November events

Join us at e-flux and Bar Laika this November for talks, screenings, and music featuring Acamol, Haykal, Želimir Žilnik, Greg De Cuir Jr, Pavle Levi, Jessica Segall, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Hamlet Lavastida, Coco Fusco, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Mohammad Ali Atassi, Stefan Tarnowski, World Records and Jason Fox, and Charles Mudede.

Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 8pm
Bar Laika presents Satellite 27: Acamol and Haykal
10 USD entrance at the door
This 26th edition of Satellite at Bar Laika (224 Greene Ave), features live music performances by Acamol and Haykal. The duo will be premiering their collaboration for the first time in New York with Acamol on decks and Haykal on mic. Acamol works to lower a fever and acts quickly. Acamol can reduce pain caused by headaches, toothaches, the flu, cold, rheumatic pain, severe heartache, and colonial trauma. Acamol is the music alias of artist Basel Abbas. Haykal is a rapper and producer from Ramallah, based, as of recently, in New York. He is known for his lyricism and the variety of different music he makes with cross-genre rap and electronic music influences. Read more here.

Saturday, November 4, 2023, 7pm
Film = weapon or shit? 
Early shorts by Želimir Žilnik
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This evening with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, organized by Greg De Cuir Jr, and followed by a discussion between Žilnik and Pavle Levi, features a selection of short films presenting early works in Žilnik’s career. From unemployed workers to unsatisfied students, from the precariously housed to those living on the streets, these films participate in the struggle against the cruel march of progress and the callous ideology of the state. Six years after the first retrospectives on Želimir Žilnik were presented in the US, the original iconoclast of Yugoslav-Serbian cinema and the enfant terrible of the Black Wave returns to New York to continue a career-spanning survey of his uncompromising and politically-engaged films. Respected as a master of interventionist nonfiction and a pioneer of hybrid documentary techniques, at 81 years old and still working Žilnik is a true elder statesman of independent European cinema. His work for the big and the small screen is always positioned on the side of the marginalized and underserved, and his aesthetics are always a function of empowering people and creating awareness and empathy for their lived experiences. Read more here.

Tuesday, November 7, 2023, 7pm
Human Energy: Jessica Segall with Macarena Gómez-Barris 
Screening and discussion
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e-flux Screening Room and Smack Mellon present a filmic adaptation of Jessica Segall’s four-channel installation Human Energy (2023, 35 minutes), followed by a discussion between the artist and the writer and scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris. Exploring humanity’s addictive and intimate relationship with oil, Segall’s film documents the largest extractive zones in the US—the oil fields in Kern County, California—as well as Soviet-era spas in Naftalan, Azerbaijan, where crude oil is used medicinally and the claims of its healing properties date back centuries. Shot via drone and Steadicam in the oilfields and Phantom camera in the spas, the sensual slowness of her footage divulges the role of fetish within discourses around petroleum. Through montage and the aesthetics of slow cinema, Segall builds upon the legacy of queer filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer and Kenneth Anger, incorporates influences from land art interventions by Nancy Holt, and draws inspiration from the ecosexual performances of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. Segall creates direct intimacy between the flesh, the machines that probe the earth, and “liquid gold” in its unrefined state. Read more here.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023, 7pm
Revolución sin la Revolución: Works and talk by Hamlet Lavastida
RSVP
Cuban artist Hamlet Lavastida will screen some of his animations, as well as a short documentary about his public interventions in Cuba. Via and in addition to his practice, he will give a brief introduction to the dispute over public space, historiography, cultural politics, opposition, civil disobedience, and the state of art activism on the island and in the diaspora. The evening will be introduced by artist and writer Coco Fusco, who will moderate a discussion with Lavastida following his talk. Read more here.

Thursday, November 16, 2023, 7pm
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Paper Beats Rock: The Imperial Institute’s Media” 
e-flux Architecture Lectures
RSVP
Merely six months after its pompous opening in 1893, the Imperial Institute in London was called a “white elephant” by the press. The giant complex had been constructed to help fulfill the British empire’s ambitions for “systematic colonization.” It was designed as a vast “database” that facilitated trade by collecting, storing, and disseminating information about colonial products. Yet, despite the ambitiousness of its architecture, its galleries remained empty and its mission was soon deemed unrealizable. This talk tries to make sense of this “failure” by considering the building as the last instance of a nineteenth-century project of spatializing information in space. The “paper” of print and film, it turns out, would beat the “rock” of architecture in structuring and circulating information in the twentieth century. This lecture by Zeynep Çelik Alexander is presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.

Tuesday, November 28, 2023, 7pm
Our Terrible Country: With World Records and Stefan Tarnowski 
Screening and discussion
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In Mohammad Ali Atassi’s Our Terrible Country (2014, 85 minutes), two activists from two different generations embark on a perilous journey as Syria tumbles into the abyss. This screening and discussion (with Stefan Tarnowski and World Records editor Jason Fox), accompanies the publication of World Records Volume 8: Generations, edited by Stefan Tarnowski and Kareem Estefan. The exchange across a generational divide is paradoxical: successive generations can overlap in the same space and time, while also having distinct relationships to pasts and futures and to the political projects orienting them. This issue is interested in how historical events and conditions interpellate people, across age cohorts, and how generations are generated through their distinct responses to these calls. Generations are not pregiven categories or stable intervals along a timeline, but rather emerge and take shape as they describe, imagine, and act within a historical conjuncture. Cosponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture, and History and the NYU Kevorkian Center. Read more here.

Thursday, November 30, 2023, 7pm
New York premiere: Charles Mudede, Thin Skin
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Ahamefule Joe Oluo’s days are spent at a soul-deadening corporate job and his nights come alive behind a trumpet at Seattle jazz clubs. As he struggles to climb out of the ruins of his broken marriage, Aham has to deal with endless bureaucracy, a boss trying to lead him to the Lord, and a mother who refuses to cut ties with his ex. After losing his home, Aham is living with his entire family once again. Aham’s older sister, Ijeoma, has reluctantly opened up her one bedroom apartment to Aham and his two young daughters, along with their mother, a well-meaning white lady from Kansas, and her array of caged animals. The one person missing from this living situation is Aham and Ijeoma’s estranged Nigerian father. He left the family when the children were young and headed back to his village to start over again. He is the ghost in this cramped family living situation. One day, the ghost makes contact after years of silence. The screening will be followed by Q&A with the film’s director Charles Mudede. Read more here.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our events mailing list here.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.