October events

Join us this October at e-flux for programs exploring film as a catalyzing force in collective action; issues of displacement, migration, survival, and resistance; the disjuncture of montage; the connection between longevity and capitalism; cinema as a communal learning environment; technology and ecological crisis; and the physiology of breathing and its reciprocal relationship to bodies and buildings.

Featuring Tomin; Louis Massiah, and Monica Henriquez; Pınar Öğrenci, with Maaza Mengiste; Artavazd Peleshyan, Daniel Schwartz, with Armand Yervant Tufenkian; Charles Mudede; Alice Diop, Natacha Nsabimana, with Christian Nyampeta; Antonia Majaca, with Tega Brain, Brian Kuan Wood, and Gary Zhexi Zhang; Solpara; and Tim Altenhof, with Peter Szendy, and Emily Apter.

Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Bar Laika presents Playback 0039 with Tomin
Join us at Bar Laika for the thirty-ninth edition of Playback with Tomin, a self-taught multi-instrumentalist, bioinformatician, and poet from Brooklyn, New York. His primary instruments are the flute, trumpet, and alto clarinet, and he participates in the creative music scene as a performer, improvisor, composer, and fan. Outside of music, he works in computational genetics, with a focus on oncology. Read more here. 

Thursday, October 8, 2026
Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez’s TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing
Get tickets
The African Film Institute invites you for a screening of TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing (2025, 105 minutes), directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez. Structured as a series of classes in cultural organizing, the film reconstructs the life of a woman whose literary works and film collaborations became a catalyzing force in 20th-century political movements. Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, and filmmaker Haile Gerima are among those who testify to Bambara's humor, fierce commitment to collective action, and gift for galvanizing artists into community work. The film is a warm and stylish portrait that makes a compelling case for why her approach to activism feels as urgent now as it did then. Read more here. 

Saturday, October 10, 2026
Under the Red Sky: Pınar Öğrenci’s Art of Responding
Get tickets
From early videos using found YouTube footage to large-scale installations, this retrospective screening traces the history of Pınar Öğrenci’s cinematic production from her first publicly exhibited video to her most recent site-specific work. The films in this screening attest to the artist’s sustained commitment, publicly and privately, to the issues of displacement, migration, survival, and resistance, and are threaded together through formal considerations of music, source material, and re-enactment. In this progression, we witness not only the development of Öğrenci’s artistic vision through various non-fictional experiments but also her own biography—forced to flee Istanbul for Berlin under political persecution and the threat of undue incarceration. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation between Öğrenci and novelist Maaza Mengiste. Read more here. 

Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Film at a Distance: On Artavazd Peleshyan
Get tickets
The Armenian director Artavazd Peleshyan (b. 1938) is the quintessential filmmaker’s filmmaker. Mysterious, elusive, and recalcitrant, his renown is based on a small body of poetic documentaries made primarily between the 1960s and early 1990s. These films showcase Peleshyan’s unique lyrical style evocative of the montage aesthetics of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde. Join us for a lecture and discussion with Daniel Schwartz and Armand Yervant Tufenkian on Artavazd Peleshyan’s theory of “distance montage,” illustrated with film excerpts. Read more here.

Thursday, October 15, 2026
Charles Mudede, "Exit Envy: BLM, MAGA, and the Continuing Crisis of Longevity"
RSVP
There is a close connection between longevity and capitalism. The latter would certainly collapse without the former. Why? Because longevity closes the door to the afterworld and forces workers to focus on the here and now, the restless realm of capital accumulation. If life were, as Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” the majority of a population would denounce this fallen world and completely invest in life after death. Such workers would be useless and impossible to manage. They are always not here (the factory, the store, the warehouse) but always there, God knows where. Join us at e-flux for "Exit Envy: BLM, MAGA, and the Continuing Crisis of Longevity", a lecture by cultural critic, filmmaker, and writer Charles Mudede. Read more here. 

Thursday, October 15, 2026
Sometimes It Was Beautiful
Join us at Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago for an event presented by the African Film Institute and convened by Natacha Nsabimana. The program features two short films, Sometimes It Was Beautiful (2018) by Christian Nyampeta and Fragments for Venus (2025) by Alice Diop, and is presented in conjunction with Karimah Ashadu's exhibition at the Renaissance Society. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Nyampeta and Nsabimana. Read more here.

Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis
RSVP
Join us for the launch of Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), a new anthology that challenges the dominant narrative that positions technological solutions as the primary response to ecological crisis. The four contributors speaking at the launch approach these problems from different sites. Tega Brain starts from the word "ecosystem," which since Arthur Tansley coined it in 1935 has cast the environment as bounded, knowable, and available for optimization. She asks what that framing has edited out, from scientific forestry to the Grasslands Biome modeling project of 1968 and the ozone loss NASA's satellites missed. Gary Zhexi Zhang takes up finance as the planet's infrastructure of time: how catastrophe gets priced, who insures the insurers when the losses exceed them, and how movements such as DefundDAPL turn dispossession into financial risk. In his conversation with Yuk Hui in the book, Brian Kuan Wood asks whether art can change how technology is conceived, rather than absorbing each new platform as a medium, and what happens when critiques of Western technological universalism are taken up by reactionary politics. Editor Antonia Majaca turns to the Anthropocene hypothesis itself and to what it would take to reclaim abstraction from computational capture. Read more here.

Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Bar Laika presents Playback 0040 with Solpara
Join us at Bar Laika for the fortieth edition of Playback with Solpara. Lebanese-American musician Solpara moves between experimental music, club culture, and interdisciplinary performance. He began making music as a teenager in early-2000s New York, collaborating with Nicolas Jaar before relocating to Montreal, where he co-founded Booma Collective with Valentin Stip and Oren Ratowsky. After returning to New York in 2015, he released his debut solo EP on Jaar’s Other People imprint, followed by records on Quiet Time and Poland’s Brutaz. His debut album, Melancholy Sabotage, arrived in 2024, with Resident Advisor describing it as “undeniably chic post-punk.” Read more here. 

Thursday, October 22, 2026
Tim Altenhof, Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings
RSVP
Join us for a conversation between Tim Altenhof, Peter Szendy, and Emily Apter on the occasion of the launch of Altenhof’s book Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings (Zone Books, 2026). Breathing Space is a compelling and wide-ranging analysis of pneumatic phenomena in modern culture. Architect and historian Tim Altenhof explores the physiology of breathing and its reciprocal relationship to bodies and buildings, both of which share a common atmosphere. 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.