October 23, 2026, 7pm
Culver City California 90232
USA
The UCLA Department of Art welcomes Anton Vidokle for a public lecture in its Visiting Artists Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Department of Art History.
An artistic practice can become difficult to locate when it extends into the structures through which art is published, taught, or exhibited. A publication or a school can provide the conditions for other people’s work while also giving form to an artist’s own propositions. Over time, the distinction between a project and the institution it produces becomes harder to sustain.
Moving between e-flux, unitednationsplaza, and his films on cosmism, Vidokle will revisit the encounters, collaborations, and material arrangements from which these projects emerged. Their histories unfold through returns and unforeseen continuities, as questions first formulated in one setting acquire a different urgency in another. The lecture follows these exchanges across the activities through which his practice has developed: organizing, publishing, education, curating, and filmmaking.
e-flux began in 1998 with an email invitation to an exhibition and developed into an organization for publishing, criticism, and artistic production. Its history is closely connected to experiments in education: the unrealized school proposed for Manifesta 6, unitednationsplaza in Berlin (2006–07), and Night School (2008–09) at the New Museum in New York. Discussions and collaborations formed through these projects helped shape e-flux journal. Finding a form for these exchanges also meant establishing the means of their continuation: how to carry an argument beyond the room in which it began, and how to keep it available to people who had never been there.
Vidokle’s films on cosmism approach the relation between art and life through another history of speculation. The overcoming of death and the resurrection of past generations introduce a conception of artistic activity whose consequences exceed the horizon of a single lifetime. Across his projects and films, artistic autonomy remains a question to be worked through in practice. The lecture considers how an artist might participate in producing the conditions of their work, and how those conditions are altered as they enter the lives and practices of others.
Anton Vidokle is an artist, filmmaker, and founder of e-flux. His curatorial work includes the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Cosmos Cinema (2023–24), and, with Hallie Ayres and Lukas Brasiskis, the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Séance: Technology of the Spirit (2025).
The Visiting Artists Lecture Series is organized by UCLA art students and brings visiting artists into conversation with the university’s students and the wider Los Angeles arts community.
Free and open to the public.
Also in the fall 2026 series
EJ Hill: October 2, 7pm
R.H. Quaytman: November 6, 7pm
Both lectures take place at UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios.
