Spectral openings: November events

This November, we are pleased to host programs delving into histories of video art, experimental film, and cinema; the transformation of words into new poetic structures; the relation between illness and architecture; nocturnal engagements with national imagination; potential openings amid our established concepts and gestures; sketches for the future of revolution; and dancing as a rhythmic mode of resistance to the colonial gaze.

Featuring works by Steina and Woody Vasulka; Carol Szymanski; Debit and Carrier; Jean-Pierre Gorin; Beatriz Colomina, Nick Axel, and Guillermo S. Arsuaga with Emily Apter, David Gissen, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, and Mark Wigley; works by Ludovica Carbotta, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Liryc Dela Cruz, Tomaso De Luca, Michela de Mattei, Feel Good Cooperative, Beatrice Gibson, Invernomuto, Muna Mussie,  Raffaela Naldi Rossano, and Natália Trejbalová; Joanna Evans, Sahar Khraibani, Stella Liantonio, Iulia Nistor, Adrienne Jacobson Oliver, and Stephen Woo; Vika Kirchenbauer, Tomonari Nishikawa, Zuza Banasinska, Shelly Silver, Eduardo Williams, and Mariano Blatt; Jasper Bernes with M. E. O'Brien; works by Onyeka Igwe, Jyoti Mistry, and Christian Nyampeta; and many others.

Saturday, November 1, 2025
“Resonant Memory”: Works by Steina and Woody Vasulka
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Join us on Saturday, November 1 at 2pm at e-flux Screening Room for “Resonant Memory,” a screening of five seminal video works by Steina and Woody Vasulka. The program revisits key pieces from the Vasulkas’ experimental practice, which spans the boundaries of image, language, and memory, and opens up new possibilities of perception through electronic media. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Robyn Farrell, Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir, and Kristín Scheving, moderated by guest curator Peter Sit. “Resonant Memory” is organized in collaboration with Vasulka Kitchen Brno, BERG Contemporary, and Vasulka Foundation, with support from Czech Center New York. Read more here. 

Tuesday, November 4, 2025
to forget and begin again by Carol Szymanski
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Premiering at e-flux on November 4, 2025, to forget and begin again is a six movement performance by Carol Szymanski incorporating video, dance, music, and spoken text. This piece is part of an ongoing project that Szymanski has become particularly known for: a series of sculptures in the form of musical instruments—in particular, brass horns shaped as letters from the alphabet in a font of her own design. These sculptures embody Szymanski’s idea that speech is fundamentally shaped breath. The alphabet horns serve as a means to “translate” any text into a sequence of musical sounds. In this performance, Szymanski’s sculptures will be played in the order that spells out the first “thunderword” in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Read more here.

Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Bar Laika presents Playback 0022 with Debit and Carrier
Join us at Bar Laika on Wednesday, November 5 from 6pm onwards for the twenty-second edition of Playback with Debit and Carrier. Both artists will feature their new solo albums on the record label Modern Love. Debit is a composer, producer, and performer whose work spans avant-garde experimentation, global club mutations, and site-specific art. Her practice bridges high-concept composition with visceral club performance, uniting cultural depth with bold sonic experimentation. Carrier is Guy Brewer’s outlet for pressure, space, and restraint, a project that privileges atmosphere over genre rules. The catalogue moves between implied rhythm, degraded texture, and carefully eroded atmospheres, developing a language defined as much by absence as by presence. Read more here.

Thursday, November 6, 2025
Launch of e-flux Index #7 with Jean-Pierre Gorin
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For the launch of e-flux Index #7, we are pleased to feature a reading of “Proposal for a Tussle” by Jean-Pierre Gorin, followed by screening of Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard's Letter to Jane (1975). The program will conclude with a conversation with Gorin, joining virtually, moderated by Yuka Murakami. Gorin's text “Proposal for a Tussle,” republished via e-flux Film Notes, is reproduced in e-flux Index #7, which gathers together and recombines everything e-flux published between December 2024 and February 2025, floating upward to survey the terrain below. Read more here.

Friday, November 7, 2025
Sick Architecture book launch
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Join us to celebrate the launch of Sick Architecture, published by MIT Press. Following a presentation of the book by editors Beatriz Colomina, Nick Axel, and Guillermo S. Arsuaga, they will be joined in dialogue by Emily Apter, David Gissen, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, and Mark Wigley. Illnesses, wellness, and architecture are inseparable. Medical professionals and architects have always been in a kind of dance, often influencing one another, though the dance is not always synchronized. Drawing from a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies from ancient Greece to twentieth-century India to present-day New York City, Sick Architecture highlights a topic that has shaped our lives from the very beginnings of architecture to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Read more here.

Thursday, November 13, 2025
TUTTAUNANOTTE: An Italian cinematic showcase
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Guest curators Francesco Urbano Ragazzi present TUTTAUNANOTTE, writing: “Ten works by Italian artists or artists based in Italy, making their US premieres, will alternate on the screen over approximately two hours. Each piece, from different perspectives, engages with the national imagination, immersing the viewer in rarefied nocturnal atmospheres. Dreamlike or spectral, darkness becomes a space for attentive listening, while the images guide the audience through temporal dimensions ranging from the recent colonial past to distant fictional futures.” The evening will be introduced by Ilaria Puri Purini, Arts Director of the American Academy in Rome, alongside the curators. The program is co-presented with the American Academy in Rome, with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The showcase will run in an expanded form on e-flux Film’s online screening room through November and December, 2025. Read more here.

Friday, November 14, 2025
to ask what else: six talks
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Featuring presentations by Joanna Evans, Sahar Khraibani, Stella Liantonio, Iulia Nistor, Adrienne Jacobson Oliver, and Stephen Woo, this program sees six friends—writers, poets and theorists—asking “what else?” of their critical practices and investments. Rethinking established concepts and routinized gestures (such as work, language, and looking), they forge critical, bodily, and imaginative openings in tight places. The attentive curiosity of “what else” yields sometimes counterintuitive findings, such as ambivalence around dichotomies of labor/ease or returned colonial artifacts, the carceral implications of ecology, the absurd linguistic nationalism of fascist Italy, the inferential structure of meaning, and the refusal of repair and cure. In flesh, fantasy, imagination, and the incalculable—“to ask what else” searches for perceptual terminology that sustains, rather than forecloses, indeterminacy. Read more here.

Saturday, November 15, 2025
Berlinale Forum Expanded: “19 going on 20 (Redux)”
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Presented in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) on the occassion of its 20th anniversary, “19 going on 20 (Redux)” features five short films made and presented at Forum Expanded between 2016 and 2024, giving an insight into the wide aesthetic and thematic range of its curatorial approach: from structuralist landscape film to feminist intervention, from poetry to performance to auto-fictional re-workings of personal and found footage. Comprising films by Vika Kirchenbauer, Tomonari Nishikawa, Zuza Banasinska, Shelly Silver, Eduardo Williams, and Mariano Blatt, the program will be introduced by curator and head of Forum Expanded Ulrich Ziemons. Read more here.

Tuesday, November 18, 2025
The Future of Revolution: Jasper Bernes with M. E. O’Brien
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Today, the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism seems at once more urgent and more distant than ever before. Even as the dominant order grows more nakedly repressive and disastrous by the day, its defeat remains progressively harder to imagine. In his recent book The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising (Verso), theorist Jasper Bernes endeavors to fill this imaginative void by laying out rigorous criteria for what a “classless, moneyless, stateless society” might look like. Bernes proposes two yardsticks by which to measure revolutionary programs: the test of value and the test of communism, the subject of his April 2025 contribution to e-flux journal. He sketches potential futures by looking to the past—from the history of workers councils in the twentieth century to more recent appraisals of those left communist traditions—even as he stresses that revolution tomorrow is unlikely to take the form it did yesterday. Join us for a presentation by Bernes, followed by a response from M. E. O’Brien. Read more here.

Thursday, November 20, 2025
“Counter-Rhythmic Pulses”: Onyeka Igwe, Jyoti Mistry, Christian Nyampeta
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“Counter-Rhythmic Pulses” brings together three films that critically engage with found footage from various historical archives. Specialised Technique by Onyeka Igwe, Loving in Between by Jyoti Mistry, and Sometimes It Was Beautiful by Christian Nyampeta all confront the colonial gaze through distinct aesthetic strategies: repetition, reanimation, spoken word, and collective critique. By intervening in and reframing the source materials, the films resist the frameworks that produced them, opening space for livingness, erotic liberation, and contested histories. “Counter-Rhythmic Pulses" is curated by Abirami Logendran in the framework of the African Film Institute. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Logendran and Christian Nyampeta. Additional support for this event was provided by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Read more here.

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