Launch of Index #9

Join us in Berlin on June 24, 7pm at Spore Initiative, where we will launch the ninth issue of e-flux Index, now available in print and for digital download.

This special issue of e-flux Index gathers 92 artists, writers, architects, poets, psychoanalysts, filmmakers, educators, and theorists to take stock of the relationship between art and theory today. How have these two practices informed one another? How and where is theory currently disseminated in the arts? Where has their relationship proved to be liberatory, and where has it become stultifying? And what illumination can either art or theory offer amidst the dark cluster of horrors that presently arrests our capacity to think lucidly?

To mark the launch of e-flux Index #9, the event at Spore will bring into conversation artists, writers, and editors whose work approaches theory as something that is used, tested, contested, and transformed through artistic practice. Participants include Sung Tieu, Hiwa K, Oraib Toukan, Elena Vogman, Ben Eastham, Hallie Ayres, George MacBeth, and Anton Vidokle. More details are here.

Index #9 is divided into two parts and eleven sections. Part I: Theory Today opens with Infrastructural Utopianism, a section examining the material and institutional conditions of possibility for the production and dissemination of theory. Monet’s Cataracts tilts the viewfinder to squint at how our perception itself is constructed—by art, technology, architecture, and the various gestalt shifts occasioned by new theoretical perspectives. Recitation. Evocation. Offering. Provocation. catalogues asemic scripts, art-speak, practices of desemanticizing language, and the linguistic nuts and bolts of theory, while The World Fair considers the large-scale perennial exhibition as a form with its own long history and contested logic. Ready-Made Theory meanwhile approaches the purported critique of value sealed within the artistic gesture of the ready-made, from Duchamp’s urinal to Cattelan’s banana (and the fruit-seller who sold it to his gallerist).

Part II: This world, this mutilated place turns from the theory wars to the socio-psychic conditions under which art is made and received today. The Forever War opens with an analysis of the “paranoiac power” underlying the war machines of masculinist authoritarianism, and brings together reports from those living amidst “the residue of a nightmare that belongs to someone else.” Endurance meanwhile reckons with civic, ecological, and personal forms of resilience—asking: what does it mean to have the courage to maintain courage? And the Dogs Were Silent pulls at the Enlightenment's fence between nature and culture, probing what thinking looks like on the other side of the human. Diasporism considers migration as the one truly universal phenomenon of our time, while Warped and Fashioned examines how the capricious seamstress of memory bends our sense of the recent past, in nostalgic curatorial trends, reconstructive cinema, and forms of counter-memorialization. Index #9 closes with Zhuangzi and the Butterfly, a section that drifts off into the dream-logic shared by psychoanalysis, Marxism, and cinema.

e-flux Index #9 features contributions from: KJ Abudu, Konstantin Akinsha, Alaa Alqaisi, Malek Al-Sarnamy, Stephanie Bailey, Ericka Beckman, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Pietro Bianchi, Lukas Brasiskis, Annemarie Bucher, Luis Camnitzer, CCCP '26, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re'al Christian, Max Crosbie-Jones, Ben Davis, Caitlin DeSilvey, Brian Dillon, Anthony Discenza, Germaine Dulac, Keller Easterling, Köken Ergun, Orit Gat, Liam Gillick, Emma McCormick Goodhart, Boris Groys, Maddie Hampton, Jörg Heiser, Owen Hopkins, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Danae Io, Isabel Jacobs, Joyce Joumaa, Ariana Kalliga, Kabage Karanja, Brian Karl, Jesi Khadivi, Eunsong Kim, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Artem Kitaev, Michael Kurtz, Kate Lacey, Patrick Langley, Natasha Marie Llorens, Jaleh Mansoor, Isadora Neves Marques, Achille Mbembe, Gili Merin, Joanne Morra, Novuyo Moyo, Chris Murtha, Stella Mutegi, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Minh Nguyen, Andreas Petrossiants, Adam Przywara, Océane Ragoucy, Raqs Media Collective, Ben Rivers, Dominique Routhier, Hannah le Roux, Frank Ruda, Vanessa Ruhlig, Raúl Ruiz, Juan José Santos, Giulia Sbaffi, Jean-Louis Schefer, Mark von Schlegell, Aaron Schuster, Gabrielle Schwarz, Benjamin Seroussi, Stevphen Shukaitis, Leonid Slonimskiy, James Taylor-Foster, Team Kinoki, Jennifer Teets, Sam Thorne, Viktor Timofeev, Jacinda S. Tran, Agnès Varda, Francisco Godoy Vega, Mathilde Villeneuve, Marina Vishmidt, Sonya Vseliubska, Thomas Waller, Theadora Walsh, Hindley Wang, McKenzie Wark, Pramodha Weerasekera, Zairong Xiang, Kathryn Yusoff, and Alenka Zupančič.

The print edition of e-flux Index is available to purchase from select art and design bookstores and museums throughout Canada, East Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. It is distributed by Antenne Books (Europe and the UK), Les presses du réel (Europe), Art Metropole (Canada), The Book Society (East Asia), and Buchhandlung Walther König (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).