This February at e-flux were are pleased to host film, performance, and lecture programs featuring Alice Wang with Matthew Day Jackson; Liz Phillips and Joseph Zeal-Henry; Ericka Beckman; Kate Yeh Chiu, Jia Yi Gu, Lola Ben-Alon, Felecia Davis, and Elsa Mäki; Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis; and Pietro Bianchi.
Thursday, February 6, 2025
Alice Wang: Liminal Landscapes. Screening and conversation
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Rooted in structuralist, essayistic, and documentary traditions, Alice Wang conceives the act of filming as a mode of inquiry into the intersection between physical and psychological landscapes. Her site-specific filmmaking often focuses on remote and uncanny terrains—volcanic fields, Arctic glaciers, and self-contained ecosystems—inviting viewers to reflect on the alien within the familiar. This screening features Wang’s The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (2012), Oracle (2017), and Pyramids and Parabolas III (2024). Following the screening, Wang will be in conversation with artist Matthew Day Jackson and e-flux Film Curator Lukas Brasiskis. Read more here.
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Reclaiming Space through Sound: Liz Phillips and Joseph Zeal-Henry
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Join us for a live performance by artist Liz Phillips and a screening of a film excerpt by architect and curator Joseph Zeal-Henry. The evening will explore sound sculptures in public spaces, with special focus on Liz Phillips’s groundbreaking work Windspun, commissioned in 1981 by Creative Time for the Bronx Frontier Ranch, a community garden in the South Bronx that processed compost which was distributed to the local community. Windspun was housed in a windmill tower and used the energy generated by the windmill to produce sound, determined by the wind’s speed, direction, and frequency. In her performance, Phillips will reflect on Windspun through the use of analog and digital live processing and synthesis, as well as interaction with the audience. Zeal-Henry will show an excerpt from his film Dancing Before the Moon (2023), which explores the rituals used by Britain’s diasporic communities to establish spaces, offering new ways of thinking about architecture and the built environment. The event will consider how sound sculptures in public spaces affect the way we experience and interact with our surrounding architecture. The program will conclude with a Q&A between Phillips, Zeal-Henry, e-flux Architecture Assistant Editor and Program Curator Christina Moushoul, and e-flux Performance Curator Sanna Almajedi. Read more here.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Power Games: Winning Isn’t Possible. A screening of films by Ericka Beckman
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A key figure of the Pictures Generation, Ericka Beckman has consistently engaged with the intersections of infrastructures and societal critique, creating films that challenge and reimagine the systems shaping our perceptions of power, agency, and identity. Through her inventive use of cinematic language, Beckman merges play and architectural thought, creating works that compel viewers to interrogate the rules of the game we inhabit—both figuratively and literally. Join us for a screening of selected works followed by an in-person discussion with the artist. Read more here.
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Material Acts launch
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Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu, curators and co-editors of the e-flux Architecture project Material Acts, discuss their most recent publication and exhibition, Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design. Together, these projects examine the role of nature as a starting point for material experimentation in the domains of architecture, craft, and science. While nature has often stood in as a model, metaphor, or resource for designers, the recent global upheavals in climate, ecology, and technology are driving intensive understandings of nature’s tangible and imagined substrate. These projects look at how contemporary design practices mobilize, confound, and generate natures, whether through simulating mechanics or growing biological matter. This event will feature a presentation by Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu, along with readings and reflections by Lola Ben-Alon, Felecia Davis, and Elsa Mäki, amongst others. Read more here.
Thursday, February 20, 2025
Notes for a Séance: Curating the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale
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Artistic directors Anton Vidokle, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis introduce the team’s proposal of the “exhibition-as-séance” for the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Vidokle will open the evening by speaking on death’s spiritual, mystic, and philosophical resonances in art throughout history; followed by a consideration by Brasiskis on the séance in relation to spiritualism, cinema, and psychoanalysis; Ayres will conclude by examining the automation of the mind and spirit by post-Fordist capitalism, and possibilities for a contemporary technology of the spirit. Films by Jane Jin Kaisen, Maya Deren, Jordan Belson, and Shana Moulton will accompany the three-part talk, mapping modern and contemporary artistic practices that relate mysticism, the occult, art, technology, and society across histories, geographies, and cultures. This program is part of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale’s pre-biennale program, organized by Seoul Museum of Art and first presented in Seoul on November 30, 2024. Read more here.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Pietro Bianchi: The Optical Unconscious in the Digital Age
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Join us for a lecture by e-flux Notes contributor Pietro Bianchi. In this talk, Bianchi engages theories of the image as developed by Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer, and more to ask: if the cinematic image is so inseparable from the unconscious, what happens when images become infinitely manipulable like in the contemporary digital universe? What happens when images are no longer photographic but increasingly indistinguishable from writing? Does something akin to an optical unconscious still exist in today’s cinema? Or perhaps, precisely because images have become a second nature indistinguishable from reality, they have ceased questioning us altogether? Read more here.
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For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.