General Relativity, Take Two

To imagine a space means nothing else than that we imagine an epitome of our “space” experience.
– Albert Einstein

Up to this point the art called Relational has primarily been concerned with audiences and effects external to or resulting from the work of art itself. On this occasion we will shift that focus to situate an internal process of directing as method, as praxis, as promise, and the specific relation of a director (or artist) with their creative counterpart. We might recall that at its earliest moment and with its first practitioners, even in an industrial mode, film was distinguished by a shared authorship. It is to this genesis point that we return, to re-learn what we already know.

Ernesto and his mother are both looking around the classroom. Rickshaw. Skeleton. Butterfly. Rose. The world. The President. Soldiers. A black man.
– Ah! Ernesto!, Marguerite Duras

The duos in focus in this series represent an engaged political positionality in relation to both society and moving image art. In some cases they work with cultural history as material. In some cases they work with the film apparatus itself as a material concern. In some they work with the archive. Some with the codes of nonfiction. Some with the qualities of abstraction. In almost all cases these duos are life partners. They all display the rhizomatic thought that Edouard Glissant identified as the principle behind the poetics of Relation. And all of these duos are in the midst of careers that are primed to develop nodes for pushing the art of film and video into novel spaces and epitomes of experiences.

Series cover image: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Palimpsests (still), 2017.

Program

General Relativity: Take Two spans six chapters, each streaming for two weeks on e-flux Film between January 7 and March 31, 2026.

Prologue. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub
Dedicated to an iconoclastic artist duo whose film works span the second half of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first. Depicted here are shared living and working spaces, with language as the key that unveils shared emotions and future trajectories both personal and political.
Featuring: en rachâchant (1982); Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice (1977); The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp (1968).

I. Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo
The work of this artist duo is concerned with the state of the marginalized and the precarious in art and society. Through a fluid melding of spoken word with sublime imagery, Iorio & Cuomo paint lyrical portraits with urgent calls to action at their core.
Featuring: Appunti del passaggio (2014–16); Undead Voices (2019–21); 2 (2024).

II. OJOBOCA (Anja Dornieden and Juan David Gonzalez Monroy)
This artist duo is dedicated to the materiality of film and its range of aesthetic possibilities. The work of Ojoboca mixes the codes of horror with fantastic and impossible narratives to arrive at a cinema of shocks and attractions.
Featuring: Awe Shocks (2011); Oro Parece (2012); The Handeye (Bone Ghosts) (2012).

III. doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran)
This artist duo utilizes video to investigate the media codes that structure society and sometimes orchestrate its collapse. The country formerly known as Yugoslavia is the eternal theme for doplgenger, and their practice is an effort to recover the lost worlds and political possibilities that can be mined from the wreckage of state socialism and neoliberal capitalism.
Featuring: Fragments Untitled #1 (2012); Fragments Untitled #2 (2014); Fragments Untitled #6 (2022).

IV. Claudrena Harold and Kevin Jerome Everson
This artist duo originated with and is oriented around the ongoing film project Black Fire, which excavates and uplifts Black cultural history at the University of Virginia. With sharp analysis and combustible style, Harold and Everson are assembling a new anthology for a next-gen Black Arts Movement that is forged in the flames of the now.
Featuring: Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014); We Demand (2016); Fastest Man in the State (2017).

V. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige
The work of this duo sits at the crossroads of art and film, also at the crossroads of East and West. With an eye for documentation and a soul for experimentation, the native Lebanon of Hadjithomas and Joreige becomes a drafting table for modeling a more humane world.
Featuring: Sarcophagus of Drunken Loves (2023); Palimpsests (2017); ISMYRNA (2016).

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.