At a moment when contemporary art is increasingly entangled with the political disasters and economic breakdowns of the present, the question of “what art can do”—to borrow the title of a conversation between Alexander Kluge and Hans Ulrich Obrist—can no longer be approached rhetorically. Essays published in e-flux Notes over the past month confront this question through film, militant research, collective authorship, experimental economies, and the body itself as a site where history accumulates and persists.
In “What Did the Golden Lion Die Of? On Judgment and Disavowal at the Venice Biennale,” Antonia Majaca brilliantly dissects the collapse of the Venice Biennale’s international jury, placing it in the context of the Biennale’s historical origins and contemporary political conflicts. The jury’s resignation letter can be read here, and their statement disqualifying from prize consideration countries whose leaders are under indictment for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court can be read here. In the open letter “An Urgent Call From Artists and Curators of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2026,” artists and curators invited by Koyo Kouoh object to the relocation of the Israeli pavilion to the Arsenale, while affirming their commitment to “an active decolonial practice of anti-racist politics and human rights.”
One of our highlights in April was a four-part series titled “Collapse Finance.” In his introduction, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou proposes the term as a framework for understanding how speculation, risk modeling, and future-making operate under conditions of systemic breakdown. In “Longevity Capitalism—Life as an Asset Class,” Giulia Dal Maso explores the science-fiction world of longevity capitalism, analyzing how aging populations become investable horizons while the wealthiest plan for immortality. Melinda Cooper writes of the “reactionary futurism” of the new crop of tech capitalists, returning to Schumpeter’s paeon to the founder-entrepreneur and his notion of creative destruction. And in “Psychic Life of Collapse,” Jamieson Webster discusses the psychic dimension of the contemporary polycrisis, in terms of a breakdown of previous clinical categories and diagnoses.
In Film Notes: Christian Nyampeta, KJ Abudu, and Kaneza Schaal discuss the African Film Institute’s prospects, focusing on its role as a collective space for thinking through African cinema. Greg de Cuir Jr.’s “The Irresistible Force of Thinking and Acting Together” gathers five artist duos in a conversation on shared authorship, treating collaboration not as a simple division of labor but as a political and aesthetic method for creating films together. In his 1925 text “Simultaneous or Poly-Cinema,” László Moholy-Nagy imagines cinema beyond the single rectangular screen, proposing multidirectional projection as a response to the intensified visual and sensory conditions of modern urban life. In “Bone Insurrection,” Rabih Mroué approaches the body as an interior archive for preserving and remembering historical violence. Ritwik Ghatak’s “The Film and I” argues for cinema as both personal expression and collective practice, defending the plurality of film form against theory, convention, and any fixed model of committed art.
“Open Letter on Auction of ‘Tributes’ to the Russian Avant-Garde” deplores the sale by Stanley’s Auction House of what “appear to be crude pastiches of Russian and Ukrainian modernist paintings.” In “Experimental Funding Schemes and Militant Analysis: The Experience of CERFI,” Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira discuss modes of organization pioneered by the French research and activist collective cofounded by Félix Guattari. Zach Gibson reviews the new translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World: “In the cries of Rabelais’s bustling crowds, Bakhtin heard the ‘utopian tones’ of a communal festivity ‘deeply immersed in the thick of life.’” And in memory of Alexander Kluge, we republished from e-flux journal a wide-ranging conversation between him and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “What Art Can Do.” Kluge’s parting advice: “Not to make yourself stupid from the power of others and not from your own powerlessness.”
—The Editors
