This June, join us at Bar Laika for screenings featuring Pierre Huyghe, Hito Steyerl, and Miguel Fernández de Castro, and a special collaboration with Images Festival featuring Stephanie Comilang and presented by Steffanie Ling; and at e-flux for a screening featuring John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik.
This month as well, e-flux will be hosting its fourth and cumulative conference in the series Art after Culture? launching off the next ten years of e-flux journal. The conference features lectures and performances by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abu Rahme, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Mary Walling Blackburn, Keller Easterling, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, The New Red Order, Charles Mudede, Reza Negarestani, The Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl; and will be livestreamed on www.e-flux.com/live.
Reminder that these are the last days to view the exhibtion The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA) at e-flux curated by Asakusa and featuring Minouk Lim, Yoshua Okón, Ming Wong—extended through June 15.
Program
Bar Laika presents: Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask
Thursday, June 6, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Human Mask opens with footage of the deserted site of Fukushima, the drone camera scaling the wreckage. This is followed by scenes of a monkey alone in an empty restaurant.
Human Mask is a bachelor rite.
A monkey wearing a mask of a young woman, trained as a servant, an unconscious actor of human labour and a drone, an unmanned camera programmed to perform tasks inhabit the same landscape of Fukushima, just after the natural and technological disaster in 2011.
The monkey, left on its own, executes, like an automaton, the gestures it had been trained to do, in a pointless pattern of repetition and variation. Trapped inside a human representation, the monkey has become its sole mediator. Sometimes enacting the role of a servant, sometimes inoperative, it is endlessly waiting, subject to boredom, left between instruction and instinct.
Behind the mask, a descendant of a common ancestor; in front of it, a drone, a human extension.
e-flux presents: John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik, End of Life
Wednesday, June 12, 7pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
End of Life is the product of four years spent by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik with five individuals at various stages in the process of dying. In preparation for this project, the filmmakers trained to be end-of-life doulas and documented hundreds of hours of interactions with their subjects. The doula works with the dying person, along with those surrounding him or her, to help design, guide, and support their wishes for whatever a “good death” might mean for them. The film employs an immersive, participatory approach intended as an invitation for viewers to explore their body, their senses, and their ability to be present in relation to their own mortality. Bruce and Wojtasik became increasingly interested in visceral, primal responses to mortality, and during their shooting process these responses became their own. There is an openness, even a certain willed ambivalence, to this approach that reflects the unique quality of life in its final phase, when the mundane and the significant seem to flow seamlessly, one into the other. The two Greek words differentiating time, chronos (clock time) and kairos (the supreme moment), reflect the durational form of the film—the disruption of sequential logics at the end of life and the emergence of temporal poetics.
Bar Laika presents: Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea
Thursday, June 13, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Lovely Andrea follows the artist’s quest to find a bondage photograph she posed for while in Tokyo as a film student. The film explores ideas of bondage and domination as they extend to self-identification, popular culture, and politics.
e-flux journal presents: Art After Culture? cumulative conference in New York
Friday, June 14, 7–9pm
Saturday, June 15, 10:30am–8pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
If we remember the artistic avant-garde tradition and its iconoclastic contempt for culture, how can we reconcile our own unknown culture with apparently simultaneous traditionalist fetishes? If we are now chained to an apparatus of representation that can only be spectacular in its scale, what is the project that art must necessarily undertake against reactionary self-homogenizing withdrawals? Can art still gain access to something larger than the culture it was born into? If staging mass ecological self-extinction is the ultimate spectacle, perhaps we should pause for a moment to see it not as human death but as a cultural endpoint. And if art—ancient, modern, or whatever—was always able to project past these endpoints, then what is art after culture?
With Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abu Rahme, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Mary Walling Blackburn, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Keller Easterling, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, The New Red Order, Charles Mudede, Reza Negarestani, The Otolith Group, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, and Brian Kuan Wood.
Admission is free but capacity is limited, please RSVP on Eventbrite. The conference will be livestreamed on www.e-flux.com/live.
The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA)
On view April 30–June 15, 2019; Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 12–6pm
e-flux
311 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002
The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) efforts to purge sites of communism was a global operation—and Japan was no exception. Key officials from the agency described acts of espionage and strategic coordination in the 1950s and ’60s that ranged from the mobilization of controlled media and Yakuza mafia groups, to the violent suppression of socialist movements. With its title alluding to mind-body dualism, this exhibition contends with past machinations that are still corporeally present, albeit camouflaged in other forms of manipulation and continuing to shift control and coerce power under new terms.
Curated by the Tokyo-based project space Asakusa, The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA) features works by artists Minouk Lim, Yoshua Okón, and Ming Wong, reacting to anti-communist rhetoric that has suppressed and repressed intellectuals since the 1950s. To ground this narrative within the exhibition, declassified accounts of covert operations by the CIA are displayed as archival documentation. A prominent personality within the chronicles is former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi (1896-1987), an imperialist and a war criminal who was imprisoned and eventually released in exchange for his espousal of pro-American policies and reforms—further evidenced by his grandson’s position as the current Prime Minister of Japan.
Bar Laika presents: Miguel Fernández de Castro, A Grammar of Gates (Gramática de las puertas)
Thursday, June 20, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
A Practical Spanish Grammar for Border Patrol Officers is a textbook edited by the Justice Department in which the learning of a language is indissociable from its deployment in a particular territory. A Grammar of Gates (Gramática de las puertas) takes us to the Tohono O'odham Nation, an indigenous people living on the Sonora-Arizona borderlands whose territory is currently occupied by the US Border Patrol. Within the reservation, the vision technologies of a scientific observatory—built on the top of a sacred mountain—coexist with those of homeland security surveillance. This video examines how the rush to explore an unknown cosmic frontier is carried further while sustaining the colonization of the indigenous lands and the violence against aliens. A landscape that has been historically understood as a frontier appears inhabited by a grammar of deterrence.
Bar Laika and Images Festival present: Stephanie Comilang, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise)
Thursday, June 27, 9pm
Bar Laika
224 Greene Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) is a science-fiction documentary set in Hong Kong. The film focuses on the lives of three domestic workers—Irish May Salinas, Lyra Ancheta Torbela, and Romylyn Presto Sampaga. Every Sunday, the Filipina domestic workforce gather for a day of rest and socialization in Statute Square, located in the business and retail district, Central. The film is narrated from the perspective of Paraiso, a ghost played by a drone (voiced by Comilang’s mother who immigrated to Canada in the 1970s) who speaks of the isolation that results from being uprooted and thrown into a new place. Paraiso’s reprieve comes when she interacts with the women and feels her purpose: to transmit their vlogs, photos, and messages back home. When the women return to work during the week, Paraiso is forced back into isolation and left in an existential rut.
This screening is presented by Steffanie Ling, Artistic Director at Images Festival.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website; or subscribe to our events mailing lists for e-flux and Bar Laika.
New on e-flux Video & Film
e-flux journal and Harun Farocki Institut present: “Art After Culture: Navigation Beyond Vision” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Day One: Keynote with James Bridle and Hito Steyerl, moderated by Brian Kuan Wood
Day Two: Panel One, Sensory Counter-Mappings with Anselm Franke, Jennifer Gabrys, Laura Lo Presti, Mariana Silva (Inhabitants), Nikolay Smirnov, moderated by Tom Holert
Day Two: Panel Two, The Tasks of Abstract Space with Ramon Amaro, Matteo Pasquinelli, Patricia Reed, moderated by Brian Kuan Wood
Day Two: Panel Three, Extra-Image Violence with Maîté Chénière, Charles Heller, Oraib Toukan, moderated by Doreen Mende; and closing response by Kodwo Eshun
New e-flux podcast episodes; available for listening on e-flux, iTunes, Spotify, and Soundcloud
Kader Attia on La Colonie and Algeria
e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood speaks to Kader Attia, artist and founder of La Colonie, a space in Paris for sharing ideas and discussion.
Tyler Coburn on Ergonomic Futures
Following a recently published text in e-flux journal issue 98 (March 2019), Tyler Coburn joins Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk to discuss the project Ergonomic Futures whcih asks questions about contemporary “fitness” through the lens of speculative evolution.
