e-flux podcast

This episode was recorded live at e-flux on February 10, 2026, celebrating the launch of e-flux Index #8. The recording features Piper Marshall reading from her remembrance of Dara Birnbaum. Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025) was a pioneering American video and installation artist whose various critiques and transformations of the moving image have inspired artists internationally. An architect and painter by training, Birnbaum entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television's ever-growing presence within the American household. Her work primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media, involving the re-manipulation of television's idiomatic grammar and enacting a complex and critical engagement with the medium's representation of political events and the public's reception of history. Piper Marshall is an art historian, curator, and critic whose practice combines rigorous research with exhibition-making. She leads…

e-flux journal Associate Editor Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Andrew Ross about his recent book, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates. Between the summers of 2023 and 2024, Andrew Ross visited Ramallah (Palestine), Dubai (UAE), Phoenix (USA), and Shanghai (China)—some of the landscapes most disturbed by human activity, whether through active warfare or massive development projects. Rather than offering another eco-polemic or recalling for us the dread prognostications of Malthus in the 19th century or Ehrlich in the 20th, The Weather Report is a clear-eyed and essentially optimistic book that proposes a pragmatic, just, and urgent new common ground reestablishing scalable projects of mutual aid and care as a new, essential center for our economic, ecological, and social well-being. Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. A contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, Artforum, Jacobin, New York Review of Books, and Al…

e-flux journal Associate Editor Andreas Petrossiants discusses States of Divergence with author Sven Lütticken. In States of Divergence, Sven Lütticken invites readers into an exploration of history as accelerating catastrophe—and of alternative, oppositional, divergent practices in life, art and revolutionary thought. Set against the backdrop of global crises, from climate change to pandemics, Lütticken dissects contemporary cultural and political practices that attempt to break free from the disastrous momentum of capitalist modernity. His journey traverses fields including art theory, philosophy, and politics, presenting a nuanced critique of the ways in which deviant temporalities and forms of life confront or adapt to catastrophe. Through a series of essays, the book tackles issues ranging from survival to prefigurative practice, indigeneity and internationalism, and the dialectics of critique and revolution. Lütticken blends personal narrative, historical inquiry, and theoretical reflection to question…

A conversation with Paul Pfeiffer, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Anthony Elms recorded in May 2025. Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa makes art, writes about it, and occasionally edits essay anthologies. His artist's book, INDEX 2025, is out now from ROMA Publications, and his recent essay "ECHO—LOCATION," on installations at Dia Art Foundation by Cameron Rowland and Steve McQueen, featured in the April issue of e-flux journal. Recent exhibitions include Scene at Eastman, at George Eastman Museum (2025), Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2021), and But Still, It Turns at the International Center of Photography, New York (2021). Read more essays in e-flux journal by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa here. Paul Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to investigate how media images shape our perception of the world and ourselves. Working in video, photography, sculpture, and sound, he is drawn to moments intended for mass audiences (live sports events, stadium concert tours, televised game shows, celebrity glamour…

Editor Brian Kuan Wood talks to Evan Calder Williams about his e-flux journal essay series, "On Paralysis." Recorded in May 2025 before the launch of e-flux journal issue #152, the conversation discusses stoppage, sabotage, disability, delay, and damage, as well as the critical tools the "On Paralysis" series finds in the hidden intimacies between limited movement and expressive power. Read all four installments of the series here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four. Paralysis has become a term and idea inseparable from contemporary understandings of subjectivity, infrastructure, politics, and war. Conjuring associations of indecision, physical immobility, and trauma, it names a breakdown of the normal processes of circulation and information that promise systemwide health and seamless flow. But what if the very smoothness of these circuits of production is precisely what debilitates human bodies and broader systems of relay and exchange? And what are the potentials for refusal and unexpected…

e-flux Education editor Juliana Halpert talks to Coleman Collins. Collins is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores notions of diaspora in relation to technological methods of transmission, translation, copying, and reiteration. His most recent projects examine the connections between things-in-the-world and their digital approximations, paying particular attention to the ways in which real and virtual spaces are socially produced. Working across sculpture, video, photography, and text, Collins' practice attempts to locate a synthesis between seemingly opposed terms: subject and object; object and image; original and duplicate; freedom and captivity. Coleman Collins is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. He has also received support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He received an MFA from UCLA in 2018, and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. In…

This conversation between curators Ebony L. Haynes, Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, and K.O. Nnamdie was initiated alongside an essay series in e-flux journal titled "After Okwui Enwezor," edited by Serubiri Moses. The episode begins with three short audio excerpts from [1] On the Politics of Disaggregation: Notes on Cildo Meireles' Insertions into Ideological Circuits—Parsons The New School for Design [2] Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965—Fondation Giacometti [3] Art Dubai Global Art Forum 8: 1955–2055: A Documenta Century Exhibitions covered include: Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (2016) and the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World's Futures (2015). Additionally, the idea of rigorous curating, and the horizon is explored in discussion of recent exhibitions including Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (2018) at MoMA, and Invisible Man (2017) featuring Jessica Vaughan, Kayode Ojo, Torkwase Dyson and Pope.L at Martos Gallery, and Evil N*gger (2025)…

This episode was recorded live at e-flux on September 19, 2024. The event, hosted by the African Film Institute, featured a screening of Lumumba (2000, 115 minutes) by Haitian director Raoul Peck, followed by a conversation between Feza Kayungu Ramazani of Centre D'art Waza and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana. Feza Kayungu Ramazani is an artist and researcher based in Lubumbashi. She is a member of the Power to the Commons project and Another Roadmap of Arts Education Africa Cluster (ARAC), which is a network of researchers and practitioners engaged in collaborative research revisiting the history, politics, and alternative practices in arts education through literature. She is also curatorial assistant at École du soir, administrator of Centre d'art Waza, and a critical writer questioning images of African beauty and exoticism. Her research on African values, creativity, ancestral practices, and technology aligns with a desire to reinvent the conception and conservative function of museums in the…

A conversation between artist Samia Halaby and Sanna Almajedi, recorded live following a performance at e-flux on September 10, 2024. In the performance, Halaby used a computer program that she coded in the early '90s to generate abstract shapes. These were manipulated in real-time alongside sonic improvisation by musician Amir ElSaffar. Samia Halaby is a trailblazer in contemporary abstract art internationally. In her distinctive painting style, Halaby draws inspiration from nature and historical movements such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde. Displaced from Palestine in 1948 with her family when she was eleven, Halaby was educated in the American Midwest at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were marginalized. Halaby believes that new approaches to painting can transform our ways of seeing and thinking, not only within aesthetics, but also as a way to discover new perspectives for advances in teaching, technology, and society at large. This…

This conversation between Shana Moulton and e-flux Film curator Lukas Brašiškis was recorded live at e-flux following a screening on Thursday, April 4, 2024. Weaving feminist undertones with surrealist imagery and sound, Shana Moulton's work explores the nuances of the contemporary psyche. Her Whispering Pines series, in particular, delves into the intricacies of self-help culture, the quest for spiritual meaning, and the often comedic absurdity of personal wellness rituals. In her performances, videos, and installations, Moulton, through the experiences of her alter ego, Cynthia, writes a narrative that is both personal and universally resonant, probing the boundaries between the mundane and the mystical in the time of global digital capitalism. The screening featured a selection of Shana Moulton's works: Whispering Pines Zero (2002, 6 minutes, a collaboration with Jacob Ciocci), Whispering Pines 1 (2002, 2 minutes), Whispering Pines 2 (2003, 4 minutes), Whispering Pines 5 (2005, 6 minutes), Repetitive…

This conversation was recorded at e-flux before a screening of Ahmed El Maanouni's Al Hal [Trances], curated by Omar Berrada. The evening was co-presented with ArteEast. Al Hal [Trances] (1981, 88 minutes) is a classic of Moroccan cinema and a compelling introduction to it. While presenting itself as a music documentary on the iconic band Nass El Ghiwane, it is also a film about friendship and collaboration, archival memory, the anti-colonial imagination, and working-class life in Casablanca. Ahmed El Maanouni is a writer, director, cinematographer, and producer born in Casablanca in 1944. Among his essential works are Alyam Alyam (1978), the first Moroccan film to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival and winner of the 7e Art prize at FESPACO in Ouagadougou; and Al Hal [Trances] (1981), which was the first movie to be restored by the World Cinema Project in 2007. Among his other works are the feature films Burned Hearts (2007) and Fadma (2017), as well as The Paths of Freedom (2015–16), a documentary…

A conversation between filmmaker Sosena Solomon, designer and urban scholar/theorist Mpho Matsipa, and anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana. This episode was recorded at e-flux Screening Room before a screening of Merkato, curated by Natacha Nsabimana. Sosena Solomon's Merkato is a documentary tracing the lives of four people as they navigate the demands of life and work in one of the biggest markets in Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Filmed on location in Merkato, before a radical architectural transformation, Solomon's documentary invites us to ask expansive questions about space, architecture, transition, and preservation. Sosena Solomon is an Ethiopian-American social documentary film and multimedia visual artist whose work explores cross-sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives through arresting visual storytelling. Solomon has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors as a director and…

Ben Eastham talks to artist Alice Wang. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Alice Wang's sculptural forms shine a light on the uncanny forces that shape the physical world. Using material such as fossils, meteorites, moss, and heat—ranging from leftover radiation from the Big Bang to the wax secreted by bees—her work aims to reconfigure our understanding of reality. Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. In his para-disciplinary artistic practice, Nolan Oswald Dennis explores "a Black consciousness of space"—the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization—questioning spacetime histories through system-specific interventions, sculptures, and drawings. Black Liberation Zodiac: Khunuseti focuses on a group of stars known in isiZulu as isiLimela (in English, the Pleiades) whose appearance over the southern hemisphere horizon in June signals the beginning of the season of planting, rites of adulthood, and other cyclical transitions. As these stars appear in the southern hemisphere they simultaneously disappear in the northern hemisphere. Their path across the equator reveals a condition of common difference which echoes…

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Thotti. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Thotti works at the frontier between trance and nothingness, the image and its oblivion, motion and remembrance, cinema and its expansion. As he puts it: "South Atlantic dissolved in the world's skies." Read more about his installation for the Shanghai Biennale, (Mo) Crossing to the End and the Beginning Again, via the Institute of the Cosmos website.

Ben Eastham talks to artist Lucile Desamory. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Lucile Desamory works at the frontiers of perception and cognition, with a special interest in what the Berlin-based artist refers to as the "too-much, the falsified, and spurned narratives." The breadth of her pursuit is reflected in the diversity of her approach, which uses film, painting, embroidery, photography, and her voice. Often working in collaboration, her oeuvre extends to theatrical works, feature-length films, and a television show currently in production.

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Heidi Lau. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Heidi Lau's luminous ceramics evoke architectural ruins, funerary vessels, and mythological creatures. Channeling the artist's personal history, the syncretic cultures of her native Macau, and the diasporic experience, Lau transforms Taoist ritual tokens of mourning and remembrance into what Kang Kang describes as "oblique monuments for an impossible ancestry." Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Ciarán Finlayson about his book, Perpetual Slavery, published by Floating Opera Press in 2023. In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. Finlayson suggests that these two artists' work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery. Ciarán Finlayson is an editor from Houston, Texas. He is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy. Finlayson is on the core faculty of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, and has taught aesthetics and social theory at Columbia University, New York, and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and at socialist night schools hosted by the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

A conversation preceding the African Film Institute's inaugural screening at e-flux curated by Natacha Nsabimana, featuring two works by Rwandan filmmaker Amelia Umuhire. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room. Amelia Umuhire (b. 1991, Kigali, Rwanda) is a filmmaker and artist living in Kigali and Berlin. In 2015, she wrote and directed the award-winning web-series Polyglot, in which she follows the lives of young, deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists. Her short film Mugabo was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival, and screened at MOCA Los Angeles and the Berlin Biennale among many other places. In 2018, Umuhire produced the Prix Europa-nominated radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She was a Villa Romana Fellow in 2020, and is currently working on her first feature film. Natacha Nsabimana teaches in the anthropology department at the university of Chicago. Her research…

Tamara Khasanova and Hallie Ayres talk to artist Saodat Ismailova following To Share a Dream With a River, a screening of three films at e-flux. Stay tuned after the conversation for an excerpt from a soundscape composed by Camille Norment for Ismailova's film, The Haunted. Films discussed in this episode: The Haunted (2017, 23 minutes) takes the form of an open letter to the Turan tiger. A majestic symbol of the Central Asian landscape, this animal has been extinct for several decades but lives on as a sacred symbol in the collective imagination of the local population. In her captivating film essay, Ismailova pays homage to the tiger as she shows how firmly bound it is to the region's history. Stains of Oxus (2016, 24 minutes) follows a transformation of the landscape of the Amu Darya riverbanks and the people that inhabit them, beginning from the high plateau in Tajikistan to the lowland deserts in Uzbekistan, where the river finds its end. Chillpiq (2018, 17 minutes) begins with a scene of two buses…

Recorded live at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 during a retrospective screening of selected works by Laure Prouvost. The pre-screening introduction by Amal Issa and Laure Prouvost is followed by a conversation between the artist and writer-curator Kathy Noble. The screening portion of the program featured a selection of works spanning the last decade: OWT (2007, 3 minutes), Finger Point Green (2010, 3 minutes), They Parlaient Idéale (29 minutes, 2019), Every Sunday, Grandma (2022, 7 minutes), OMA JE (You, My, Omma, Mama, Shadow Does, and A Walking Story) (2023, 22 minutes). Language—in its broadest sense—permeates the video, sound, installation, and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that weave in film in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost's work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and…

Recorded in February 2023, Keli Maksud talks to Esteban Jefferson about his exhibition, MAY 25th, 2020, at 303 Gallery. A second iteration of the show will open at Goldsmiths CCA in October 2023. Esteban Jefferson's practice centers around issues of race, identity and the legacies of colonialism. Using photography, drawing, painting, and sound installation as forms of documentation, Jefferson paints the focal points of his compositions in great detail, creating a stark contrast between the subject or object in focus and the surrounding environment. The paintings are left intentionally unfinished, creating a raw style emblematic of his investigative process. Well known for his series, "Petit Palais", first featured at White Columns, New York, in 2019, Jefferson's latest works consider the related symbolism of flags and toppling of equestrian monuments in New York, through the lens of racial and colonial legacies. Esteban Jefferson was born in New York City in 1989, and attended Columbia University. Recent…

An excerpt from Raven Chacon's performance Solos, followed by a conversation with Xenia Benivolski, recorded live at e-flux on April 27. Solos, is a series of short, improvised works performed in quick succession. Using a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, Chacon's experimental compositions range from sparse, minimalistic soundscapes to complex, multi-layered works that incorporate voices, noises, and found sounds. Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. Since 2004, he has mentored more than three hundred Native high school composers in writing new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP). As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Ar, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der…

Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Jacopo Galimberti about his book, Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988), published in 2022. Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and Assistant Professor at IUAV (Venice). He is the author of Individuals Against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956-1969) (Liverpool) and Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso), which historicizes those political currents and movements alongside visual and literary culture that was either in dialogue or in debate with the figures he centers—as well as the revolutionary aesthetic/cultural theory that they produced through workers' inquiries and research on forms of postwar labor, and later participation in extraparliamentary militant social and urban movements. In addition to providing an art and architecture historical perspective on these movements, the book acts as a very helpful entry-point to operaist theory, which Classe Operaia called an…

Ben Eastham talks to Shubigi Rao about her long term project Pulp, and curating the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Artist and writer Shubigi Rao makes layered installations of books, etchings, drawings, pseudo-scientific machines, metaphysical puzzles, video, ideological board games, garbage and archives, and has been exhibited and collected in Singapore and internationally. Her interests include archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history. Since 2014 she has been visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally for Pulp, a decade-long film, book and visual art project about the history of book destruction. See here for more info. Rao curated the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022–23. The biennale was originally planned for 2020–21, but was delayed due to COVID-19.

Recorded at e-flux before the launch of Dorit Chrysler's album, Calder Plays Theremin, on February 23, 2023. The conversation with Sanna Almajedi is followed by an excerpt from Dorit's live performance. The album Calder Plays Theremin is a co-release by the NY Theremin Society and Fridman Gallery, and can be ordered on Bandcamp. The album is based on a sound piece commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start. For the piece, Chrysler identified two of Alexander Calder's sculptures, Snow Flurry, I (1948) and Man-Eater with Pennants (1945), to interact and "play" multiple theremins on site. Dorit Chrysler is a Berlin-based composer and sound artist, and co-founder of the NY Theremin Society. Her work explores new applications of the theremin in various forms. Chrysler was awarded the Austrian State Stipend in Composition 2023 and earned her Master's Degree of Musicology in Vienna. She has performed worldwide, and written for film and the…

A conversation with artists Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, and Keith Christensen on the occasion of their exhibition and book project, In Union, on view at Open Source Gallery in New York. In Union highlights the native role in a union strike, union families, and environmental protests. The conversation is hosted by Matt Peterson. Read more about the project here. Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds has worked as an artist, activist, and teacher. Heap of Birds's artwork confronts unacknowledged histories of state and settler violence against Native communities in the United States. His piece "Our Red Nations Were Always Green" was published by e-flux Architecture in May 2021. Keith Christensen is an artist and designer. His work includes a focus on social justice issues. He created Game Turn, Learning from the Minneapolis Truckers' Strike of 1934, a book and board game installation. He recently authored the book See & Say Time on his paintings. Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental…

Sanna Almajedi speaks to Maria Chávez on the occasion of Topography of Sound (2007–now) at e-flux. The conversation is followed by an excerpt from the performance, Maria's first public live show since a medically induced sabbatical. Maria Chávez is an abstract turntablist, conceptual sound artist, and DJ based in New York and born in Lima, Peru. Coincidence, chance, and failures are themes that are at the heart of her practice, which expands from the world of sound to sculpture and other disciplines. Chávez is one of the only people, if not the only person, in the world that uses the double-headed RAKE turntable needles in her live performances. She uses broken needles that bounce and scratch in their attempt to play a groove. Sometimes she breaks the record itself and stacks broken shards of vinyl on the turntable. Through these experimentations, Chávez utilizes destruction as a method to discover new sonic worlds. Chávez's influences stem from improvised contemporary music; she is an avid practitioner of…

This episode was recorded live during the launch of e-flux journal issue #131 on December 7, 2022. The evening was introduced and moderated by the journal editors, and featured authors Martin Guinard, Sabu Kohso, Matt Peterson, Leon Dische Becker, and Cosmo Bjorkenheim. Martin Guinard expands on his "Homage to Bruno Latour" with a message on diplomacy between different worlds that are no longer commoning together. In connection to Dische Becker and Bjorkenheim's later conversation, Guinard also touches on Latour's (non-)relationship to science fiction. Sabu Kohso and Matt Peterson discuss their conversation "The Catastrophe Revealed: On Radiation and Revolution," which traces deep, interconnected fault lines between the ongoing aftermaths of the Fukushima disaster and the Covid pandemic, as well as the imperial and also liberatory history of activist movements in Tokyo, New York, and all places where people rise up against a disintegrating world. Leon Dische Becker and Cosmo Bjorkenheim discuss their essay…

Lukas Brasiskis, associate curator of e-flux Video & Film, talks to Erika Balsom about the book and exhibition co-curated with Hila Peleg, Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image. The episode was recorded at e-flux Screening Room before "No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image," a talk by Erika Balsom preceded by a screening of Han Ok-hee's Untitled 77A (1977, 6 minutes) and Grupo Chaski's Miss Universo en el Perú (1982, 32 minutes). Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King's College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021, shortlisted for the Kraszna Krausz prize). Her criticism appears regularly in venues such as Artforum, Cinema Scope, e-flux, and 4Columns. With Hila Peleg, she is the co-curator of the exhibition No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (HKW Berlin, 2022) and co-editor of the books…

Sanna Almajedi talks to Jad and Tarek Atoui about their experimental music duo, Through Rust and Dusk. The conversation is followed by an excerpt of their performance at e-flux on September 26, 2022 that incorporated improvisation, custom made instruments, field recordings, and electronic sounds. Read more about Tarek Atoui's The Whisperers (October 1–December 10, 2022) at Flag Art Foundation here. Jad Atoui is a Beirut-based sound artist and improviser. He composes and performs electronicand electro-acoustic music and has worked with musicians like John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Chuck Bettis, and Anthony Sahyoun. During his formative years in New York, Atoui found interest in the New York avant-garde scene. He began working closely with NYC downtown musicians and learning improvised music techniques, while also working at the Stone and the Guggenheim Museum. In 2015, Atoui spearheaded the "Biosonics" project in collaboration with scientist Ivan Marazzi where they used bio-sonification of…

Ben Eastham talks with authors Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams about their novel, Diego Garcia (Fitzcarraldo Editions, Semiotext(e) / Native Agents). "Through the intricately woven histories and the corresponding fictions within fictions, the compassion expressed in Diego Garcia highlights the absence of it in those who, forsaking their obligations towards other human beings, exiled the Chagossians from their home. We see that until the Chagossian people are home, nobody is home." –Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood About the book: August 2014. Two friends, writers Damaris Caleemootoo and Oliver Pablo Herzberg, arrive in Edinburgh from London, the city that killed Daniel—his brother, her frenemy and loved by them both. Every day is different but the same. Trying to get to the library, they get distracted by bickering—will it rain or not and what should they do about their tanking bitcoin?—in the end failing to write or resist the sadness which follows them as they drift around the city.…

Hallie Ayres talks to Miriam Hillawi Abraham and Nasra Abdullahi about their text, "The Afro-Cosmologist's Treatise on the Astrolabe," published in the Cosmic Bulletin 2021. Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. She holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts and a BArch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art. She is a CCA-Mellon researcher for the Digital Now multidisciplinary project, a 2020 fellow of Gray Area's Zachary Watson Education Fund and a Graham Foundation 2020 grantee. Nasra Abdullahi is a designer, writer, and editor based in London. She is currently a junior writer at Wallpaper* magazine, the 2021 guest editor of The Avery Review and a member of the second cohort of New Architecture Writers. A student at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she is interested in…

Andreas Petrossiants discusses We Are "Nature" Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press/Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2021) with authors Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan. An excerpt from the book was published in e-flux journal issue 124. "Since 2004, through the work of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, we have questioned how to radically transform and entangle art, activism, and everyday life amidst the horrors of the Capitalocene. A decade ago, we deserted our metropolitan London lives, rooting our art activism in a place that French politicians had declared "lost to the republic," known by those who inhabited it as la ZAD (the "zone to defend"). On these four thousand acres of wetlands, turned into a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, an international airport project was defeated through disobedience and occupation. This is an extract from our latest book, where an art of life is populated by rebel farmers and salamanders, barricades and…

Hallie Ayres talks with Shimrit Lee about her forthcoming book, Decolonize Museums. Shimrit Lee is a writer, educator, and curator based in Philadelphia. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit's research interests relate to the cultural production of security narratives in Israel and the US. She holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU, and currently teaches high school history as well as community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her book, Decolonize Museums, will be published as part of the series "Decolonize That" by Warscapes and O/R Books in 2021.

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists on 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers…

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are composed out of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies, defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a "commoning" force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of 9 sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists and researchers…

Andreas Petrossiants speaks to Woodbine members Matt Peterson and Laura McAdams. Woodbine is a volunteer-run experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens for developing the practices, skills, and tools needed to build autonomy. Since March 2020 they have run a food pantry in partnership with Hungry Monk that serves thousands of families per week. "We came together out of our experiences in Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy, after having lived through a New York City forever changed by 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. Trump and Covid are only the latest in a series of disasters we have had to face together, and community resilience and collective autonomy remain our answer and horizon. In the fall of 2013 Woodbine was conceived as an organizing framework to rethink how to inhabit a city and neighborhood together. Now it is time to begin a new chapter and phase, and expand our collective capacities." Quote from Woodbine's website. Support the fundraiser discussed in this episode here.

Furqat Palvan-Zade, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Carol Yinghua Lu, Keti Chukhrov, and Kasia Wolinska read excerpts from their Letters Against Separation correspondence. The letters were published in series on e-flux conversations as the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world. Other contributors included Claire Fontaine in Italy, Bahar Noorizadeh in London, Hanmin Kim in Seoul, Oxana Timofeeva in rural Russia, and Pelin Tan on an Island. The idea for the project was initiated by Hito Steyerl and developed by e-flux conversations editor Mike Andrews. The following announcement concluded the project: Dear friends, Our correspondence project "Letters against Separation," hosted on e-flux conversations, was launched as the Covid-19 pandemic forced most of the world to retreat into isolation. The aim was to have writers from different parts of the globe, who were facing different phases and manifestations of the pandemic, reflect on what was going on around them, in the hope of creating connections…

Elvia Wilk talks to artist Stephanie Dinkins about her ongoing projects involving AI, and recent text, "Afro-now-ism," published in Noema magazine. Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist and professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. She creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins' art practice employs lens-based practices, emerging technologies, and community engagement to confront questions of bias in AI, data sovereignty and social equity. Investigations into the contradictory histories, traditions, knowledge bases, and philosophies that form/in-form society at large underpin her thought and art production.

Luis Camnitzer and editor Ben Eastham have a conversation following the June 2020 publication of One Number Is Worth One Word, the latest in the e-flux journal book series with Sternberg Press. For nearly 60 years, Luis Camnitzer has been obsessing about the same things. As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an "ethical anarchist" preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. "If we keep digging," he writes, "it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed." At the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, Camnitzer has worked primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as an art medium has distinguished…

Charles Mudede joins us from Seattle to read "White Knee, Black Neck," published in the June 2020 issue of e-flux journal. Charles Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, and writer. Mudede, who teaches at Cornish College of the Arts, collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on two films, Police Beat and Zoo, both of which premiered at Sundance. Zoo was also screened at Cannes. Mudede is also associate editor for The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, and directed the 2020 film Thin Skin.

Andreas Petrossiants speaks with Marina Vishmidt about her book, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital. Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Ephemera, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is one of the organisers of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic).