Lavin, John May, Ana Miljacki, Meredith Tenhoor, David Theodore, Matthew Allen, Joseph Bedford, Elisa Dainese, Gabriel Fuentes, Antonio Furgiuele, Joseph Godlewski, Jeremy Lecomte, Jake Matatyaou, Ginger Nolan, Bryan Norwood, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Marrikka Trotter, and Nick Axel.
e-flux lectures: Joan Kee, “When Art Lays Down the Law”
Wednesday, May 22, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
In this lecture, art historian and former lawyer Joan Kee will discuss three lines of inquiry into art and law via 1) legal practice, or how the practice of law intersects with art; 2) legal theory, how legal theory might help us think through/revisit artistic questions like intention [volition/consent], collaboration [joint authorship], and what the idea of agreement might entail; and 3) the “legal imagination,” or what is not yet possible in law that artworks permit us to imagine. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood.
Bar Laika presents: A Temporary State of Grace
Thursday, May 23, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
You’re sitting in a bar and overweight Jesus walks in and points a glowing finger directly at you. Or perhaps its not Jesus but a fleshy baby Satan or God himself or your mother, it’s hard to tell with all the smoke and thunder. And you think about running but your expensive drink just arrived and you’re thirsty, and maybe each person in the bar is seeing their own God Baby Mom Satan, but rather than look around, you check your phone and you have a new message. Bar Laika presents an evening of short videos precariously situated between popular culture, popular religion and popular pastimes such as eating, dancing, singing, spinning, bathing, praying, punching, cutting, crawling, fighting, flying. A balancing act, a floating just above, an acting out [or in], till it becomes real, or forestalled, or goes away, or at least something you can dance to. With videos by Ja’tovia Gary, Johan Grimonprez, John Smith, Michael Smith, Patty Chang, Phoebe Osborne, Samantha Nye, Sondra Perry, Suzie Silver; curated by Shelly Silver.
e-flux presents: Sophia Al-Maria, Sad Sack; in conversation with Michael Vazquez
Wednesday, May 29, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
Sad Sack (Book Works, 2019) is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction;” opposing “the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.” Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her “premature” memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of “Gulf Futurism,” towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up, and sucking dry. Emerging from under a weight of climate depression, registering a hyper-empathic, hormonally sensitized response to current affairs and long histories of colonial injustice, this anthology offers “mini-mega narratives” that innovate the personal essay, alongside poetry, short stories, arts criticism, and “juvenilia.” New and previously unpublished pieces sit with others originally commissioned by Artforum, Bidoun, e-flux journal, Creative Time Reports, and Serpentine Galleries, among others. “Dear Chip” (Delany), “Dear Kurt” (Cobain), and “Dear Britney (Axis Mundi)” (Spears) are exemplars of the anti-exemplary, fan-fiction genre. Join us for an evening with the author, in conversation with writer and editor Michael Vazquez.
Stay tuned to our website for more programs coming up in May; or subscribe to our events mailing lists for e-flux and Bar Laika.
New on e-flux Video & Film
David Claerbout, “Dark Optics”
Claerbout discusses his 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.
“Offsetted: On the Rights of Trees”
Discussion with Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe (Cooking Sections), Mari Margil, and Elizabeth Yeampierre; moderated by Felicity D. Scott; organized at e-flux on the occasion of Cooking Sections’ exhibition Offsetted at Columbia GSAPP.
Charles Mudede, “Black Green Gothic: Visualizing the Afro Pacific Northwest”
Mudede presents clips from his new film Thin Skin and discusses the Northwest aesthetic of what Seattle art critic Matt Offenbacher has described as the “green gothic.”
Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-socialist Europe
Zdenka Badovinac in conversation with Ana Janevski for the launch of Badovinac’s new book published by ICI.
Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?
Discussion with Claire Bishop, Cosmin Costinaș, Adrienne Edwards, Inti Guerrero, Ana Janevski, and André Lepecki on the launch of the the eponymous book co-published by Para Site and Sternberg Press.
New e-flux podcast episodes; available for listening on e-flux, iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud
Satellite music series: Lucie Vítková
Sanna Almajedi and Andreas Petrossiants speak with Lucie Vítková following her Satellite music series performance at Bar Laika.
Three science-fiction scenarios: Tony Wood
Writer Tony Wood and e-flux editor Brian Kuan Wood discuss “Intrusions: Or, The Golden Age Is Not in Us” published in e-flux journal #98, March 2019. The text examines three science-fiction scenarios that for Tony illustrate three collapses of orders of magnitude or scale—Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, written in the US in the 1970s; Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, filmed in the USSR in the same decade; and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, published in the US in the 2010s.
Satellite music series: C. Spencer Yeh
Sanna Almajedi speaks with C. Spencer Yeh following his Satellite music series performance at Bar Laika.
