e-flux is very pleased to announce that Turnarounds, Metahaven’s solo exhibition at e-flux, has been extended till Saturday, November 9. We also hope to see you this November for programs featuring Sophie Lewis, and Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli and McKenzie Wark; and in December for a new show by artists Goldin+Senneby, curated by Maria Lind—details of which are coming soon.
Program
Turnarounds. Metahaven at e-flux
September 20–November 9
Metahaven returns to New York with a project comprised of their film installation Hometown (2018), a new series of textile pieces, and an essay in e-flux journal.
Hometown focuses its ultra-wide, hypnotic gaze on two cities—Beirut and Kyiv—that merge into a fictional home for the film’s protagonists, Ghina Abboud and Lera Luchenko. Fluorescent, lava-like animations alternate between images of industrial estates and overgrown gardens as Ghina and Lera lyrically describe the town. A caterpillar gets killed, but while mourning the loss, both evade responsibility for the crime. With their monologue in Russian and Arabic colorfully subtitled in English and Ukrainian, they eat ice cream. Their laughter solves puzzles, and there is a sunken city inhabited by adults who forgot what children taught them.
The script of Hometown draws on a genre of Russian children poems called perevortyshi (“turnarounds,” or “twisters”). In perevortyshi, positive statements are provisionally joined with their opposites to the great joy of both narrator and listener. These poems are, in their playfulness, also fundamentally questioning our reliance on verbal statements in order to approach reality. In Sleep walks the street, an essay for e-flux journal no. 102 that will go live when the exhibition opens, Metahaven interrogate our current tendency to aestheticize politics by relying on the cognitive guidance of metaphorical and allegorical construction. Examining figures of speech that normalize not just words but also entire semantic contexts and cognitive patterns, they reference the work of the German-Polish linguist Victor Klemperer (1881–1960) who studied the language of the Nazis. In searching for potential antidotes, Metahaven focus on the work of the Russian poets Alexander Vvedensky (1904–41) and Daniil Kharms (1905–42), as well as the contemporary poets Eugene Ostashevsky, Jackie Wang, and Galina Rymbu.
e-flux lectures: Sophie Lewis, “Wages for Womb-Work, Polymaternalism, Critical Firestonianism”
Wednesday, November 6, 7pm
Join us for a lecture by Sophie Lewis, author of the essay “Full Surrogacy Now” (e-flux journal #99) and the book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019).
Full Surrogacy Now is both a description of the dystopian structure of planetary reality in the present (reproductive stratification) and a cry for family abolition. Over the course of her theorization, which seeks to synthesize black-feminist polymaternalisms and the Wages for Housework (“wages against womb-work”) sensibility, author Sophie Lewis also critically echoes Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970). Lewis will expand on her “critical Firestonianism,” clarifying—with reference to the history of family-abolitionism in queer and women’s liberation struggles—what abolishing the family means and doesn’t mean; and what is at stake in de-romanticizing the labor of care.
More Pretty: Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli and McKenzie Wark in conversation
Monday, November 25, 7pm
The director of the award-winning film So Pretty and the writer McKenzie Wark discuss the concept of the “pretty” as a minor aesthetic category, with possibilities that major aesthetic categories such as the sublime and the beautiful don’t allow. They will also investigate the kinetic possibilities of rave culture and how (not) to create art by, for, or about trans people using these aesthetic materials. The discussion will be framed by three brief scenes from the film.
Events will be livestreamed on e-flux.com/live.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website; or subscribe to our events mailing list for e-flux.
Upcoming exhibition at e-flux
Goldin+Senneby: Insurgency of Life
December 6, 2019–February 8, 2020
New e-flux podcast episodes; available for listening on e-flux, iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud.
Sohrab Mohebbi and Christian Nyampeta discuss École du soir
Curator Sohrab Mohebbi speaks to artist Christian Nyampeta on the occasion of his exhibition at SculptureCenter, École du soir (The Evening Academy), on view through December 16, 2019.
