e-flux podcast

Journalist and author Masha Gessen discusses ways of surviving an autocracy. Rule #1? Believe the autocrat. For this week’s episode of the e-flux podcast, we are featuring Masha Gessen’s lecture, "How We Survive an Autocracy," originally given on May 24, 2017 as part of an ongoing e-flux lectures series dedicated to discovering the protocols of twenty-first century truth, assuming that these still exist. Launched in February 2017, most e-flux lectures are live streamed on e-flux.com/live and archived at e-flux.com/video.   Masha Gessen is a journalist and author, whose most recent book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Elvia Wilk and Rachel Ichniowski discuss issues of power abuse in the artworld. The conversation references Elvia’s recent essays "The Grammar of Work" and "No More Excuses," both published by frieze. Elvia Wilk is a writer and contributing editor to e-flux journal. You can read another essay published in April 2018, "Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?" in e-flux Architecture’s initiative Positions. Rachel Ichniowski is Senior Manager, Digital Projects and Strategy at e-flux.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) on the occasion of the launch of their book The Empire Remains Shop at e-flux. In conversation with e-flux journal Art Director and artist Mariana Silva. "Empire shops" were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they were intended to make previously unfamiliar produce and products—sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica—available in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling the remains of the British Empire in London today. Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organize the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping, and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at Performa17; 13th Sharjah Biennial; Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York; dOCUMENTA(13); CA2M, Madrid; The New Institute, Rotterdam; UTS, Sydney; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; among others, and have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London, and Headlands Center for the Arts. The duo were part of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and 2016 Brussels ParckDesign. Their work has been featured in a number of international publications (Lars Müller, Sternberg Press, Volume, and Frieze Magazine). The Empire Remains Shop is published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City–Columbia University Press. They currently lead a studio unit at the RCA, London.

David Kim and Yazan Khalili discuss Yazan's video, Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind, currently on view in the exhibition Being: New Photography 2018 at MoMA through August 19, 2018. "How do we disappear in the digital age? This is a project that works with the facial recognition technologies in smart devices and its historical background in the colonial practices." A segment of the video can be watched on Yazan's website. You can find an additional conversation on the impossible legality of an artwork between David Kim, Yazan Khalili, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Vivian Ziherl in e-flux journal #90. David Kim is a graduate of Yale Law School, at which he was the curator of JUNCTURE: Explorations in Art and Human Rights, an initiative sponsored by the Schell Center for International Human Rights. Kim is currently a principal at the management consultancy Incandescent. He also collaborates with curators and artists on projects in connection with property, contracts, finance, and human rights. Yazan Khalili lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, and a cultural activist. Khalili has woven together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics. He is the director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah.

Artist Keren Cytter discusses past and future projects on the occasion of the premiere of her film Middle of Beyond at e-flux. In conversation with Josh Altman.  Middle of Beyond blends fiction, news clips, and animation recounting ten days in the life of Malte Krumm, a month after the latest US elections. The film depicts the numbness of a world flooded by information and social media activity, where the borders between reality and illusion are crumbling and narcissism and self-promotion overshadow moral values. Based on a true story. 

Dena Yago discusses her essay "Content Industrial Complex," published in e-flux journal issue 89 (March 2018), with editor-in-chief Kaye Cain-Nielsen. "What is an artist to do? With an understanding of how our content, identities, and influence are valuable to and instrumentalized by brands and marketers, we can find space for resistance and refusal, or we can actively engage with existing models in an effort to ameliorate them." Dena Yago is an artist who was born in 1988. She has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and at Bodega in New York.

Artists and filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Adam Khalil in conversation.  Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She has produced a range of work since the 1980s challenging traditional forms of film and video, and investigating cultural identity and the role of the subject. Ahwesh's work has been the subject of several museum retrospectives and is screened worldwide, including at e-flux in 2015 as part of Corruption: Everybody Knows… curated by Natasha Ginwala. She has been a professor of Film & Electronic Arts at Bard College since 1990. More information: Vimeo / EAI catalogue / overview of work by John David Rhodes (2003) Adam Shingwak Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s film INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./] (2016) re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. It was shown at e-flux on Wednesday, September 21, 2016. A trailer for the feature film co-directed with Bayley James Sweitzer Empty Metal will be out soon. More information: INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./] / The Violence of a Civilization without Secrets co-directed with Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys  

Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General's Executive Director & Curator, on the occasion of Blas's exhibition Contra-Internet at Art in General and his lecture-performance Metric Mysticism at e-flux. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice confronts technologies of capture, security, and control. Currently, he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent works respond to biometric governmentality and network hegemony. Read more about the exhibition, on view through April 21, 2018, at artingeneral.org Read Zach Blas' essay in e-flux journal #74 (June 2016): "Contra-Internet"

e-flux founder, journal editor, and artist Anton Vidokle discusses cosmism with Kaye Cain-Nielsen, editor-in-chief of e-flux journal. You can read more on cosmism in the 88th issue of e-flux journal (February 2018). Featuring texts by Robert Bird, Maria Chehonadskih, Keti Chukhrov, Boris Groys, Trevor Paglen, Alexei Penzin, Marina Simakova, Arseny Zhilyaev, and a Timeline of Russian Cosmism compiled by Anastasia Gacheva, Arseny Zhilyaev, and Anton Vidokle. 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli discusses four axioms of critical theory in response to her presentation, "Toxic Assets the the Extimacy of Existence," from Frontier Imaginaries Ed.No3 at e-flux. In conversation with journal editor Stephen Squibb. Read Elizabeth A. Povinelli in e-flux journal: "Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories" from issue 81, April 2017 "Geontologies: The Figures and the Tactics" from issue 78, December 2016