Talks, screenings, and launches
Join us at e-flux this May for talks, screenings, and launches featuring Thomas Allen Harris and Daniella Brito; Marion von Osten, Jonas von Lenthe, and Brian Kuan Wood; Meredith TenHoor; Noam M. Elcott; Sylvain George and George MacBeth; Christina Kiaer, Juliet Koss, and Devin Fore; Mabel O. Wilson and Mahdi Sabbagh; and more.
Thursday, May 2, 2024, 7pm
Thomas Allen Harris: screening and conversation
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A screening of two works by Thomas Allen Harris, curated by Daniella Brito. Harris’ films are among a series of videotapes derived from the artist’s archive of his performance work from the 1990s. In Blue Baby (1996/1997), he embodies an infant who would have been aborted had their family known they would grow up to be queer. The recurrent performance intervention took place across public spaces in Los Angeles, ranging from shopping malls, to museums and cafés. In the second work, titled Heaven, Earth & Hell (1993), Harris conjures the Trickster figure—an archetype found across Afro-diasporic and Indigenous folklore—to recount the story of his first queer love. In both works, Harris captures the gaze of the observer through disguise. As the artist adorns himself in striking body and face paint, he toys with notions of public spectacle, gesturing towards the racial, sexual, and gender subjectivities that fabricate cultural difference. After the films, Harris will be in conversation with Brito as they ask: How does identity inform social otherization? And how can we understand the different implications of spectatorship between performance documentation and live performance? Read more here.
Friday, May 3, 2024, 7pm
Material Marion von Osten 1: MoneyNations
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MoneyNations was an exhibition, a webzine, a radio, a conference, a video archive, a printed publication, an infrastructure, a counterpublic, an ongoing discussion, a transnational network of friends. Initiated by Marion von Osten (1963–2020) as curator at the Shedhalle Zurich, the project evolved from an urgency to act against the hegemonic forces of “the West” within the radically changing condition of post-Cold War Europe. MoneyNations addressed—and intervened in—the interrelatedness between racist border policies and media representations, exploitative economic relations, and identity-forming processes. The applied methods of critique and organizing, transversing between art, theory, and activism, are made accessible in this volume through images, correspondences, and other ephemera, revealing their political potential for the present. Join us for a screening and presentation of archival material by editor Jonas von Lenthe in celebration of the launch of Material Marion von Osten 1: MoneyNations (Wirklichkeit Books, 2024), followed by a discussion between Jonas von Lenthe and e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood. Read more here.
Tuesday, May 7, 2024, 7pm
Launch of e-flux Journal #145
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e-flux Journal #145 (May 2024) is a collective reflection on the afterlife of Iran’s Jina uprising and the historical and material forces that compelled it into action. The issue’s contributing authors comprise women activists who work across feminist, social, and civil fields—all based in Iran. Nearly two years after Jina’s point zero, the essays in this issue aim to map the uprising’s specificity in the genealogy of post-revolutionary insurrections in Iran, and reassert the links between the Jina uprising and interconnected liberation struggles beyond national configurations—as a body of thought in translation. Join us for a conversation between the issue’s guest editors and some of its contributing authors and translators. Read more here.
Thursday, May 9, 2024, 7pm
Meredith TenHoor, “On Residues and Repair”
e-flux Architecture Lectures
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How can we theorize the harm of modern building materials? What does it mean to live with this harm? What forms of repair are possible? One of the most damaging additives to building materials is vinyl chloride, widely used in flooring, piping, and roofing. The liver-cancer-associated and VOC-emitting chemical that was spilled and then incinerated in the recent Northern-Southern rail disaster in East Palestine, Ohio has quietly polluted many landscapes prior to this spectacular disaster, at sites of production, construction, transportation, installation, use, and disposal. Looking at the long history of vinyl products—the materials they replaced, the forms of racialization they provoke, their local and global social and ecological impacts—Meredith TenHoor will analyze what she calls “vinylaties:” how building products manufacturers, the architects who aestheticized their products, and activists who have insisted on repair, contend with the violence of this material. Presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.
Thursday, May 14, 2024, 7pm
Noam M. Elcott, “Arthur Jafa: Seeing is Believing in the Age of AI”
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In the last decade, Arthur Jafa has incomparably advanced our understanding of art and visual culture at the intersections of technology, race, and history. Works like Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) capture the swells of Black joy and pain as they undulate in and through distributed technology networks enabled by camera phones and social media. In ***** (pronounced “redacted,” 2024), Jafa restores the harrowing conclusion of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver(1976) to its original but ultimately redacted racial animus. The 73-minute video is much more than an exercise in film history. It is an education in racial vision, a meditation on the visible and the invisible in the US, and the most compelling exploration to date of the possibilities for art in the age of artificial intelligence. This talk by Noam M. Elcott is presented as part of the ongoing lecture series Film Beyond Film: Art and the Moving Image. Read more here.
Saturday, May 18, 2024, 3pm
Sylvain George: screening and conversation
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For the last eighteen years, Sylvain George has been engaged in a critical cinematic project of confronting the sedimentation of violence enacted by Fortress Europe to “securitise” its terrestrial and imaginary borders, and suppress dissent—whilst also portraying the forms of disidentification practiced by those subjects who strive to surmount such official borders, whether it is the young Moroccan men amongst and with whom the filmmaker has recently lived and filmed in Melilla (the so-called Harragas), the migrants in the Calais refugee camps, or the insurrectionary surging of social movement activists in the metropole. Drawing upon the formal legacy of the historic avant-garde, George’s work provides both a self-scrutinizing record of the so-called Mass-Protest Decade—the 2010s—and its militancy, and a searing and immediate insight into the ongoing European refugee crisis. Featuring No Border (2008), Joli Mai (2017), and L’impossible – Pages arrachées (2009). Followed by a conversation between Sylvain George and guest-curator George MacBeth. Read more here.
Tuesday, May 21, 2024, 7pm
Christina Kiaer, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism
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This conversation between Christina Kiaer, Juliet Koss, and Devin Fore marks the US launch of Kiaer’s Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (Chicago, 2024), a new account of Socialist Realism not as a totalitarian style but as a fiercely collective art system. Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s corporeal version of Socialist Realism as an alternate experimental aesthetic that activates affective forces for collective ends. Christina Kiaer traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Terror and beyond. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limit case of the system he inhabited and helped to create. Collective Body shows how the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers’ imaginations by evoking the elation of collectivity, retaining the potential to inform the art-into-life experiments of contemporary art. Read more here.
Thursday, May 30, 2024, 7pm
Mabel O. Wilson, “On the Violence of Architecture”
In conversation with Mahdi Sabbagh. e-flux Architecture Lectures
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In his first chapter “Concerning Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon observes that “this world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species.” How do we understand what happens when bodies routinely cross borders, when they are subjected to all forms of scrutiny? In what ways are processes of subjection performed, like nationality but also gender, sexuality, and race allowing agents of the state to determine the status of belonging, rights, and humanity? In narrating a personal journey through and within checkpoints in the West Bank, Mabel O. Wilson will consider how borders divide territory and function as wastelands, zones of suspended time, and disrupted space. Wilson will be in conversation with writer, architect, and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh. Presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.
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