E-flux Podcast

Furqat Palvan-Zade, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Carol Yinghua Lu, Keti Chukhrov, and Kasia Wolinska read excerpts from their Letters Against Separation correspondence. The letters were published in series on e-flux conversations as the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world. Other contributors included Claire Fontaine in Italy, Bahar Noorizadeh in London, Hanmin Kim in Seoul, Oxana Timofeeva in rural Russia, and Pelin Tan on an Island. The idea for the project was initiated by Hito Steyerl and developed by e-flux conversations editor Mike Andrews. The following announcement concluded the project: Dear friends, Our correspondence project “Letters against Separation,” hosted on e-flux conversations, was launched as the Covid-19 pandemic forced most of the world to retreat into isolation. The aim was to have writers from different parts of the globe, who were facing different phases and manifestations of the pandemic, reflect on what was going on around them, in the hope of creating connecti

Elvia Wilk talks to artist Stephanie Dinkins about her ongoing projects involving AI, and recent text, “Afro-now-ism,” published in Noema magazine. Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist and professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. She creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins’ art practice employs lens-based practices, emerging technologies, and community engagement to confront questions of bias in AI, data sovereignty and social equity. Investigations into the contradictory histories, traditions, knowledge bases, and philosophies that form/in-form society at large underpin her thought and art production.

Luis Camnitzer and editor Ben Eastham have a conversation following the June 2020 publication of One Number Is Worth One Word, the latest in the e-flux journal book series with Sternberg Press.  For nearly 60 years, Luis Camnitzer has been obsessing about the same things. As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an “ethical anarchist” preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. “If we keep digging,” he writes, “it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed.” At the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, Camnitzer has worked primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as an art medium has distinguished h

Charles Mudede joins us from Seattle to read “White Knee, Black Neck,” published in the June 2020 issue of e-flux journal.  Charles Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, and writer. Mudede, who teaches at Cornish College of the Arts, collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on two films, Police Beat and Zoo, both of which premiered at Sundance. Zoo was also screened at Cannes. Mudede is also associate editor for The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, and directed the 2020 film Thin Skin. 

Andreas Petrossiants speaks with Marina Vishmidt about her book, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital.  Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Ephemera, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is one of the organisers of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic).

Hallie Ayres speaks to Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts. The conversation was scheduled following the opening of Aliza Shvarts: Purported at Art In General on February 20, 2020. Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. She received her BA from Yale University and PhD in Performance Studies from NYU. Shvarts was a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014–15 Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2017 Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Art, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015–19). Current and upcoming solo exhibitions include Purported at Art in General, which surveys the last decade of her practice; and Potfuch, a new commission on view later this year at A.I.R. Emily Apter is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair

Conversation with editors Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza following a postponed book launch at e-flux for Red Love: a reader on Alexandra Kollontai, presented by CuratorLab at Konstfack University, Tensta konsthall, Cabinet and Sternberg Press. The reader is accessible in open access on Konstfack’s website. Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Berlin and Stockholm. Her other book Seven Years: The Rematerialization of Art from 2011 to 2017 was published by Sternberg Press in 2019. She is a guest lecturer of CuratorLab. Michele Masucci is an artist, researcher, and educator based in Stockholm.  Joanna Warsza is a Program Director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm and an independent curator based in Berlin. Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra KollontaiAlexandra Kollontai was a Bolshevik revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social and one of the first female ambassadors in the world. She worked to introduce crucial re

Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission.  A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi's work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research and “techno-sensual” artistic exploration, Yi is opening new discourse in the realms of cognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning, introducing concepts of the sensorial ecology of intelligence, the machine microbiome, machine ecosystems, and “biologized” machines. Maintaining a practice

e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood speaks to iLiana Fokianaki and Laura Raicovich on the occasion of Rojava Film Commune: Forms of Freedom at e-flux. The exhibition is curated by Fokianaki and on view through April 4, 2020.  iLiana Fokianaki is a Greek curator, researcher and writer based in Athens and Rotterdam. She is the founder and director of State of Concept, Athens, cofounder, with Antonia Alampi, of the research platform Future Climates, and lecturer at the Dutch Art Institute. Read her text, “Narcissistic Authoritarian Statism, Part 1: The Eso and Exo Axis of Contemporary Forms of Power,” in e-flux journal issue 103 (October 2019).  Laura Raicovich is a curator and writer dedicated to art and artistic production that relies on complexity, poetics, and care to create a more engaged and equitable civic realm. She is currently working on a book about museums, cultural institutions, and the myth of neutrality (Verso, 2020), and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship a

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk of The Wooster Group speak with Peter Scott of Carriage Trade Gallery.  The exhibition mentioned in this episode, The Wooster Group at Carriage Trade Gallery, is on view in New York through February 16, 2020. The exhibition features archival material, props, and performance documentation emphasizing the group’s significant contribution to both performative and visual culture over the last four and a half decades. The production mentioned, A PINK CHAIR (in place of a fake antique) was at NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts through February 2, 2020. A PINK CHAIR (In Place of a Fake Antique) references one of Polish stage director Tadeusz Kantor's (1915–90) manifestos. It describes a theater that gives the simplest, everyday objects—chairs—hallucinatory power to summon up forgotten history and memory. The Wooster Group (originating in 1975) is a company of artists who make work for theater, dance, and media at The Performing Garage at 33 Wooster Street in New York. Elizabeth

Live recording from the opening of Goldin+Senneby’s exhibition, Insurgency of Life, at e-flux. The exhibition is on view until February 8, 2020. Goldin+Senneby is a Stockholm-based artist subject. Since 2004 their work has explored the structural correspondence between conceptual art and finance capital, drawn to its (il)logical conclusions. Recent works include a ghostwritten detective novel about an offshore company on the Bahamas (2007–15), a magic trick for the financial markets (2016), and a proposal for an eternal employment at a train station (2026–). Currently their practice is mutating: Drawing on bodily experiences of an autoimmune disease, they are staging a fiction with an “autoimmune tree” as the main protagonist. Read more about the exhibition here. 

Andreas Petrossiants speaks with author Leigh Claire La Berge about Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art, published in November 2019 by Duke University Press.  “The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality. In Wages Against Artwork Leigh Claire La Berge shows how socially engaged art responds to and critiques what she calls decommodified labor—the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which socially engaged artists relate to work, labor, and wages, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own and others' financial precarity; why the increasing role of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labor; and how the expansion of MFA programs and student debt helps create the conditions for decommodified labor.

Mariana Silva speaks to Sophie Lewis about her book, Full Surrogacy Now, on the occasion of her talk at e-flux, “Wages for Womb-Work, Polymaternalism, Critical Firestonianism.” The introduction from Full Surrogacy Now was also published in issue 99 of e-flux journal. Sophie Lewis is a writer and part-time faculty member at the Philadelphia branch of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Sophie's interdisciplinary work tends to blend feminist theory and cultural criticism, interrogating work, nature, and reproduction in a queer utopian mode. Her essays have appeared in many journals (both academic and non-academic) including Signs, Feminist Review, Gender Place and Culture, Viewpoint, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, Mute, Salvage Quarterly, Logic, The New Inquiry, and Commune. She is also a member of the ecological writing collective Out of the Woods, and an editor at the journal Blind Field. As an occasional translator (to make ends meet), she has translated books from Ger

Curator Sohrab Mohebbi speaks to artist Christian Nyampeta on the occasion of his exhibition at SculptureCenter, École du soir (The Evening Academy), on view through December 16, 2019. As part of the related public program, e-flux hosted an evening with philosopher Isaïe Nzeyimana, in dialogue with anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana and Christian Nyampeta on Wednesday, October 23 at e-flux.  Excerpt from the press release: Christian Nyampeta’s project consists of a scriptorium (a place for writing), an exhibition, and public programs concerned with “thinking Africa,” then and now. The program is resourced around the idea of an “evening school,” following the Senegalese writer and film director Sembène Ousmane, who saw cinema as “cours du soir” or “evening classes.” This concept was informed by the traditions of orality, sensuality, and conviviality within the realm of art learning and making in his region. Sembène saw cinema as a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, an

Rachel Ichniowski talks to three representatives from the New Museum Union’s Bargaining Committee—Dana Kopel, Francesca Altamura, and Gabe Gordon—about the decision by staff to form a union, and the details of their first five-year contract, which was agreed upon with the museum on October 1, 2019. Staff at the New Museum voted to unionize in January 2019. The formation of the union, which is a part of UAW Local 2110, has been closely watched amid calls for greater transparency in art and culture sector workplaces. The New Museum employs over 140 people, and counts over 70 staff members as part of the union. New Museum Union’s Mission Statement: “When Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977, she envisioned an institution that did away with hierarchies—not only in the art exhibited, but in the structure of the museum itself. Her aim, as she wrote in 1990, was to work toward “a collaborative, self-critical, and ‘transparent’ organizational model.” As the New Museum Union, we are committed to Tucker’s visio

Brian Kuan Wood talks to Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) on the occasion of their exhibition at e-flux titled Turnarounds. Turnarounds consists of the film installation Hometown (2018), a new series of textile pieces, and an essay in e-flux journal. Hometown focuses its ultra-wide, hypnotic gaze on two cities—Beirut and Kyiv—that merge into a fictional home for the film’s protagonists, Ghina Abboud and Lera Luchenko. Fluorescent, lava-like animations alternate between images of industrial estates and overgrown gardens as Ghina and Lera lyrically describe the town. A caterpillar gets killed, but while mourning the loss, both evade responsibility for the crime. With their monologue in Russian and Arabic colorfully subtitled in English and Ukrainian, they eat ice cream. Their laughter solves puzzles, and there is a sunken city inhabited by adults who forgot what children taught them. The script of Hometown draws on a genre of Russian children poems called perevortyshi (

Erin talks to Interference Archive volunteers Louise Barry and Rob Smith about the archive, and the exhibition Resistance Radio: The People’s Airwaves, on view through September 29, 2019.  Resistance Radio: The People’s Airwaves focuses on the people, stations, and organizations that have battled to bring their defiant programming onto the airwaves, and particularly when these actions were in service of grassroots movements and/or community organizing. The mission of Interference Archive is to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements—through an open stacks archival collection, publications, a study center, and public programs.  The archive consists of posters, flyers, zines, books, t-shirts, buttons, moving images, audio recordings, and more. You can listen to Interference Archive’s podcast, Audio Interference, here. 

e-flux journal editorial assistant Andreas Petrossiants speaks to Franco “Bifo” Berardi following his recent texts “(Sensitive) Consciousness and Time: Against the Transhumanist Utopia” in issue 98, and “Game Over” in issue 100. Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous Radio Alice in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia movement, is a writer, media theorist, and social activist. His most recent books are Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (Semiotexte, 2018) and The Second Coming (Polity, 2019).

Sanna Almajedi talks to composer and trombonist Peter Zummo, and Eve Essex, a musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice and electronics. The music heard in this episode was recorded live during the fifth edition of Satellite at Bar Laika on March 12, 2019, featuring Zummo and Essex.  Peter Zummo is a composer and trombonist whose music encompasses both the contemporary-classical and vernacular genres. His work is informed by five decades of realizing the work of other composers, poets, bandleaders, choreographers, directors, and filmmakers. The way in which he maneuvers the contemporary trombone is genre non-conforming, and still finds a place in any genre.  Zummo worked closely with Arthur Russell, appearing on many of his recordings. He has also collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Phil Niblock, and Yasunao Tone. His music has been released by Foom, Optimo Music, and Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Eve Essex is a Brooklyn-based musician who performs with alto saxophone, piccolo, voice an

Andreas Petrossiants, Editorial Assistant for e-flux journal, speaks to artist Fiona Connor starting from her exhibition at SculptureCenter, Closed for installation, Fiona Connor, SculptureCenter, #4.  As the show's press release describes: "Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor remakes overlooked everyday objects, including bulletin boards, park benches, community noticeboards, doors of closed down clubs, real estate signs, municipal water fountains, and so on. She is interested in where these objects come from, what they are made out of, who makes them and for whom, as well as the relationships that the artist initiates and maintains in order to reproduce and re-present the objects as works of art. For her new commission at SculptureCenter, Connor is producing a set of intersecting works that bring together the artist’s investment in the various operations of sculpture in an expansive field of production, maintenance, and display. In the gallery, she shows a number of bronze pieces that replicate tools requ