June events

This June at e-flux, we are pleased to host talks, screenings, and launches featuring Sara Nadal-Melsió and Diana SeoHyung; Karimah Ashadu, Caroline Taylor Shehan, and Sofia Thiệu D’Amico; Seth Barry Watter and work by Martin Spinelli, Arthur Plutzer, Rita Mitra, Erica Anderson, Mario Ruspoli, and Andrew Norman Wilson; David Gissen; Omar Berrada, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Christian Nyampeta, and Kaneza Schaal, alongside work by Jean Pierre Bekolo with V.Y. Mudimbe; Aubrey Knox; and works by Shinji Sōmai and Jordan Strafer. At Bar Laika, this month's editions of Playback feature Qasim Naqvi and Kyle Dixon.

Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Sara Nadal-Melsió, Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on the Musical Figure
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Join us on Tuesday, June 3 at 7pm for a conversation between Sara Nadal-Melsió and Diana SeoHyung, on the occassion of the launch of Nadal-Melsió’s book Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on the Musical Figure (Zone Books, 2025). The book explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The “wolf” is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe’s ongoing social and political contradictions. Read more here.

Thursday, June 5, 2025
Karimah Ashadu: Scenes of Labor
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Join us for “Scenes of Labor,” a screening of selected films by Karimah Ashadu. Filmed in Nigeria between 2013 and 2022, the works in this program focus on various modes of labor within informal economies and the spatial conditions that surround them. Ashadu’s use of self-built experimental filming devices recurs across several works, shaping a distinct filmic language that responds to the visual and rhythmic specificities of the milieus in which she works. This program is presented in collaboration with Canal Projects alongside the exhibition Machine Boys. Introducing the screening, Ashadu will be in conversation with Sofia Thiệu D’Amico and Caroline Taylor Shehan of Canal Projects. Read more here.

Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Captives: Three Portraits of the Asylum (and One of its Decline)
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Join us for “Captives: Three Portraits of the Asylum (and One of its Decline),” a screening program and talk guest programmed and presented by Seth Barry Watter. Watter writes, “Madhouse, mental hospital, or psychiatric facility: whatever we choose to call it, the asylum is a defining feature of the landscape of our modernity. Its waning as a form over the last fifty years has been met with repeated calls to bring it back upon the scene.... The titles in this program present rare views of the asylum from outside perspectives and in a variety of national contexts.” The program features Walls of Skin (1964) by Martin Spinelli, Arthur Plutzer, and Rita Mitra; No Man is a Stranger (1961) by Erica Anderson; Captive Feast (1962) by Mario Ruspoli; and Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016) by Andrew Norman Wilson. Presented as part of the ongoing lecture series “Film Beyond Film: Art and the Moving Image” at e-flux Screening Room. Read more here.

Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Bar Laika presents Playback 0014 with Qasim Naqvi
Bar Laika presents the fourteenth edition of Playback with improviser, percussionist, composer, and electronic musician Qasim Naqvi. Qasim will share a cross-section of recent collaborative projects alongside works for modular synthesizer, including his new solo album Endling on Erased Tapes Records. In addition to being the drummer of the lauded cult minimalist trio Dawn of Midi, Naqvi’s passion for multidisciplinary work has brought him into the worlds of film, dance, installation art, orchestral and chamber music, and modular synthesis. From his early days as an improviser in New York–being exposed to the downtown music scene of the mid-90s and onward–Naqvi's work has displayed a deep appreciation for experimental practices and the avant-garde. Read more here.

Thursday, June 12, 2025
David Gissen, “Function-Able: Artifacts in the Era of Design and Disability”
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This talk by David Gissen explores a range of US industrial designers' and architects’ efforts to both define physiological normality and to enhance the functioning of disabled people. Many of these works uphold a mechanistic concept of human capacity, while others unknowingly utilize frameworks that originated within eugenic theories. This talk will briefly outline how a range of designers sought ways to enhance the human grip, upright posture, movement, respiratory capacity, and physical autonomy as central attributes of human-ness. This talk ultimately argues that what is eliminated in this design work–the provocative physicality of incapacities–offers a critical perspective on the limits of design versus more opportunities for design engagements with disabled people. Presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.

Saturday, June 21, 2025
Mudimbe’s Order of Things: Screening, Conversation, and Gathering
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The African Film Institute is pleased to invite you to an extended program featuring the film Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe [Mudimbe’s Order of Things] by Jean Pierre Bekolo, alongside a conversation between Omar Berrada, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Kaneza Schaal. The film will be screened in parts, interspersed with refreshments and discussion, and followed by a reception.  Les choses et les mots de Mudimbe (2015) is a four-hour cinematic encounter between filmmaker-philosopher Jean Pierre Bekolo and the late poet, novelist, philosopher, anthropologist, and philologist V.Y. Mudimbe. Bekolo's film offers intimate insights into Mudimbe’s way of life and engagement with many of today’s pressing issues—studying Mudimbe’s influences, his books, his objects and his surroundings—and features Mudimbe reflecting on the enduring violence wrought in part by the creation of racial identities in the Great Lakes region. This program is convened by Berrada, Kisukidi, and Christian Nyampeta as part of the film series for the African Film Institute and e-flux Screening Room. Read more here.

Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Aubrey Knox, “A Problem of Dissonance: Bodies and Museums”
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Join us at e-flux for “A Problem of Dissonance: Bodies and Museums,” a lecture by Aubrey Knox. Knox writes, “The aim of this talk is to use the expanded history of museums, colonialism, and medicine to begin to define the contours and origins of the dissonance between the body and the museum. Taking the lead from disabled artists, disability scholars, and activists, we can then think of ways to re-inject the museum experience with moments of harmony, collectively imagining a new space that is built around the bodies of visitors rather than despite them. The conclusion is a call and a question: can museums invest the same resources–both human and financial–in addressing this foundational myth as they do in capital projects, acquisitions, and collections care? Can museums ever truly become consonant with our human bodies?” Read more here.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Bar Laika presents Playback 0015 with Kyle Dixon
Kyle Dixon joins Bar Laika for the fifteenth edition of Playback. Dixon is an American composer and producer, best known as one-fourth of the Austin, Texas-based experimental synth group S U R V I V E and as co-composer of the acclaimed score for Netflix’s Stranger Things, alongside bandmate Michael Stein. The series premiered in July 2016–just two months before S U R V I V E released their second album, RR7349. Before forming the quartet, Dixon and Stein explored sound through field recordings, often venturing into tunnels and climbing water towers around Austin with battery-powered modular setups and recording equipment. S U R V I V E brought full setups of synthesizers and amplifiers into dive bars, delivering legendary live shows that filled rooms with immersive, crushing sound. Dixon and Stein continue to compose for feature films, documentary series, and large-scale installations, while still performing with S U R V I V E. Read more here.

Thursday, June 26, 2025
Economies of Love. Part 4: Before the Storm
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How do young people endure the structures built to contain them? Within spaces where time is regimented, latent sexuality is policed, and emotion is disciplined, adolescent defiance takes shape under pressure, morphing into a spontaneous refusal. The fourth installment of Economies of Love at e-flux Screening Room presents Shinji Sōmai’s Typhoon Club (1985) and Jordan Strafer’s No Spank (2024). Typhoon Club follows a group of students isolated inside their school during a typhoon, tracing how tensions–social and sexual–swell beneath the collapse of routine. Set against the backdrop of Japan’s economic boom, the film channels collective unease through the perspective of a generation on the cusp of emotional rupture. No Spank reflects on similar dynamics through a silent choreography of discipline and withholding, as a girls’ boarding school becomes a space of constraint where resistance is generated through postures and gestures of disobedience. Together, the films consider how proximity under regimes of control does not create relation, but sets the stage for its possible eruption. Read more here.

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For more information about programs at e-flux, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com; for information about Playback at Bar Laika, contact laika [​at​] e-flux.com.