e-flux

e-flux journal issue 163, “Intellectuals,” guest-edited by McKenzie Wark, is out now. with: McKenzie Wark @mckenziewark3000 , Denise Ferreira da Silva @livingcommons , Tithi Bhattacharya @drtithi1917 , Bogna Konior @bognamk , Amber Musser @a_jamilla , Verónica Gago @vero_gago76 , Dominic Pettman, Matt Seybold, Daria Serenko @serenko_daria , and Luce deLire @luce_delire . “Is it possible that we might know something of the world, share what we know, decide together what’s best, and work toward a world that is free, fair, and might endure? If I were to describe the project that’s consumed my life, I might put it something like that. It’s why I’m drawn to the work of those oriented toward something similar, other travelers passing in the shadows of the fiefdoms of knowledge-as-power who might have their eye on such a horizon.” —McKenzie Wark Read e-flux journal issue 163 “Intellectuals” at the link in our bio. Cover image: Gustav Klutsis, unpublished illustration for Yuri Libedinsky’s novel A Week, 1924.

The eighth issue of the e-flux Index is now in print and available for digital download! e-flux Index 8 explores the fragmentary complexity of the current moment through pointing out eleven emergent themes drawn from texts commissioned by e-flux throughout the spring of 2025. These “indications for reading” refuse the xenophobic illogic of the us/them, friend/enemy strategies of categorizing, and instead seek to index multiple temporalities and positions simultaneously— in a non-linear way. They bring together exhibition and film reviews, in-depth theoretical and historical essays on contemporary art, architecture, and design, interviews with artists, theorists, and filmmakers, journeys into the archive of film history, and shorter missives on sociopolitics and contemporary culture. They are titled: Dont’s, Othercare, Chance Operations, The World of Interiors, Bone Alphabets, The One Who Waits, The Day Is the Barricade, Sentimental Educations, Marking Territory, [gesticulating], and Sedimentology. Together, this issue presents an invitation to dodge and misdirect the accusatory fingers of the authoritarian present and instead enter into Adrian Piper’s “indexical present.” Link in bio. The printed edition of the Index is available to purchase from select art and design bookstores, as well as museums, throughout Canada, East Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. The publication is distributed by @artmetropole (Canada), @asterism_books (USA), @antennebooks (UK, Europe), @l_pd_r (Europe), @tbs_book_society (East Asia), and @buchhandlungwaltherfranzkoenig (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).

Join us this May for programs exploring acts of self-recording under authoritarian rule; how operativism can be rethought today; how U.S. immigration enforcement has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry shaped by private profit and political power; forms of remembrance that exceed linear time; the importance of maintaining and preserving the Black archive in the face of institutional neglect; and ekphrastic communion that considers writing about art as a form of survival and thought. Tuesday, May 5 Ion Grigorescu: Body, Camera, Resistance a program of films and videos by Grigorescu, followed by a conversation with Roxana Marcoci, Amy Bryzgel, and Andreiana Mihail, moderated by Lukas Brasiskis. in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute and presented in collaboration with Gregor Podnar Gallery and Kinotopia. RSVP Tuesday, May 5, Venice Venice launch of e-flux journal issue 162: “Operativism: Labor, Automation, Agitation” Thursday, May 7 Deportation Inc.: Investigating the Business of Migrant Detention a screening of Deportation Inc., co-presented with The Architectural League of New York, SITU Research, and Lawfare. introduced by Brad Samuels and followed by a conversation with Gauri Bahuguna, Eileen Grench, Elora Mukherjee, Jon Nealon, and moderated by Tyler McBrien. @archleague Saturday, May 9 Sky Hopinka: screening and discussion alongside a selection of Sky Hopinka’s films, the afternoon brings together works by Fox Maxy, Tyson Houseman, darylina powderface, and Svetlana Romanova. @skyhopinka @foxm4xy @tysonhouseman @darylinapdf Wednesday, May 20 Bar Laika presents Playback 0032 with CZ Wang @efluxbarlaika @cz__wang Thursday, May 21 Clarence Delgado’s Niiwam, with Samba Gadjigo and Mahen Bonetti a screening hosted by the African Film Institute followed by a conversation between Samba Gadjigo and Mahen Bonetti Thursday, May 28 EKPHRASIS IS THOUGHT, EKPHRASIS IS SURVIVAL with Emily LaBarge, Catherine Quan Damman, Johanna Fateman, Dan Fox, and Lynne Tillman RSVP @emilylabarge @johannafateman @d_a_n_f_o_x Get tickets and stay tuned via the link in bio. Cover image: Sky Hopinka, Here you are before the trees, 2020

In the first of our roundups of Venice’s national pavilions, Jörg Heiser reflects on three in which bodies were conspicuously absent, spectacularly present, and uncannily simulated. Read at the link in bio. #jörgheiser #venicebiennale @labiennale Images: [1, 2] View of Florentina Holzinger’s “Seaworld Venice” in the Austrian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia. Photos by Andrea Avezzù. [3] Li Yi-Fan, Screen Melancholy, 2026. © Li Yi-Fan. Courtesy of the artist and TFAM of Taiwan Collateral Event 2026. [4] View of Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu’s “Ruin” in the German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Image courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Andrea Avezzù.

Anna Curcio’s work as an author and editor has consistently grappled with the intersection of feminist political economy, shifting labor relations, and the development of racialized and gendered capitalism. Her work has been vital to presenting and preserving histories of workerist-feminist and autonomous Marxism, while attending to contemporary practices of organizing in contentious social movements and on the “factory floor” of global supply chains. The excerpt published here comes from an essay originally written in 2021, “Le differenze del capitale: Razza, genere, antagonismo, compatibilità,” published as a chapter in Curcio’s most recent book, L’Italia è un paese razzista (Italy is a racist country, 2024). The book is a broad-ranging consideration of the role of racism in the consolidation of the nascent Italian nation-state. … The passage excerpted here critiques the liberal capitalist commodification of difference that accompanies an intensified management of racialized, exploitable populations. The excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity. —Arlen Austin @infantile_disorder Read it in e-flux Notes. Link in bio. Illustration: Angelica Ferrara

A very smart show about labor in capitalist economies proves that “culture will not do the things we want it to until the current social relations of production and reproduction are destroyed,” writes R. H. Lossin. Read at the link in bio. #rhlossin #mitlistarts @rhlossin @mitlistarts Images: [1] Chauncey Hare, Self-portrait at the EPA, 1980. Chauncey Hare photograph archive, The Bancroft Library. This photograph was made by Chauncey Hare to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multi-national corporations and their elite owners and managers. [2] Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment Performance Still 4, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York. [3] Blondell Cummings, Chicken Soup, 1981. Courtesy of MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. Photo by Dario Lasagni.

The African Film Institute is pleased to invite you to @efluxscreeningroom next Thursday, May 21 at 7pm for a screening of Niiwam (1988) by Senegalese film director Clarence Delgado. The evening will be followed by a conversation between Senegalese filmmaker and author Samba Gadjigo and film programmer Mahen Bonetti. The presentation is organized with the support of the New York African Film Festival @africanfilmfest , which presented Niiwam in 2006. Now in its 33rd year, the New York African Film Festival has bridged the divide between three decades of changes in Africa and the American public through the medium of film. The 33rd edition of the festival runs from May 1 to May 30 across various locations in New York City. Get tickets at the link in bio.

e-flux Notes roundup “what art can do” continues with Film Notes. Christian Nyampeta, KJ Abudu, and Kaneza Schaal discuss the African Film Institute’s prospects, focusing on its role as a collective space for thinking through African cinema. @christiannyampeta @kj_abudu @kanezaschaal Greg de Cuir Jr.’s “The Irresistible Force of Thinking and Acting Together” gathers five artist duos in a conversation on shared authorship, treating collaboration not as a simple division of labor but as a political and aesthetic method for creating films together. In his 1925 text “Simultaneous or Poly-Cinema,” László Moholy-Nagy imagines cinema beyond the single rectangular screen, proposing multidirectional projection as a response to the intensified visual and sensory conditions of modern urban life. In “Bone Insurrection,” Rabih Mroué approaches the body as an interior archive for preserving and remembering historical violence. Ritwik Ghatak’s “The Film and I” argues for cinema as both personal expression and collective practice, defending the plurality of film form against theory, convention, and any fixed model of committed art. Link in bio.

Artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva @livingcommons on the intellectuals’ function, yesterday and today. Read it in e-flux journal issue 163, “Intellectuals,” guest-edited by McKenzie Wark. Link in bio. Image: Antonio Gramsci, Rome, Italy, 2016. Photo: Riccardo Cuppini.

This week, e-flux Film Notes publishes Qingyuan Deng’s essay that brings Lacan’s account of retroactive meaning into relation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative reading, asking how recent artists’ films and moving-image installations hold the time between an event and its belated political comprehension. @saodatismailova @alison.c.nguyen Read it at the link in bio. Cover image: Alison Nguyen, Perforation, Ellipse (installation view), 2026. Courtesy the artist and Storefront for Art and Architecture. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

The five women artists in this stimulating group show, all of whom came of age in Cold War Southeast Asia, produce work that is rooted in tradition yet radical in spirit and effect. This overdue exhibition of their work, writes Stephanie Bailey, presents an alternative history of art in the region that emphasizes collectivity, collaboration, social practice, and resistance over “masterpieces” and market-friendly modernisms. Read at the link in bio. #stephaniebailey #nationalgallerysingapore @stephanie_waiyi_bailey @nationalgallerysingapore Images: [1] Amanda Heng, Twardzik Ching Chor Leng and Vincent Twardzik Ching. Home Service. Collection of the Artists [2] Phaptawan Suwannakudt. My Mother Was a Nun I. Collection of National Gallery Singapore [3] Nirmala Dutt. Self Portrait. 1999. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

At a moment when contemporary art is increasingly entangled with the political disasters and economic breakdowns of the present, the question of “what art can do”—to borrow the title of a conversation between Alexander Kluge and Hans Ulrich Obrist—can no longer be approached rhetorically. Essays published in e-flux Notes over the past month confront this question through film, militant research, collective authorship, experimental economies, and the body itself as a site where history accumulates and persists.   In “What Did the Golden Lion Die Of?,” Antonia Majaca dissects the collapse of the Venice Biennale’s international jury in the context of its historical origins and contemporary political conflicts. The jury’s resignation letter, their statement, and “An Urgent Call From Artists and Curators of the 61st Biennale” can be found at the link in bio. A highlight in April was the four-part series “Collapse Finance.” Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou proposes the term as a framework for understanding how speculation, risk modeling, and future-making operate under conditions of systemic breakdown. Giulia Dal Maso explores the science-fiction world of longevity capitalism, analyzing how aging populations become investable horizons while the wealthiest plan for immortality. Melinda Cooper writes of the “reactionary futurism” of the new crop of tech capitalists, returning to Schumpeter’s creative destruction. And Jamieson Webster discusses the psychic dimension of the contemporary polycrisis.. “Open Letter on Auction of ‘Tributes’ to the Russian Avant-Garde” deplores Stanley’s Auction House’s sale of “crude pastiches of Russian and Ukrainian modernist paintings.” Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira discuss modes of organization pioneered by CERFI, cofounded by Félix Guattari. Zach Gibson reviews the new translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. In memory of Kluge, we republished a wide-ranging conversation between him and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “What Art Can Do.” Kluge’s parting advice: “Not to make yourself stupid from the power of others and not from your own powerlessness.” Link in bio.