January program

Happy New Year!

Join us this month at Bar Laika for screenings featuring Julieta Aranda, Samuel Beckett introduced by Simon Critchley, Karrabing Film Collective and Liam Gillick with Pelin Tan, as well as Satellite 13 with Chatter Blip and Bookworms.

Please also note our updated hours for 2020:
Sunday–Monday: closed
Tuesday–Thursday: 6pm–12am
Friday–Saturday: 6pm–1am
Happy hour every day 6-7pm and 11pm–close

Email laika [​at​] e-flux.com for dinner or large party drinks reservations.

Bar Laika presents: Julieta Aranda, Stealing one’s own corpse (An alternative set of footholds for an ascent into the dark)
Thursday, January 2, 9pm

Julieta Aranda, Stealing one’s own corpse (An alternative set of footholds for an ascent into the dark), 2014, 31:59 minutes

PART 1: “The Conquest of space is part of the planetary hope of an economic system which, saturated with commodities, spectacles and power, ejaculates into space when it arrives at the end of the noose of its terrestrial contradictions.” This statement, by the Venezuelan thinker Eduardo Rothe (an ex-member of the International Situationist as well as an Hugo Chavez collaborator), opens Julieta Aranda’s Stealing one’s own corpse (an alternative set of footholds for an ascent into the dark) Part 1 (2014). 

On this video, a conversation between six blurred-out characters is combined with footage found on the internet, high-end computer animation and documentation of the artist’s experience in a reduced-gravity aircraft, creating a narrative that observes the interconnection between neoliberal economies and their reliance on growth, environmental destruction, genetics, and space exploration. The result is a complex, expanded investigation of escapology, the practice of escaping. Presented as a basic animal drive, a human desire, an utopic possibility, an economic and political strategy, and a science, the act of escaping is analyzed in its historical and contemporary significances and considered under biopolitical and environmental optics.

PART 2: Swimming in rivers of glue—The perspective of perspective (2016) adds another chapter to the artist’s exploration of the cultural and political imaginary of escaping with an equally upsetting and intense assemblage of found and recorded footage. This time, the combination of digital sounds and computerized, distorted voices that composed the audio of the first part of the series gives way to an equally immersive soundscape of organic noises, in which bodily fluids and syncopated heartbeats connect the viewer’s own physicality with the absent body of the artist.

Julieta Aranda is and artist and an editor of e-flux journal.

Bar Laika presents: Samuel Beckett, Film, introduced by Simon Critchley
Thursday, January 9, 9pm

Samuel Beckett, Film, 1965, 24:00 minutes

Samuel Beckett made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film; the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

Bar Laika presents: Karrabing Collective, Night Time Go
Thursday, January 16, 9pm

Karrabing Collective, Night Time Go, 2017, 31:10 minutes

On September 19, 1943, a group of Karrabing ancestors escaped from a war internment camp and walked over 300 kilometers back to their coastal homelands in Northern Australia. Night Time Go is an exploration of the settler state’s attempt to remove Indigenous people from their lands during the Second World War using truck, train, and rifle and the refusal of the Karrabing ancestors to be detained. The film begins by hewing closely to the actual historical details of this ancestral journey but slowly turns to an alternative history in which the group inspires a general Indigenous insurrection driving out settlers from the Top End of Australia. Mixing drama and humor, history and satire, Night Time Go pushes subaltern history beyond the bounds of settler propriety.

Karrabing Film Collective is an indigenous media group based in Australia’s Northern Territories that uses filmmaking and installation as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organization.

Bar Laika presents Satellite 13: Chatter Blip and Bookworms
Thursday, January 23, 9pm

Join us at Bar Laika for the thirteenth edition of Satellite, featuring live performances by Chatter Blip and Bookworms. 

Chatter Blip is Dafna Naphtali on sound processing, electronics, and voice, and Chuck Bettis on electronics and throat. 

Dafna Naphtali is an electronic-musician, singer, composer-improviser-performer of experimental, interactive electro-acoustic music using her custom Max/MSP programming for live sound processing. She creates works for multi-channel audio, music robots, and interactive soundwalks. She draws on an eclectic musical background in jazz, classical, rock and near-eastern music, to interpret Cage, Stockhausen and other contemporary composers.

Chuck Bettis was raised in the fertile harDCore soil, nourished within Baltimore’s enigmatic avant-garde gatherings, and currently blossoming in New York’s downtown musical tribe. His unique blend of electronics and throat has led him into various collaborations.

Nicholas Dawson (Bookworms) is a Los Angeles-born, New York-based electronic composer. His work is often concerned with various modes of representation and interpretation through audio and non-linear living sonic histories. By way of advanced synthesis, generative sequencing and audio collage, Dawson accesses detuned realities, and conjures harmonics, rhythms and ghosts of the truths which have come to signify across time and space through repetition a multi-dimensional blues.

Free entrance.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi. 

Bar Laika presents: Liam Gillick, Pelin Tan
Thursday, January 30, 9pm

Liam Gillick, Pelin Tan, 2019, 27:54 minutes

For Matera European City of Culture 2019, Pelin Tan researched labour conditions and the new sense of place and community that began with the Riforma Agraria in 1950: from the exodus from Matera’s Sassi to the newly built neighbourhoods in the decades that followed to the re-occupation of the Sassi by left-wing activists in the 1970s, and the contemporary arrival of migrants via the Mediterranean today. 

Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian. She was Associate Professor and Vice-Dean at the Architecture Faculty, Mardin Artuklu University, Mardin. In 2016, she was visiting Associate Professor at PolyU School of Design, Hong Kong. A member of the Artıkişler Collective and The Silent University, Tan is involved in artistic and architectural projects that focus on urban conflict, territorial politics, and conditions of labor.

Liam Gillick lives and works in New York City. Gillick deploys multiple forms to make visible the aesthetics of the constructed world and examine the ideological control systems that have emerged along with globalization and neoliberalism.