E-flux Podcast

e-flux Education editor Juliana Halpert talks to Coleman Collins. Collins is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores notions of diaspora in relation to technological methods of transmission, translation, copying, and reiteration. His most recent projects examine the connections between things-in-the-world and their digital approximations, paying particular attention to the ways in which real and virtual spaces are socially produced. Working across sculpture, video, photography, and text, Collins' practice attempts to locate a synthesis between seemingly opposed terms: subject and object; object and image; original and duplicate; freedom and captivity.   Coleman Collins is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. He has also received support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He received an MFA from UCLA in 2018, and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. In

This conversation between curators Ebony L. Haynes, Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, and K.O. Nnamdie was initiated alongside an essay series in e-flux journal titled “After Okwui Enwezor,” edited by Serubiri Moses.  The episode begins with three short audio excerpts from [1] On the Politics of Disaggregation: Notes on Cildo Meireles' Insertions into Ideological Circuits—Parsons The New School for Design  [2] Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965—Fondation Giacometti [3] Art Dubai Global Art Forum 8: 1955–2055: A Documenta Century Exhibitions covered include: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (2016) and the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World's Futures (2015). Additionally, the idea of rigorous curating, and the horizon is explored in discussion of recent exhibitions including Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (2018) at MoMA, and Invisible Man (2017) featuring Jessica Vaughan, Kayode Ojo, Torkwase Dyson and Pope.L at Martos Gallery, and Evil N*gger (2025) feat

This episode was recorded live at e-flux on September 19, 2024. The event, hosted by the African Film Institute, featured a screening of Lumumba (2000, 115 minutes) by Haitian director Raoul Peck, followed by a conversation between Feza Kayungu Ramazani of Centre D’art Waza and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana.  Feza Kayungu Ramazani is an artist and researcher based in Lubumbashi. She is a member of the Power to the Commons project and Another Roadmap of Arts Education Africa Cluster (ARAC), which is a network of researchers and practitioners engaged in collaborative research revisiting the history, politics, and alternative practices in arts education through literature. She is also curatorial assistant at École du soir, administrator of Centre d’art Waza, and a critical writer questioning images of African beauty and exoticism. Her research on African values, creativity, ancestral practices, and technology aligns with a desire to reinvent the conception and conservative function of museums in the Democrati

A conversation between artist Samia Halaby and Sanna Almajedi, recorded live following a performance at e-flux on September 10, 2024.  In the performance, Halaby used a computer program that she coded in the early ’90s to generate abstract shapes. These were manipulated in real-time alongside sonic improvisation by musician Amir ElSaffar.  Samia Halaby is a trailblazer in contemporary abstract art internationally. In her distinctive painting style, Halaby draws inspiration from nature and historical movements such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde. Displaced from Palestine in 1948 with her family when she was eleven, Halaby was educated in the American Midwest at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were marginalized. Halaby believes that new approaches to painting can transform our ways of seeing and thinking, not only within aesthetics, but also as a way to discover new perspectives for advances in teaching, technology, and society at large. Thi

This conversation between Shana Moulton and e-flux Film curator Lukas Brašiškis was recorded live at e-flux following a screening on Thursday, April 4, 2024. Weaving feminist undertones with surrealist imagery and sound, Shana Moulton’s work explores the nuances of the contemporary psyche. Her Whispering Pines series, in particular, delves into the intricacies of self-help culture, the quest for spiritual meaning, and the often comedic absurdity of personal wellness rituals. In her performances, videos, and installations, Moulton, through the experiences of her alter ego, Cynthia, writes a narrative that is both personal and universally resonant, probing the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical in the time of global digital capitalism. The screening featured a selection of Shana Moulton’s works: Whispering Pines Zero (2002, 6 minutes, a collaboration with Jacob Ciocci), Whispering Pines 1 (2002, 2 minutes), Whispering Pines 2 (2003, 4 minutes), Whispering Pines 5 (2005, 6 minutes), Repetitive Stre

This conversation was recorded at e-flux before a screening of Ahmed El Maanouni’s Al Hal [Trances], curated by Omar Berrada. The evening was co-presented with ArteEast. Al Hal [Trances] (1981, 88 minutes) is a classic of Moroccan cinema and a compelling introduction to it. While presenting itself as a music documentary on the iconic band Nass El Ghiwane, it is also a film about friendship and collaboration, archival memory, the anti-colonial imagination, and working-class life in Casablanca. Ahmed El Maanouni is a writer, director, cinematographer, and producer born in Casablanca in 1944. Among his essential works are Alyam Alyam (1978), the first Moroccan film to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival and winner of the 7e Art prize at FESPACO in Ouagadougou; and Al Hal [Trances] (1981), which was the first movie to be restored by the World Cinema Project in 2007. Among his other works are the feature films Burned Hearts (2007) and Fadma (2017), as well as The Paths of Freedom (2015–16), a documentary tr

A conversation between filmmaker Sosena Solomon, designer and urban scholar/theorist Mpho Matsipa, and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana.  This episode was recorded at e-flux Screening Room before a screening of Merkato, curated by Natacha Nsabimana. Sosena 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. Sosena Solomon is an Ethiopian-American social documentary film and multimedia visual artist whose work explores cross-sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives through arresting visual storytelling. Solomon has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors as a director and cinematogra

Ben Eastham talks to artist Alice Wang. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Alice Wang’s sculptural forms shine a light on the uncanny forces that shape the physical world. Using material such as fossils, meteorites, moss, and heat—ranging from leftover radiation from the Big Bang to the wax secreted by bees—her work aims to reconfigure our understanding of reality.     Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. In his para-disciplinary artistic practice, Nolan Oswald Dennis explores “a Black consciousness of space”—the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization—questioning spacetime histories through system-specific interventions, sculptures, and drawings. Black Liberation Zodiac: Khunuseti focuses on a group of stars known in isiZulu as isiLimela (in English, the Pleiades) whose appearance over the southern hemisphere horizon in June signals the beginning of the season of planting, rites of adulthood, and other cyclical transitions. As these stars appear in the southern hemisphere they simultaneously disappear in the northern hemisphere. Their path across the equator reveals a condition of common difference which echoes pla

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Thotti. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Thotti works at the frontier between trance and nothingness, the image and its oblivion, motion and remembrance, cinema and its expansion. As he puts it: “South Atlantic dissolved in the world’s skies.”  Read more about his installation for the Shanghai Biennale, (Mo) Crossing to the End and the Beginning Again, via the Institute of the Cosmos website.

Ben Eastham talks to artist Lucile Desamory. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Lucile Desamory works at the frontiers of perception and cognition, with a special interest in what the Berlin-based artist refers to as the “too-much, the falsified, and spurned narratives.” The breadth of her pursuit is reflected in the diversity of her approach, which uses film, painting, embroidery, photography, and her voice. Often working in collaboration, her oeuvre extends to theatrical works, feature-length films, and a television show currently in production.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Heidi Lau. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham.  Heidi Lau’s luminous ceramics evoke architectural ruins, funerary vessels, and mythological creatures. Channeling the artist’s personal history, the syncretic cultures of her native Macau, and the diasporic experience, Lau transforms Taoist ritual tokens of mourning and remembrance into what Kang Kang describes as “oblique monuments for an impossible ancestry.”   Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Ciarán Finlayson about his book, Perpetual Slavery, published by Floating Opera Press in 2023.   In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. Finlayson suggests that these two artists’ work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.    Ciarán Finlayson is an editor from Houston, Texas. He is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy. Finlayson is on the core faculty of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, and has taught aesthetics and social theory at Columbia University, New York, and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and at socialist night schools hosted by the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of Am

A conversation preceding the African Film Institute’s inaugural screening at e-flux curated by Natacha Nsabimana, featuring two works by Rwandan filmmaker Amelia Umuhire. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room. Amelia Umuhire (b. 1991, Kigali, Rwanda) is a filmmaker and artist living in Kigali and Berlin. In 2015, she wrote and directed the award-winning web-series Polyglot, in which she follows the lives of young, deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists. Her short film Mugabo was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and screened at MOCA Los Angeles and the Berlin Biennale among many other places. In 2018, Umuhire produced the Prix Europa-nominated radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She was a Villa Romana Fellow in 2020, and is currently working on her first feature film. Natacha Nsabimana teaches in the anthropology department at the university of Chicago. Her research

Tamara Khasanova and Hallie Ayres talk to artist Saodat Ismailova following To Share a Dream With a River, a screening of three films at e-flux. Stay tuned after the conversation for an excerpt from a soundscape composed by Camille Norment for Ismailova’s film, The Haunted. Films discussed in this episode: The Haunted (2017, 23 minutes) takes the form of an open letter to the Turan tiger. A majestic symbol of the Central Asian landscape, this animal has been extinct for several decades but lives on as a sacred symbol in the collective imagination of the local population. In her captivating film essay, Ismailova pays homage to the tiger as she shows how firmly bound it is to the region’s history. Stains of Oxus (2016, 24 minutes) follows a transformation of the landscape of the Amu Darya riverbanks and the people that inhabit them, beginning from the high plateau in Tajikistan to the lowland deserts in Uzbekistan, where the river finds its end. Chillpiq (2018, 17 minutes) begins with a scene of two buses emer

Recorded live at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 during a retrospective screening of selected works by Laure Prouvost. The pre-screening introduction by Amal Issa and Laure Prouvost is followed by a conversation between the artist and writer-curator Kathy Noble. The screening portion of the program featured a selection of works spanning the last decade: OWT (2007, 3 minutes), Finger Point Green (2010, 3 minutes), They Parlaient Idéale (29 minutes, 2019), Every Sunday, Grandma (2022, 7 minutes), OMA JE (You, My, Omma, Mama, Shadow Does, and A Walking Story) (2023, 22 minutes). Language—in its broadest sense—permeates the video, sound, installation, and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that weave in film in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and ex

Recorded in February 2023, Keli Maksud talks to Esteban Jefferson about his exhibition, MAY 25th, 2020, at 303 Gallery. A second iteration of the show will open at Goldsmiths CCA in October 2023. Esteban Jefferson's practice centers around issues of race, identity and the legacies of colonialism. Using photography, drawing, painting, and sound installation as forms of documentation, Jefferson paints the focal points of his compositions in great detail, creating a stark contrast between the subject or object in focus and the surrounding environment. The paintings are left intentionally unfinished, creating a raw style emblematic of his investigative process.  Well known for his series, “Petit Palais”, first featured at White Columns, New York, in 2019, Jefferson’s latest works consider the related symbolism of flags and toppling of equestrian monuments in New York, through the lens of racial and colonial legacies. Esteban Jefferson was born in New York City in 1989, and attended Columbia University. Recent gro

An excerpt from Raven Chacon’s performance Solos, followed by a conversation with Xenia Benivolski, recorded live at e-flux on April 27.  Solos, is a series of short, improvised works performed in quick succession. Using a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, Chacon’s experimental compositions range from sparse, minimalistic soundscapes to complex, multi-layered works that incorporate voices, noises, and found sounds. Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Since 2004, he has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Ar, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der W

Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Jacopo Galimberti about his book, Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988), published in 2022. Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and Assistant Professor at IUAV (Venice). He is the author of Individuals Against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956-1969) (Liverpool) and Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso), which historicizes those political currents and movements alongside visual and literary culture that was either in dialogue or in debate with the figures he centers—as well as the revolutionary aesthetic/cultural theory that they produced through workers’ inquiries and research on forms of postwar labor, and later participation in extraparliamentary militant social and urban movements. In addition to providing an art and architecture historical perspective on these movements, the book acts as a very helpful entry-point to operaist theory, which Classe Operaia called an “anti-diale

Ben Eastham talks to Shubigi Rao about her long term project Pulp, and curating the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.  Artist and writer Shubigi Rao makes layered installations of books, etchings, drawings, pseudo-scientific machines, metaphysical puzzles, video, ideological board games, garbage and archives, and has been exhibited and collected in Singapore and internationally. Her interests include archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history. Since 2014 she has been visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally for Pulp, a decade-long film, book and visual art project about the history of book destruction. See here for more info. Rao curated the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022–23. The biennale was originally planned for 2020–21, but was delayed due to COVID-19.