July events

This July, join us on the rooftop at e-flux Screening Room for Decision Moment, a four-part series that reflects on historical moments of action and inaction and examines cinematic ways of approaching them. The series features pairings of work by John Smith and Krzysztof Kieślowski; Basim Magdy and Anocha Suwichakornpong; Tiffany Sia and Iva Radivojević; Rea Tajiri and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

At Bar Laika, we look forward to two editions of Playback, evenings of listening with Lamin Fofana on July 9 and Abby Echiverri on July 23.

On  July 16, join e-flux at Public Records for a summer issue launch party co-presented with BOMB Magazine, n+1, and CLMP.

We will take a pause in programming for August, returning in the fall with talks, screenings, performances, and more. We look forward to seeing you at our July events.

Decision Moment
e-flux Screening Room rooftop, 172 Classon Ave, Brooklyn Tuesdays after sunset, July 8–29

I. Narratives of Chance
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
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Contemplating the fragile and incomprehensible boundary between causality and contingency as well as between pre-determinacy and free will, these works by John Smith and Krzysztof Kieślowski explore counter-factual worlds. Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) upturns the supposed authority of a director's voiceover to, in the words of A.L. Rees, “play word against picture and chance against order.” In Kieślowski’s Blind Chance (1981), three diverging timelines, triggered by the single moment of a young man running to catch a train, provide the structure for an exploration of the limits of freedom under authoritarianism. Read more here.

II. Simultaneous Pasts
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
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Overcoming the inherent difficulties of an objective reconstruction of the past, and thinking along Buddhist or quantum understandings of space and time, where multiple, equally valid perspectives coexist, these films approach past events as lived experiences that become most tangible in their multiple versions. Basim Magdy’s The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness (2014) operates against linear timelines with its dreamy, semi-abstract visuals of ruins and habitats bathed in surreal colors. By The Time It Gets Dark (2016) by Anocha Suwichakornpong circles around the 1976 massacre of student activists in Thailand, inhabiting a state of narrative diffraction where characters shift identities as cinema turns inward on its representational limits. Read more here.

III. Erasure that Persists
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
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Approaching traumatic experiences as refrains that persistently shape personal identities, the works in this program explore cinematic ways of grappling with events that have stripped away individual agency. In A Child Already Knows (2024) by Tiffany Sia, half-remembered scenes of a historical cusp are recalled alongside a montage of appropriated early Mao-era children's animations, assembling fragmentary memories and conjuring images in lieu of historical reenactments too costly to make. For the eleven-year old protagonist of When the Phone Rang (2024) by Iva Radivojević, one phone call erases her country, history, and identity. Through uses a mix of scripted, performative recreations, the film excavates the residue of childhood memories shaped by the dissolution of Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Read more here.

IV. History Remade
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
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Can reenactments create new spaces for critique and self-reflection? The films in this final screening of Decision Moment illustrate the ethical and aesthetic implications of cinematic reconstructions of past events. Off Limits (1988) by Rea Tajiri juxtaposes the text of a near-contemporaneous film portraying Saigon in 1968 against the soundtrack and image of Easy Rider, the 1968 American production, highlighting the complex associations between 1960s hippie iconography and memories of the Vietnam War. In A Moment of Innocence (1996) by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the filmmaker casts himself and a former adversary—a policeman he stabbed in his youth—as directors of reenactments, folding autobiography into fiction, revolutionary fervor into post-revolution disillusionment. Read more here.

Playback
Bar Laika, 224 Greene Ave, Brooklyn

Playback 0016 with Lamin Fofana
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
Lamin Fofana joins Bar Laika for the sixteenth edition of Playback. Fofana is an artist and musician currently located in New York City. His music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond, and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation, and belonging. Fofana’s overlapping interests in history and the present, and his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound, manifests in multisensory live performances and installations featuring original music compositions, field recordings and archival material. Read more here.

Playback 0017 with Abby Echiverri
Wednesday, July 22, 2025
The seventeenth edition of Playback features Abby Echiverri, a producer based in Brooklyn whose intense curiosity has led her to take on a variety of roles as a touring musician, sound engineer, DJ, and VJ. Her releases include her debut EP on The Bunker NY, entitled Ab Initio, as well as releases on Acid Camp, Patterns of Perception, Going In, and self-releases. Echiverri’s left-field musical influences, deft hardware manipulations, and experienced engineering meld into an inventive interpretation in her live techno sets. Read more here.

2025 summer issue party
Public Records, 233 Butler St, Brooklyn
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Tickets
Join e-flux at Public Records on Wednesday, July 16 for a summer issue party co-presented with BOMB, n+1, and CLMP. Doors open at 8pm, and the first round of drinks is on us. The sixth issue of e-flux Index brings together 82 contributors across 580 pages, weaving long-form essays on art, architecture, and contemporary culture with exhibition and film reviews, interviews, theoretical texts, and opinion pieces—organized into eleven thematic digressions. Ranging from monuments to marionettes, climate devastation to sonic resistance, the texts in Index 6 explore the margins where new ways of thinking—and living—begin to take shape. Read about the summer issues from BOMB and n+1, and find more details here.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our Events mailing list here.

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.