March events

Join us at e-flux this March for screenings, talks, and performances featuring Alla Vronskaya; Kite, Christina Kiaer, Xin Wang, Yin-Ju Chen, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Anton Vidokle; Chris Kennedy; Liz Phillips, Sam Green, Sanna Almajedi, and Annea Lockwood; Sosena Solomon, Mpho Matsipa, Natacha Nsabimana, and Christian Nyampeta; Amy Sillman, Adam Moss, Prudence Peiffer; and Ben Eastham; Samia Henni; Elizaveta Shneyderman, Travis Fitzgerald, Evan Calder Williams, and Serubiri Moses; Katharine Liberovskaya, David Watson, and Phill Niblock.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024, 7pm
Alla Vronskaya, “Modernism on the Frontier: Architecture and Regional Planning in the Interwar Soviet Union”
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This lecture by Alla Vronskaya will examine the interrelated development of regional planning, architecture, and geography in the interwar Soviet Union. It will focus on the transition from evolutionist human geography, which viewed architecture as society’s adaptational mechanism, to economic geography, which instead turned to such questions as location of industrial production and the distribution of the workforce. Unlike its Western analogs, Soviet economic geography, which emerged at the moment of forced industrialization, was not analytical but projective: Guided by Nikolay Baransky, it aspired to not only analyze but to design economic connections. Urban and regional planning responded to this transition. As the lecture will argue, the now-well-known debate about the socialist settlement, which ignited in 1929–30, was inspired by this transition, as architects struggled to reconcile the familiar ways of typification with the new economic demands. Situating this debate in its intellectual context, Vronskaya will examine the entanglement between extractive industrialism, centralized planning, geographic knowledge, and architecture at this moment, focusing on such concepts as the regional plan, the combine, the linear city, and the settlement type developed by Mikhail Okhitovich, Moisei Ginzburg, Ivan Leonidov, and others. Part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.

Thursday, March 7, 2024, 7pm
Launch of e-flux journal issue #142: “Cosmos Cinema”
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A special evening launching e-flux journal’s current issue #142: “Cosmos Cinema”, guest-edited by Ben Eastham and produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale. Introduced by Anton Vidokle, Chief Curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, the evening begins with a performance by Kite, whose work is featured in the Biennale. Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya is a solo performance by Oglala Lakȟóta artist Kite, utilizing a custom hair-braid computer interface that intertwines technology with Lakȟóta Visual Language to manipulate sound. Scholar Christina Kiaer will speak on her text “Anna Andreeva: A ‘Cosmic-Minded Comrade’ in the Red Rose Collective,” co-authored with Ekaterina Kulinicheva. Kiaer’s essay about Soviet artist Anna Andreeva’s cosmic fabric designs from the 1960s contends with Western commentators who have characterized Andreeva’s abstract, geometric patterns as signs of her exceptional ability to circumvent the constraints of the Soviet art system, presumed always to prohibit abstraction and individual expression. Author Xin Wang will discuss her text “The Cosmos Flickers for You,” which takes the warning contained in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy as its starting point to consider the impulse behind the monumental inscriptions of Buddhist texts that adorn Chinese mountainsides. Lukas Brasiskis and Hallie Ayres, members of the Biennale’s curatorial team, will each discuss their respective texts, followed by a short screening of Yin-Ju Chen’s Beyond Right and Wrong, There is a Garden. I Will Meet You There (2023, 15 minutes), currently on view in the Biennale), in which Chen explores the material effects of spiritual, shamanic, and Buddhist practices as well as the metaphysical properties of consciousness. Read more here.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024, 7pm
Constructed Visions: Films by Chris Kennedy
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Chris Kennedy’s films are characteristic of the blend of formalist exploration of cinema and critical engagement with social realities. Utilizing techniques such as conceptual multi-framing, hand processing, superimpositions, and multiple exposures, Kennedy probes how film form influences our optics. His unique blend of technical rigor, minimalist approach, and thoughtful attention to the surrounding world helps reveal the constructed nature of visual perception and challenge dominant ways of seeing, establishing Kennedy’s unique position in the world of contemporary experimental cinema.The screening will feature Kennedy’s Brimstone Line (2013), The Initiation Well (2020), and Watching the Detectives(2017), as well as a special preview of a new work-in-progress. A discussion with the filmmaker will follow the screening. Read more here.

Thursday, March 14, 2024, 7pm
Spirit Catchers with Annea Lockwood
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New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations. In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in the New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, and most recently, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The participants of this performance, Liz Phillips, Sam Green, Sanna Almajedi, and Annea Lockwood herself will bring an object that they have possessed for many years—something sentimental that holds a lot of meaning for the owners. They will then share stories about the objects while their voices are mixed together by Adrian Rew. The performance will be followed by a short talk between Lockwood and the participants. The performance will be followed by a short talk between Lockwood and the participants. Read more here.

Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 7pm
African Film Institute Film Series: Sosena Solomon, Mpho Matsipa
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The African Film Institute presents the second event of the film series curated by anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana, featuring a screening of Merkato (2013) by Ethiopian-American filmmaker Sosena Solomon, and followed by a conversation between Solomon, architect Mpho Matsipa, and Nsabimana.Taking a cue from the practice of an evening school as proposed by Christian Nyampeta’s Ecole Du Soir, Nsabimana invites filmmakers, artists, and scholars for a meditation and conversations around “African Cinema,” unfolding at e-flux Screening Room over the course of twelve months. What does the formulation evoke for us today? Is it worth holding onto? For whom? Comprised of a series of viewings sometimes followed by conversations, the curation will include feature films, shorts, and documentaries. Solomon’s Merkato is a documentary tracing the lives of four people as they navigate the demands of life and work in one of the biggest markets in Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Filmed on location in Merkato, before a radical architectural transformation, Solomon’s documentary invites us to ask expansive questions about space, architecture, transition, and preservation. Read more here.

Thursday, March 21, 2024, 7pm
e-flux Criticism presents: On editing and the creative process
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At the conclusion of the first in this series of talks hosted by e-flux Criticism, in March 2023, there was a question from the audience for Teju Cole. Its asker was herself a painter and a writer, she explained, and often wished that she might, in her artistic practice, have the benefit of the support that is provided to writers by their editors. Is there an analogy, she wondered, between working through edits on a text and the creative process of the visual artist? That member of the audience was Amy Sillman, and we are delighted to welcome her back to e-flux to reflect upon the question from the stage. She will be joined on this panel about editing and the creative process by the celebrated editor Adam Moss, now the author of a book of conversations with artists on the subject of their creative process, and the art historian, writer, and editor Prudence Peiffer, author of a widely acclaimed group biography reflecting on the relationship between a work of art and the wider social and intellectual communities that do so much to shape it. With e-flux Criticism editor Ben Eastham for an interlocutor, they will discuss editing as a working methodology. Read more here.

Monday, March 25, 2024, 7pm
Samia Henni, “Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara”
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This lecture discusses the making of Samia Henni’s publication Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024), which brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting the violent history of France’s nuclear bomb program in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the book is a rich repository for all those concerned with spatial histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social, and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices. Part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024, 7pm
Art Tech and Media Curation: From the “Never-Was” to American Medium
Launch of e-flux journal #143
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The talk will focus on author Elizaveta Shneyderman’s analysis in her forthcoming essay on operational images and specialized institutions of new media art. Moderated by e-flux journal contributing editor Evan Calder Williams, the talk provides two presentations—one theoretical and the other practice-oriented—concerned with the spectralizing of digital ecosystems within the art world. Shneyderman theorizes on fringe or “glitch” art worlds, such as videogame speedrunning communities, as well as on curatorial “already-seenness”, among other terms, to describe the complicated and enmeshed digital and/or art-tech art world, while Travis Fitzgerald offers an account of American Medium gallery, which operated from 2012 through the end of 2018 in New York, as one of the notable galleries that focused on new media art. Organized in the context of e-flux journal #143 (March 2024). Introduced by contributing editor Serubiri Moses. Read more here.

Thursday, March 28, 2024, 7pm
Katherine Liberovskaya and David Watson: Compositions by Phill Niblock
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Join us for an event celebrating the life and work of avant-garde composer, photographer, filmmaker, videographer, and Experimental Intermedia founder Phill Niblock (1933–2024). Katharine Liberovskaya, Niblock’s longtime collaborator, will be joined by David Watson to present three pieces of music: “Expl. Watson” (a version of “Exploratory” written by Niblock for Watson), “Bag” (another composition written by Niblock for Watson), and one piece encompassing live-mixing of field recordings that Niblock gathered on his travels with Liberovskaya. These compositions will be accompanied by guitar, bagpipe, and video. Katherine Liberovskaya has been involved in experimental video since the 1980s and has produced numerous single-channel video art pieces, installations, performances, and works in other media that have been shown around the world. Since 2001, her work predominantly focuses on the intersection of moving image with sound in various ephemeral and fixed forms, most notably through collaborations with many composers and sound artists in improvised live video and sound concerts, where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes. David Watson’s work encompasses improvisation, composition, and scoring for film and dance. In addition to being a guitarist, he has created a vocabulary for the bagpipe as a new music instrument. Since 2016 he has organized and presented hundreds of new music concerts in New York under the auspices of WOrK, Shift, FourOneOne, and now Striped Light. Read more here.

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