Join us this March and April at e-flux for our continuing series of lectures and other events, with Maria Lind, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Sven Lütticken, Tony Wood, Ute Holl, Liam Young, Gleb Napreenko, Charles Mudede, Nora Sternfeld, Nato Thompson and Laura Poitras, Vivian Ziherl, and Carolyn Kane.
Program
e-flux lectures: Maria Lind
“Situating the Curatorial”
Saturday, March 18, 6pm
Drawing from the experience of working at Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall, and being the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, Lind will explore notions such as “weak resistance,” “contact and conflict zones,” and “redistributive politics” while keeping art center stage in the lecture.
e-flux lectures: Franco “Bifo” Berardi
“IS THERE A WAY OUT?”
Monday, March 20, 7pm
Berardi revisits his 2014 text “The Neuroplastic Dilemma: Consciousness and Evolution” to discuss current affairs and to ask and answer the question: Is there a way out?
Book launch and discussion: Sven Lütticken and Tony Wood
Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy
Saturday, March 25, 6pm
Written as the neoliberal era was morphing into the Trumpocene, Lütticken’s book examines forms of aesthetic practice beyond residually modern(ist) notions of artistic autonomy; practices whose relevance may be more acute than ever in the current crisis, in which strategies and tactics are in urgent need of reexamination.
e-flux lectures: Ute Holl
“Aesthetics and the Alien: Straub/Huillet in Moses und Aron”
Wednesday, March 29, 7pm
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron (1975) is a study on migration, exile, and on being a stranger or alien. In the equal distribution of aesthetic elements, their film follows Schoenberg’s rule of twelve-tone distribution of indiscrimintae perception. Thus, the film confronts the situation “before the law,” violence, and the question of the (missing) people.
e-flux Architecture: Liam Young
“I Spy with my Machine Eye”
Friday, March 31, 7pm
This audio-visual performance is a filmic tour told from the perspective of a drone drifting across the planet. Based around his short film In the Robot Skies, Young presents a near-future love story set against the fears and wonders of an impending drone age.
The event coincides with the exhibition Liam Young: New Romance on view from March 30 to May 13, 2017 at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University GSAPP.
e-flux lectures: Gleb Napreenko
“Modernism as the Unheimlich of Stalinism: The Socialist Realist Regime of the Imaginary Body and its Disruptions in Soviet Art during WWII”
Wednesday April 5, 7pm
Stalinist culture may be described as a culture of excess and of an illusory imaginarium of ideals—in contrast to the productivist ideas of left Soviet artists of the 1920s, which were oriented in an economy of energy and a refusal to produce illusions. The step-by-step mobilization and militarization of labor and culture since the first five-year plan found its truth in the Second World War. But this truth was sometimes subversive and even destructive for the imaginarium of socialist realism: it appeared in the form of suppressed modernist tendencies. This time it wasn’t a modernism of homeostasis and enlightenment as it was for productivists, but a dark modernism obviously connected to the death drive.
e-flux lectures: Charles Mudede
“Not Even A Satellite: Notes on a Cosmic Motion Picture”
Friday, April 7, 7pm
This lecture will describe with notes and images a film that will connect the backyard of a home in Harare, Zimbabwe, the Atomic-Age graveyard in the Tri-Cities in Central Washington, and the collision of black holes predicted by Einstein.
e-flux lectures: Nora Sternfeld
“Why Exhibit At All? An Answer From the Year 2030”
Wednesday, April 12, 7pm
From the year 2030, Sternfeld looks back as a curator to the years 2013-2023. She prepares an exhibition on the history of struggles in museums and art universities in the years of the authoritarian change: It begins with the 2013 occupation of the Ludwig Museum in Budapest—which Orban’s government put a stop to—and ends with the 2023 collapse of autonomous institutional structures in France.
Book launch and discussion: Nato Thompson and Laura Poitras
Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life
Wednesday, April 19, 7pm
In an era when real estate developers preach the power of art to change society, and when innovative capitalist design has come to be called art, one has to appreciate—and perhaps foster a healthy suspicion of—just how far art has come. Thompson’s book asks us to see the culture wars as more than just Reagan-era history, but as part of an evolving assault that uses art and affect to appeal to our emotional selves.
e-flux lectures: Vivian Ziherl in discussion with Elizabeth A. Povinelli
“Articulation Value”
Friday, April 21, 7pm
Articulation is a borrowed concept improvized through the globally moving art project Frontier Imaginaries. The central lecture by Ziherl will pick up on Marx’s gliederung (structure) to point to “articulation” not as a declarative expression but as a joint. Moving through a frontier perspective, ways beyond Marxian impasses—such as Povinelli’s Symphony of Late Liberalism—will be discussed.
e-flux lectures: Carolyn L. Kane
“Anti-Communication as Fashionable Communications”
Wednesday, April 26, 7pm
While precision and accuracy in audiovisual media are norms and ideals dating back millennia, there is nonetheless a growing need to understand the popularity of glitch styles; noisy artifacts that seem to say nothing and communicate even less. Focusing on precursors in the twentieth century avant-garde, the lecture maps a visual and critical history of glitch aesthetics, showing its gradual implementation in the development of twenty-first century style.
About e-flux lectures
Is there any distance between authority and authoritarians? We used to think they were the same thing. Now it seems like authoritarians don’t even know what authority is. Lies don’t begin to describe alternative facts or an extra ten million quid (per week!) for the National Health Service or three million fraudulent votes. Law and Justice, Cigars and Champagne, Soros’ activists on the streets from Budapest to Oakland. Robbers have authority over their thefts when leaders themselves steal.
Recent events have made us think again about what it means to communicate in a clear and direct style. We were raised to believe that it was most important to be open-ended, and to take every opportunity to qualify each assertion. Arguments became notes, dialogues became conversations, and lectures became talks. After everything that’s happened, it is hard not to feel like our modesty or self-consciousness was taken advantage of. We didn’t know how much we took collective goodwill for granted.
Now we are curious about what it means to take steps in the opposite direction, to return to something slightly more linear, a mode of address that makes it easier, perhaps, to locate any problems. Or at least one that engages more explicitly with the conventions of honesty and accuracy. What do these look like today? Can they be recovered?
e-flux lectures is a series of events dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming these still exist. The series was launched in February 2017, and contributors thus far have included James T. Hong, Oxana Timofeeva, Suad Amiry, Thomas Keenan, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, Rijin Sahakian, and Adam Kleinman.
Lectures will be streamed live here.
For a list of our upcoming programs, visit our website. For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
