Join us at e-flux this March, 2023 with Marion von Osten, Matt Peterson, Joscelyn Jurich, Laura Huertas Millán, Uriel Orlow, Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Rijin Sahakian, Dina Ramadan, Ali Hussein Al Adawy, Elena Vogman, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Sashko Protyah, Dana Kavelina, Svitlana Shymko and Galina Yarmanova, Oksana Kazmina, Mariya Stoyanova, Martine Syms, Daniella Brito, Go Hirasawa, Ethan Spigland, Masao Adachi, Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group, Koji Wakamatsu, Emiko Inoue, Nagisa Oshima, Ciarán Finlayson, R.H. Lossin, Margaret Sundell, Ben Eastham, Barry Doupé, Steve Reinke, and Steff Hui Ci Ling.
Thursday, March 2, 2023, 7pm
Screening and discussion: Marion von Osten and Matt Peterson
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The films in this screening offer a critique of contemporary capitalism and its impact on the lives and careers of ordinary people. Works shown explore the themes of alienation, precarity, the search for meaning, and strategies of resistance in an urbanized world that is increasingly defined by economic imperatives. Featuring Marion von Osten, Brigitta Kuster, Isabell Lorey, and Katja Reichard’s Camera Running! A Small Post-Fordist Drama (2003, 32 minutes), Red Channels and Glass Bead, From Wall Street to Wall Street to Wall Street (2011, 4 minutes), Red Channels, Ø (2011, 4 minutes), Red Channels, La Commune (2011, 8 minutes), Woodbine, Mutual Aid in Ridgewood, Queens (2021, 5 minutes), Matt Peterson and Brandon Jourdan, We Seek a Total Revolution (2021, 9 minutes), followed by a discussion between Peterson and Joscelyn Jurich. Part of “Communities, Labor, and Class Relations,” the third chapter of the series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. Read more here.
Saturday, March 4, 2023, 5pm
Laura Huertas Millán: Ethnographic Fiction as Deconstruction and Reinvention
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Entwining ethnographic fictions and historical enquiries, Laura Huertas Millán’s moving-image works engage with strategies of survival, resistance, and resilience. Sensuous and immersive, her films propose embodied and emotional experiences where aesthetics and politics are indissociable. The screening features three films by Laura Huertas Millán: Journey to a Land Otherwise Known (2011, 23 minutes), Sol Negro (Black Sun) (2016, 43 minutes), and El Laberinto (The Labyrinth) (2018, 21 minutes) that all together explore the connection between the political and the personal, as well as the interplay between colonial histories and the present day, labor and traditions, social realities, and imagination. The screening will be followed by an online discussion with the filmmaker. Part of “Communities, Labor, and Class Relations,” the third chapter of the series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. The screening is co-presented with World Records. Read more here.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023, 7pm
Geo-psychiatry: Media, Milieus, and the Politics of Madness, a lecture by Elena Vogman
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This lecture explores moving-image archives related to a psychiatric reform and resistance movement which aimed to radically “disalienate” patients by restituting their social, mental, and environmental milieus. “Healing the institution” before any individual cure was the crucial principle of institutional psychotherapy, a practice initiated by François Tosquelles, Georges Daumezon, Gisela Pankow, and Frantz Fanon, and further developed by Félix Guattari, Ginette Michaud, Anne Querrien, Jean Oury, and others. Initiated during the occupation of France in the early 1940s, when over 40,000 patients became victims of the national socialist extermination policy under the Vichy regime (“extermination douce”), this practice of resistance gave rise to a number of anti-colonial, desegregationist, queer/feminist, environmental, and anti-racist movements. Read more here.
Thursday, March 9, 2023, 7pm
Uriel Orlow: Affirming Difference Through Rituals of Filming
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Uriel Orlow’s moving-image art is research-driven, process-oriented, and often in dialogue with other disciplines and people. His film projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, and social and ecological justice. Situated across gallery and cinema contexts, his works bring various moving-image regimes and narrative modes into correspondence attempting to affirm difference rather than instill sameness. Featuring Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal) (2017, 28 minutes), Veilleurs d’images (2017, 13 minutes), and Learning From Artemisia (2019, 14 minutes), followed by a video conversation with the artist. Part of Films to be Made and Unmade, the last of four chapters of the series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. Read more here.
Saturday, March 11, 2023, 5pm
Straub-Huillet at Work: A screening of Harun Farocki’s and Pedro Costa’s films
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Straub-Huillet at Work is a screening that features two creative documentaries on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The first film, by Harun Farocki, follows the duo as they work on the adaptation of Kafka’s novel, offering a unique insight into their creative process. The second film, by Pedro Costa, captures Straub and Huillet in a more intimate setting, discussing their work and philosophy on filmmaking. Together, these two films by Farocki and Costa, who were both fascinated and inspired by the works of Straub-Huillet, provide a rare and fascinating look into the work of one of the most significant filmmaker duos of the twentieth century. Featuring Harun Farocki’s Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at Work on Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” (1983, 26 minutes) and Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001, 107 minutes). Part of Films to be Made and Unmade, the last of four chapters of the series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. Read more here.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023, 7pm
Screening and discussion: Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
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In 2007, Ayreen Anastas made a journey through Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia, collecting materials for a film with the working title A Film for Every One and No One. The film was intended as an adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the contemporary Arab world. In the ensuing years, a period of planetary unrest, a near collapse of the global capitalist financial system, followed by new policies of austerity, brutality, further enclosures, and waves of resistance. Those reorderings and collapse of worlds gave rise to revolutionary aspirations and their correlated apocalyptic doppelgängers. In 2018, together with the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and the artist Rene Gabri, an attempt (the first of four) was made in the midst of the unfolding struggles and wars (which we are still enduring) to produce an untimely version of this hitherto uncompleted film. Featuring Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri’s A Film for Every One and No One (2018, 90 minutes), followed by an in-person discussion with the artists. Part of Films to be Made and Unmade, the last of four chapters of the series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art. Read more here.
Thursday, March 16, 2023, 7pm
Rijin Sahakian, “Twenty Years After the Invasion of Iraq: Sada in Context”
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From 2011-2015, Sada, an online and in person ad hoc art school, was set up in Baghdad to support artists working through the aftermath of US-led invasion and occupation. Nearly a decade later, former artists of Sada came together again, reflecting on their creative and disparate lives since that time. Artists Sajjad Abbas, Bassim Al Shaker, Ali Eyal, Sarah Munaf, and Sada’s founder Rijin Sahakian each created video works, comprising one experimental, interconnected anthology film on individual and collective art practice in a protracted era of international warfare. Join us for an evening with Rijin Sahakian, curated and introduced by Ali Hussein Al-Adawy. The evening will feature a screening of Sada [regroup] (2022), and a discussion with Sahakian and Dina Ramadan. Co-presented with ArteEast, and co-sponsored by the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College – CHRA. Read more here.
Saturday, March 18, 2023, 5pm
Mental Ecologies of War: Bodies, Subjectivities, and Milieus
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Featuring Sashko Protyah, The Film of Sand (2019, 13 minutes), Dana Kavelina, There Are No Monuments To Monuments (2021, 35 minutes), Svitlana Shymko and Galina Yarmanova, The Wonderful Years (2018, 8 minutes), Oksana Kazmina, The Secret, the Girl, and the Boy (2017, 14 minutes), Mariya Stoianova, Ma (2016, 17 minutes). Curated by Olexii Kuchanskyi and Elena Vogman, and followed by a conversation with the curators and artists Dana Kavelina and Oksana Kazmina. Bodies, Subjectivities, and Milieus is the second part of the program Mental Ecologies of War and addresses processes of subjectivation in their relation to media, sexuality, and environments. The first part, Infrastructures, Geographies, and Elemental Relations streams on e-flux Film till March 15, 2023. Read more here.
Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 7pm
Martine Syms, The African Desperate
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Featuring a screening of Martine Syms’s The African Desperate (2022, 97 minutes). This screening constitutes the final event in the three-part What are you afraid of?, curated by Daniella Brito. Syms’ first feature-length film presents a hypnotic, trance-induced sequence of occurrences that begin with the protagonist’s defense of her MFA thesis at a liberal arts college. From uncomfortable microaggressive comments, to racially coded sexual encounters, to hazy, drug induced paranoia, the film is laden with satirical, nightmarish scenes that trail the life of a Black femme in the art world. Read more here.
March 24, 25, 27, 2023
Landscape Theory: Post-1968 Radical Cinema in Japan
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Join us on March 24 and 25 at e-flux Screening Room and on March 27 at Pratt Institute for Landscape Theory, a screening program curated by Go Hirasawa and Ethan Spigland. This series of screenings and discussions will be focused on “landscape theory” (fukeiron), which was proposed by film critic and anarchist Masao Matsuda in 1969, and further developed by film director Masao Adachi, screenwriter Mamoru Sasaki, and photographer Takuma Nakahira as a new theory of politics and revolution. Landscape theory attempted to locate the power-state not in a typical political domain, but rather in the ordinary everyday landscape, expanding the interpretation of existing discussions dealing exclusively with visible landscape further, to the extent of naming invisible as well as visually recognizable structures “landscape.” The program is co-presented with Pratt Institute, and co-sponsored by the Japan Foundation. See the full program here.
Monday, March 27, 2023, 7pm
Criticism is dead, long live criticism!
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In the wake of several magazine closures and takeovers, this panel discussion responds to the sense that the space for independent cultural criticism is shrinking, and a related anxiety around the function of criticism today. What, to paraphrase Joseph North’s open question in the pages of New Left Review, is criticism for? Old anxieties about the co-option of art criticism by the market—the critic reduced to consumer advocate—have been eclipsed by the fear that a market operating according to its own logics no longer needs independent validation. Does criticism any longer intervene in the culture, or merely comment upon it? With Ciarán Finlayson, R.H. Lossin, and Margaret Sundell, moderated by Ben Eastham. Read more here.
March 30 and April 1, 2023
Barry Doupé: VERY BIG SHORTS and Distracted Blueberry
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Join us on Thursday, March 30 and Saturday, April 1 for Barry Doupé: VERY BIG SHORTS and Distracted Blueberry, programmed by Steff Hui Ci Ling. The program features two parts: a “selectrospective” of Barry Doupé’s shorts from 2008 to 2022 followed by a conversation between Barry Doupé and filmmaker Steve Reinke, and the New York premiere of Doupé’s latest feature, the truly difficult to describe Distracted Blueberry (2019, 273 minutes). See the full program here.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our events mailing list here.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.