e-flux lectures: Malik Gaines, “A History of Impossible Progress”

In a lecture drawn from the concluding section of his book Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left (2017), Malik Gaines traces a legacy of radical performance tactics, rooted in the movements and aesthetics of the 1960s, as it figures in contemporary works featured in the 2015 Venice Biennial. Ambivalence reorients the imagined efficacies of transnational revolutionary projects into a set of possibilities that continue to circulate. In the context of an international art exhibition, this black political energy exceeds the visual order. Works by Emeka Ogboh, Isaac Julien, Julius Eastman, Glenn Ligon, and Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran will be discussed. 

Malik Gaines is a writer, performer, and teacher based in New York. His book, Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left (NYU Press, 2017), traces a circulation of political ideas in performances of the 1960s and beyond. His essays have appeared in Art Journal, Women & Performance, e-flux journal, and in numerous exhibition catalogues and arts publications. Since 2000, Gaines has performed and exhibited extensively with the group My Barbarian, whose work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, two Performa biennials, the Montreal Biennial and the Baltic Triennial, among others. Gaines also makes performance and video work solo, and in collaboration. He is assistant professor of Performance Studies in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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