April events

e-flux welcomes spring with a slate of screenings, talks, and performances featuring Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva; Jack Halberstam; Maxime Jean-Baptiste, World Records, Yasmina Price, and LaCharles Ward, along with work by Caroline Déodat; work by Agnès Varda and by Charmaine Poh; Helena Wittman; Aaron Schuster, Jamieson Webster, and Evan Calder Williams; Yuk Hui and Brian Kuan Wood; Seth Cluett and works by Laurie Spiegel.

Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva: Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims
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Join us at e-flux Screening Room for a screening of Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023), a film by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, followed by an in-person conversation with the artists. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims follows the wind and what it carries—from dust to clouds, ideas, stories, and voices—as a guide and an analytical framework. Filmed in the Chilean Atacama desert, it explores the entanglements and overlaps of historical events, past, present, and future in this site. Embarking on a visual journey through the ALMA large array facility, an international astronomical observatory, and the lithium mines of the Atacama, the film shows how material trajectories are deeply entwined with the pursuit of foundational ideas from the enlightenment, their mutation into aspects of modern neoliberal authoritarianism, and their dissemination. Timeless, plural, and untamable, the wind in virtue of the memories, particles, and ancestral claims it carries acts as a prism that reveals what is hidden in plain sight: the pillars of Western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion, and human extractivism. Read more here.

Thursday, April 3, 2025
Jack Halberstam, “Anarchitecture After Everything”
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In this talk, Jack Halberstam will explore the meaning of trans embodiment using a vocabulary borrowed from a 1970’s art collective called “anarchitecture.” The work of Gordon Matta-Clark represents the spirit and the intentions of this group. Halberstam believes we should use the language of anarchitecture to describe trans embodiment for a few reasons: first, trans bodies should not become legible within the system of gender that was constructed around its exclusion. In other words, if trans bodies violate binary gender, then they cannot seek to become “real” through that same binary. Instead, they must and do threaten to unbuild the binary, and take apart the version of trans that the binary produces. Second, because anarchitecture delivers a version of transness that does not seek to become a new vehicle for capital, it offers an alternative to the process by which once-excluded groups become new markets. Rather than becoming a new platform for neoliberal marketing, the unbuilding of the body opens onto a critique of capital, real estate, and the realities that subtend them. And finally, trans bodies, like the buildings that Gordon Matt-Clark opened up, represent an unworld within which representational systems can and do come apart. The trans body that can be glimpsed through Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural experiments is not figure but ground, not body but landscape, not building but demolition site. Read more here.

Tuesday, April 8, 2025
“It Would be Alright if He Changed My Name”: Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records
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Join us for an evening featuring Maxime Jean-Baptiste with World Records, beginning with a screening of Under the Sky of Fetishes (2023) by Caroline Déodat. Following the film, Maxime Jean-Baptiste will present a performance approached through his experience playing the role of an extra in a BBC adaptation of Les Misérables, taking on strategies of archival reenactment and embodied memory grounded in the experiences of the Guyanese and West Indian diasporas in France. The program will conclude with a conversation between Jean-Baptiste, Yasmina Price, and LaCharles Ward about Black visual and sonic practices of refusal, historical counternarratives from the African diaspora, and Jean-Baptiste’s larger practice. This event accompanies the publication of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, and is co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Media, Culture, and History. Read more here.

Thursday, April 10, 2025
Economies of Love part 2: Care’s Terrains
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Care is not simply an act of compassion but a response to shared vulnerability. Operating outside spectacle, sustained in habits and insistence, it quietly wears down the barriers of indifference and exclusion. Echoing bell hooks’s framing of love as a radical practice of care, this screening illuminates the invisible topographies of care—how care circulates through labor, gestures, and communal rituals within larger social systems that fail to recognize it. Join us for the second installment of Economies of Love, presenting Agnès Varda’s Daguerréotypes (1976, 80 minutes) and Charmaine Poh’s What’s Softest in the World Rushes and Runs Over What’s Hardest in the World (2024, 14 minutes). Read more about the Economies of Love series here, and the April 10 screening here.

Saturday, April 12, 2025
“Wave After Wave”: An afternoon with Helena Wittmann
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Join us for a two-part program featuring Helena Wittman, which begins at 3pm with a screening of Wittmann’s film Human Flowers of Flesh (2022, 106 minutes). Małgorzata Sadowska writes of the film: “A Mediterranean cruise, guided by a woman, takes us from Marseille to Sidi Bel Abbes in Algeria, the early headquarters of the French Foreign Legion. Against this symbol of colonial violence and subjugation of lands, seas, and nations, the director juxtaposes her own ‘army’ of poets, nomads, and connoisseurs...” Following the film, at 5:30pm, Wittmann will perform Tender Noise (Echoes), a sonic lecture performance featuring the LP Drift by Nika Son, with excerpts from the original film sountrack of Drift by Helena Wittmann and from the installation Wildness of Waves, by Helena Wittmann and Nika Son. The work is presented as part of Goethe Institute’s series “Art und Weise: Artists in Conversation.” The program as a whole is co-presented with the German Film Office and Goethe-Institute New York, in collaboration with Cinema Guild. Read more here.

Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog
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Join us for a presentation by Aaron Schuster on his latest book How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka's New Science​ (MIT Press, 2024), followed by a conversation between the author, Evan Calder Williams, and Jamieson Webster. How to Research Like a Dog proposes a new and surprising inspiration for philosophy today—the canine thinker from Kafka's story “Investigations of a Dog.” Written toward the end of Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author's oeuvre. Kafka’s quixotic tale of adventures-in-theory is that of a lone, maladjusted hound who challenges the dogmatism of dog science and pioneers an original research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world. Schuster uses the investigative canine as a guide dog to rediscover Kafka's fictional universe, while taking up the cause of this ingenious, possessed, melancholy, comical, and revolutionary thinker. The ambition of Kafka’s new science is not to become the Queen but the demon of the sciences, a folisophie (follysophy) as Lacan once quipped. Cutting across philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, and literature, the book envisions what such a new science could be—called by the dog the "science of freedom"—enlisting new comrades in the dog’s struggle. Read more here.

Monday, April 21, 2025
Yuk Hui in conversation with Brian Kuan Wood: “Technology, Nationalism, and Post-Globalization”
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Yuk Hui has written that machines today are no longer simply tools or instruments, but rather the “gigantic organisms in which we live.” While this provides a tidy description of information networks, today we also find the nation-states in which we live struggling to maintain sovereignty amidst the chaotic legal mechanisms and economic flows of an emerging post-globalization order. Is this chaos really new, or are we actually dealing with contradictions that are older and more familiar than we would like to admit? Following up on their conversation regarding “Art and Cosmotechnics” (part one and part two) in 2022, Brian Kuan Wood speaks with Yuk Hui about nationalism and technology, and Hui’s latest book Machine and Sovereignty. Read more here.

Thursday, April 24, 2025
Seth Cluett plays Laurie Spiegel
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Join us for a performance by Seth Cluett presenting six multi-channel spatial diffusions of Laurie Spiegel’s works Pentachrome, The Unquestioned Answer, Drums, Passage, East River Dawn, and A Harmonic Algorithm 2020. Pioneering composer and computer music innovator Laurie Spiegel is known for her explorations of algorithmic composition and early synthesizer technology. Cluett, a composer and visual artist, creates work that explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, examines minutiae by amplifying impossible tasks, and investigates memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. Read more here.

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For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.