We are happy to open a new season of events at e-flux this September, with screenings, talks, performances, and a workshop featuring Ericka Beckman, Piper Marshall, Isaac Preiss, and Jeff Preiss; Samia Halaby and Amir ElSaffar; John Akomfrah, Nande Walters, and Skye Prosper; Peggy Ahwesh, Betzy Bromberg, Abigail Child, Vivienne Dick, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Ruth Novaczek, Anne Robinson, and Rachel Garfield; Raoul Peck, Feza Kayungu Ramazani, and Natacha Nsabimana; Basma al-Sharif, Coleman Collins, Sky Hopinka, Emily Jacir, Joe Namy, Oraib Toukan, and Fawz Kabra; Cate Consandine, Archie Barry, Hayley Millar Baker, Claire Lambe, Laresa Kosloff, Leyla Stevens, Tina Stefanou, James Barth, Ezz Monem, and Stephen Garrett; and Feminist Spatial Practices. Join us!
Saturday, September 7, 2024, 3pm
Growing Sideways: Ericka Beckman, Piper Marshall, Isaac Preiss, Jeff Preiss
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Growing Sideways features the films STOP (2012, 120 minutes) by Jeff Preiss and We Imitate; We Break Up (1978, 26 minutes) by Ericka Beckman. The screening highlights the fitful rhythms of maturation and the profoundly emotional ways the minor—its youthful energy—is a catalyst for social transformation—from thoughtful interlocutor to code disruptor. Growing Sideways will be introduced with a reflection by STOP collaborator Isaac Preiss, and it will conclude with a question and answer session attended by both filmmakers and the guest curator, Piper Marshall. Read more here.
Tuesday, September 10, 2024, 7pm
Kinetic Painting with Samia Halaby, in collaboration with Amir ElSaffar
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Visual artist Samia Halaby has long believed that to be an artist of her time, she had to explore the latest technology. In the early 1980s, this belief led her to explore computing. The computer marketed to artists at the time was the Commodore Amiga—the only computer that had a wide color palette, when Microsoft and Apple were still operating more or less in black and white. Already in her 50s, Halaby began learning how to program using the language Basic, and by 1987, she advanced to the computing language C. While Halaby is known for her abstract oil paintings, she sees programming as a way to visualize her paintings in motion. At e-flux, Halaby will be performing using a program that she coded in the early ’90s. This program generates abstract shapes that she manipulates in real-time using the keyboard, allowing her to perform alongside musician Amir ElSaffar who will be improvising electronic music on modular synthesizers. This event marks the duo’s first performance together, but not their first collaboration, as Halaby’s work graces the cover of ElSaffar’s 2015 album Crisis. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with Halaby and the curator, Sanna Almajedi. Read more here.
Thursday, September 12, 2024, 6pm
John Akomfrah, The Stuart Hall Project
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Presented in collaboration with Pratt School of Art as part of the public programs accompanying the Pieces of You, Pieces of Me exhibition, John Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project (2013, 103 minutes) follows the late public intellectual Stuart Hall’s journey from Jamaica to London, and his foundational contribution to the field of cultural studies. Co-founder of the New Left Review and pioneering figure of cultural studies, Jamaican-born Stuart Hall (1932-2014) has had a resounding—and ongoing—influence on British intellectual life and the wider political and academic landscape. Weaving between the musical archaeology of Miles Davis, and a life lived through the defining political moments and narratives of the twentieth century, director John Akomfrah carefully constructs archival sequences of rare, forgotten, and long-since-seen historical material in this intimate and engaging portrait. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the exhibtion’s curators Nande Walters and Skye Prosper, and a gathering. Read more here.
Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 7pm
Unexpected Pleasures: Women, Punk, and Experimental Film
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Unexpected Pleasures features films by a range of women artist filmmakers whose work was shaped by the punk era of the 1970s. Just as punk created a space for bands such as The Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity through a transgressive, strident new female identity, it also provoked experimental feminist filmmakers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of filmmaking. The films in this screening were part of a rebellious, feminist punk audiovisual culture. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, the featured artists offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new punk audiovisual aesthetic. While not all of these artists identified as punks, the spirit of punk provoked experimental feminist filmmakers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of filmmaking. A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audiovisual culture can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these pioneers, who, like their musical contemporaries, worked in a pre-digital, analog modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audiovisual culture of the 1990s and 2000s. Featuring Betzy Bromberg, Ciao Bella (Or Fuck Me Dead) (1978, 9 minutes), Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Baby Doll (1982, 3 minutes), Abigail Child, Cake and Steak (2002-2004, 20 minutes), Peggy Ahwesh, Doppelganger (1987, 8 minutes), Vivienne Dick, London Suite (Getting Sucked In) (1990, 28 minutes), Anne Robinson, Four Minute Cut (1987, 4 minutes), Ruth Novaczek, Episode (2003, 4 minutes). Followed by a conversation between guest-curator Rachel Garfield and artists Peggy Ahwesh, Abigail Child, and Tessa Hughes-Freeland. Read more here.
Thursday, September 19, 2024, 7pm
Raoul Peck’s Lumumba, with Feza Kayungu Ramazani and Natacha Nsabimana
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On June 30, 1960, the day of independence for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba told a crowd of dignitaries assembled for the occasion: “The Republic of the Congo has been proclaimed, and our country is now in the hands of its own children…We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.” Six months later, he was murdered. Haitian director Raoul Peck’s Lumumba (2000, 115 minutes) traces the first and last days of Lumumba, an iconic African political figure, and with it the aspiration for a free Congo. It is the story of the beauty, the tears and blood that came with that dream. The screening of the film will be followed with a conversation between Feza Kayungu Ramazani of Centre D’art Waza and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana, and is presented as part of the film series curated by Nsabimana for the African Film Institute and e-flux Screening Room. Read more here.
Tuesday, September 24, 2024, 7pm
On landscapes, ruins, and patterns of remembering
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On landscapes, ruins and patterns of remembering is a program of video works that takes its cue from Oraib Toukan’s performance video Remind me to Remember to Forget (2006, 2 minutes), after Mahmoud Darwish’s 1982 prose poem, “Memory for Forgetfulness,” in which the artist proposes to reverse the act of writing and the will to remember, consequently dispersing the written word and suspending it in memory and reimagination. Eighteen years later, in a global context that remains anxious with war and impending invasions, Toukan’s video is revisited in conversation with Sky Hopinka’s Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021, 4 minutes); Emily Jacir’s 15 Palestinian Minutes in Palestine (2001, 16 minutes) and Lydda Airport (2009, 5 minutes); Joe Namy’s Libretto-o-o (2024, 5 minutes); Coleman Collins’s Specular Fiction (2024, 8 minutes); and Basma al-Sharif’s Capital (2023, 17 minutes). Through minimalist experiments and lyrical narratives the works address profound violences of colonial erasure of land and people, the legacies of exile and dispersion, and our relationship to objects and images when only image and replica remain. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Coleman Collins and Emily Jacir, moderated by guest curator Fawz Kabra. Co-presented with ArteEast ias part of Unpacking the ArteArchive. Read more here.
Thursday, September 26, 2024, 7pm
View From a Body
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View from a Body is a screening exploring provocations that surround moving-image culture and notions of embodied affect via the works of ten Australian contemporary artists. Navigating the imaginings of First Nations, diasporic, queer, and female artists, the screening presents affective embodied and disembodied perspectives, creating the space to reflect on how our bodies affect the way we see and understand moving images, and how artists use this through their work. Featuring Cate Consandine, RINGER #1 (2024, 7 minutes), Archie Barry, Scaffolding (Preface) (2021, 11 minutes), Hayley Millar Baker, Nyctinasty (2021, 7 minutes), Hayley Millar Baker, The Umbra (2023, 6 minutes), Claire Lambe, Sudden Bursts of Nasty Laughter (2022-2023, 7 minutes), Laresa Kosloff, The Bleaching (2024, 7 minutes), Leyla Stevens, Patiwangi, the death of fragrance (2021, 8 minutes), Tina Stefanou, Back-Breeding (2023, 11:00 minutes), James Barth, Stone Milker (2024, 5 minutes), Ezz Monem, And He Said: This Is Power? Prodigal Son (2024, 2 minute), Stephen Garret, The Poverty Gully Project (2012, 2:45 minutes). Guest-curated by Cate Consandine. Followed by a discussion between Consandine, Tina Stefanou, and Claire Lambe. Read more here.
Saturday, September 28, 2024, 2–5pm
Feminist Spatial Practices: Making Workshop
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Feminist Spatial Practices—a global collective of architects, artists, designers, and scholars—is launching a new interactive online platform that celebrates the diverse ways that people practice feminism in the built environment. The platform offers an interactive new media visualization and a searchable index of 600+ global feminist practices in art, design, architecture, and activism. The experimental design of the platform enables visitors to discover relationships between practices, publications, exhibitions, and protest movements across time, with themes such as “experimental pedagogies,” “alternative materialities,” and “spaces for non-conforming bodies.” At the launch event, members of Feminist Spatial Practices will introduce the interactive archive, and guest speakers featured within the platform will share their work on intersectional gender equity in the built environment. Fluffy poofs, created during a participatory workshop, will transform the space at e-flux into an environment that invites multiple embodied forms of participation. Read more here.
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For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.