Scenes of life: December events

In bringing the year to a close, we invite you to join us for programs communing with spirits of poetry, music, and performance; strategies for filmmaking amid violence and exigency; fantasies of automated relation; reflections on the art of the lie; and much more.

Featuring works by Allen Ginsberg and Jonas Mekas, with Conor Williams, Emily Greenberg, Daniel Cooke, Hannah Beerman, Lynne Sachs, Terrence Arjoon, and A. S. Hamrah; Satch Hoyt; Jen Liu and Hirokazu Kore-eda; Salomé Lamas; works by Emad Badwan and Yahya Alsholy, with Farah Barqawi and Omar Berrada; Joan Copjec; and Keith Fullerton Whitman.

Tuesday, December 2, 2025
An Evening for Allen Ginsberg: screening, reading, and performance
Get tickets
Join us at e-flux Screening Room for an evening dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, opening with a live performance of Ginsberg’s punk composition “Capitol Air,” interpreted by Emily Greenberg,  Daniel Cooke, and Conor Williams. Written in the early 1980s and later performed with The Clash, the song underscores Ginsberg’s presence as both poet and musician. The performance will be followed by Ginsberg’s poems read by Hannah Beerman, Lynne Sachs, Terrence Arjoon, and A. S. Hamrah. The program will conclude with a screening of two works by Jonas Mekas: Scenes from Allen’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit, filmed at Ginsberg’s East Village loft in the days immediately following his death in April 1997; along with a video portrait of Ginsberg by Mekas, bridging footage recorded with Ginsberg in 1987 and Mekas's reflections in 1997. Guest-curated by Conor Williams, the evening reflects on how Ginsberg’s voice continues to move across music, cinema, and contemporary literary and artistic communities. Read more here.

Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Bar Laika presents Playback 0022 with Satch Hoyt
For the twenty-third edition of Playback at Bar Laika, musician and visual artist Satch Hoyt will play his new album Un-Muting, released on traza, and sounds from his back catalogue. Un-Muting documents Satch Hoyt’s ongoing project of un-muting as a form of “sonic restitution,” a performative challenge to the silent confinement of instruments and sounds within Western conservation standards, awakening and celebrating the hybridity, resilience, and creativity of the Black diaspora. Read more here.

Thursday, December 4, 2025
Economies of Love. Part 7: Synthetic Love
Get tickets
Join us for the seventh and the final installment of Economies of Love, presenting Jen Liu’s I Am Cloud (2024) alongside Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll (2009). This program turns to the figures who inhabit the fantasy of automation: synthetic bodies, invisible workers, and the soft infrastructures that hold up seemingly frictionless intimacy. Across both works, gendered and racialized bodies appear as the substrate of contemporary convenience—training AI systems, performing affective labor, standing in for companionship—while not fully recognized as subjects in their own right. “Synthetic love” here is not only a question of artificial desire, but of the ways loneliness becomes organized by platforms and service industries, which are given their values in the context of urban precarity. Read more here.

Saturday, December 6, 2025
Salomé Lamas: screening and discussion
Get tickets
Join us on the afternoon of December 6 for a three-part program with Portuguese filmmaker and artist Salomé Lamas, featuring the films Eldorado XXI (2016) and Gold and Ashes (2025), alongside the new publication Salomé Lamas: Gold and Ashes (Mousse Publishing, 2025). Working between cinema, installation, and essayistic documentary, Lamas has developed a distinct approach to the environments and social situations she films. Drawing on parafictional strategies that combine sensory ethnography and critical media practice, Lamas focuses on geographies marked by extraction, instability, and forms of life shaped by structural violence. Lamas refuses easy comforts of moral absolutism and instead invites the viewer to participate in the labor of meaning-making. Fiction in her work is not used to obscure the facts, but to expose how violently constructed—and violently maintained—versions of the truth can be. Read more here.

Tuesday, December 9, 2025
“We Never Imagined All the Cameras Would be Useless”: films from the Gaza Biennale
Get tickets
The Gaza Biennale and the Forbidden Museum of Al Risan Mountain, in collaboration with Recess and e-flux Screening Room, present films by Emad Badwan and Yahya Alsholy, filmmakers and artists working in Gaza today. The works of Badwan and Alsholy challenge the ubiquitous image of life in Gaza, fusing fact and fiction to capture the material and unconscious realities of a life distorted by genocide, pushing the medium to its limits. The screening will be presented alongside a virtual Q&A with the filmmakers, moderated by Farah Barqawi and Omar Berrada. Read more here.

Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Joan Copjec, “The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami: A Rope Trick”
RSVP
Produced under the strict rules of the Iranian modesty system, Abbas Kiarostami's films broke through national and historical barriers. They are now regarded as among the finest in the history of cinema. How did this happen? The short answer is that Kiarostami mastered the art of the lie. The long answer will take us through considerations of the act of veiling, the nature of the image, and questions of shame and sexuality—all of which rely on some form of flim flam. Joan Copjec, whose most recent book Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran was published last spring by MIT Press, joins us for a talk on the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami. Read more here.

Wednesday, December 17, 2025
Bar Laika presents Playback 0023 with Keith Fullerton Whitman
Join us at Bar Laika on Wednesday, December 3 from 6pm for the twenty-third edition of Playback with Keith Fullerton Whitman. Whitman is a composer of live electronic music based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. While initially concerned with making records (for kranky, Planet Mu, Editions Mego, PAN, Nakid, and countless others) his focus has shifted to performing, with over 500 concerts under the belt; many at the world’s most prestigious festivals (CTM, Dokumenta, FAQ, Geometry of Now, LUFF, Mutek, Présences Electroniques, Semibreve, Skaņu Mežs, Sonic Acts, Terraforma) and houses of culture (the Banff Centre, Berghain, Cafe OTO, EMPAC, among many). Read more here.

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

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