Effects Journal

Daisy Lafarge’s intoxicating poem ‘Sewer Theory’, written for Effects 4: Holes, is now available to read on our website. In the poem, odour becomes a theory of reading: the stinking sewer as both figure and method—a subterranean channel of waste, infrastructure and lyric overflow. Rather than treating reading as a clean decipherment, Lafarge follows what leaks from the text—its residues, vapours, contaminations, and stubborn opacity. Link in bio. @daisylafarge #effects #sewertheory #poem #cloacamaxima

Please join us for the LA launch of Effects 4: Holes on Friday May 15th, 7.30pm, at The Loved One, 1634 West Temple Ave.  The event is a rare chance to explore some of the themes of our current issue—especially around painting and holes—in person with contributors and editors of Effects 4: Holes, including writer Jan Tumlir, artists Lakshmi Luthra and Paul Sietsema, alongside curator and writer Zachary Korol Gold.  For more information please e-mail us: [email protected].

“What appears as an erasure is actually an act of camouflage.” In ‘Vanishing Points,’ published in Effects 4: Holes, Jan Tumlir speaks with artist Paul Pfeiffer about erasure not as simple deletion, but as a way of making visible the unstable relation between image and spectator, foreground and background, spectacle and crowd. From the ghostly residual silhouettes of ‘The Long Count’ to the vertiginous architecture of ‘Vitruvian Figure,’ this wide-ranging interview follows the void as it opens onto questions of perception, camouflage, trauma, memory, and the unconscious. Jan Tumlir is a writer, curator and teacher based in LA. He is founding editor of art journal X-TRA, a regular contributor to Artforum, author of numerous books and catalogue essays, and is an editor of Effects. Paul Pfeiffer is a sculptor, photographer and video artist, whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world, including a recent large-scale survey exhibition, ‘Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom,’ that has travelled from MOCA in LA to the Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao to the MCA Chicago. Read the full interview on our website now. Link in bio. #effectsjournal #jantumlir #paulpfeiffer @pmp2021 #vanishingpoints

“These now-vacant vitrines, still illuminated, stand as stark, uncomfortable symbols…of a painful and yet-to-be fully realised past.” In ‘Holes in the Collection’, published in Effects 4: Holes, Tabitha Steinberg examines how museums produce, manage and display absence. What begins as a figure of speech becomes a material history of bombardment, colonial extraction, classification, repatriation and reform. At stake is not only what museums keep, but how they account for what cannot be returned. Steinberg is a gallerist, curator and writer based in LA. She is co-founder of the gallery Ehrlich Steinberg, and her writing can be found in various publications including Art Monthly and Frieze. Read ‘Holes in the Collection’ now on our website. Link in bio. @st4bs #effectsjournal #tabithasteinberg #holesinthecollection #effects4holes

You can now find Effects 4: Holes in London at the ICA Bookshop, Koenig Books at Serpentine Galleries and Whitechapel Gallery, Blue Mountain School, and Cafe OTO; in New York at Printed Matter; and in Berlin at Pro qm. Copies are running low so be sure to get one before they go! Also, as ever, available from our website. Link in bio. #effectsjournal @icalondon @koenigbooksltd @serpentineuk @whitechapelgallery_books @cafeotodalston @bluemountainschool @printedmatterinc @proqm

Last few days of HOLES at @colgateuniversity ’s museum, the Clifford Gallery. The exhibition expands upon Effects 4: Holes, our current print issue. Images: 1. Paul Pfeiffer, Corner Piece (2004) 2. Milano Chow (@milanosalami ), Dual Façade with Tulip (2024) 3. Lakshmi Luthra, Noli Me Tangere (2024) 4. Mary Helena Clark (@maryhelenaclark ), Brooder 6; Decoy 1 (2024 & 2025) 5. Paul Sietsema, Brut spill (2020) 6. Christopher Page (@christopheropage ), That Which is Missing (2025) 7. Clementine Keith-Roach (@clementinekeithroach ), Eternal Return (2024) 8. Patricia Treib, Sinuate (2023) 9. Noel W Anderson (@nwa_studios ), Alcindor Lost in the Sirens’ Song (2023-2025) 10-11. Jeffrey Stuker (@jeffrey_stuker ) & Nour Mobarak (@adult_nour ), Untitled (2024) 12. Larissa Sansour (@larissasansour ) & Søren Lind, Familiar Phantoms (2023) 13. Adam Putnam (@arpzap ), [Untitled] - Hole 4 (2022) 14. Eric N. Mack (@ernatmack ), Satin and fluid evening dresses (2023) Curated by Lakshmi Luthra, editor of Effects and Professor of Art and Film & Media Studies @colgateuniversity . #effectsjournal #colgateuniversity #effects4holes #cliffordgallery #holes

Could AI ever fall in love? Or are computers immune from the contagion of love, forever doomed merely to calculate? Is human love a kind of knowledge or, in fact, a kind of non-knowledge? In his new essay, ‘Loving the Frightful (W)Hole’, philosopher Richard Boothby proposes that when we fall in love we are drawn not to something we understand and recognise in the other, but something obscure and even unknowable. The lover, he claims, is magnetised by the abyss in the loved one. Richard Boothby is professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland and one of the world’s foremost Lacanian theorists. He has been exploring the consequences of Jacques Lacan’s radical rethinking of Freudian psychoanalysis since the 1990’s. Read this amazing essay on our website now, or read it in print in our fourth issue, Effects 4: Holes, which is available now from our issues page. Link in bio! #effectsjournal #richardboothby #lovingthefrightfulwhole #holes #effects4holes #love #abyss

HOLES, an exhibition that expands on Effects 4: Holes, is now open at Colgate University’s museum the Clifford Gallery in upstate New York. Through rips and shadows, enclosures and erasures, the artworks in this exhibition peer across the familiar into the unknown. A range of conceptual approaches and material processes are used to probe the illusionistic and associative power of the image, illuminating the fragile moment when a form coheres—or begins to fall apart. The exhibition is curated by Lakshmi Luthra and includes works by @ernatmack , @milanosalami , @nwa_studios , @maryhelenaclark , @christopheropage , @jeffrey_stuker & @adult_nour , @arpzap , @clementinekeithroach , @larissasansour & Søren Lind, Paul Pfeiffer, Patricia Treib, Lakshmi Luthra and Paul Sietsema. The exhibition was opened with talks by our editor @christopheropage and contributor @nwa_studios . It’s a beautiful exhibition, up until November 12th. If you’re in upstate New York be sure to pay it a visit! @colgateuniversity #colgateuniversity #cliffordgallery #effectsjournal #exhibition #holes #ericnmack #milanochow #noelwanderson #maryhelenaclark #christopherpage #jeffreystuker #nourmobarak #adamputnam #clementinekeithroach #larissasansour #sørenlind #paulpfeiffer #patriciatreib #lakshmiluthra #paulsietsema

Thanks everyone who came to @icalondon over the weekend for the launch of Effects 4: Holes. The book fair was wonderful and the launch was a magical event. Apologies to those who came but couldn’t get in, we were at full capacity! We experienced mesmerising readings by @daisylafarge and @nwa_studios and watched moving and powerful films by @larissasansour & Søren Lind and @maryhelenaclark . We discussed holes in the body, the psyche and the body-politic, how the discourse of our time is dominated by political actors who advocate sewing up and sealing off the body-politic, fortifying borders to make it ‘whole’. Our discussion felt all the more urgent as just such political actors mobilised over 100,000 people to march a stone’s throw from the building that very weekend. Effects 4: Holes is now officially out and available to purchase from our website.

We are so excited for this Sunday’s launch of Effects 4: Holes at @icalondon . From 4.30 until 6pm we will hear in-person readings and watch screenings by some of the incredible contributors to the issue. British poet and novelist @daisylafarge is coming from Glasgow to read her brilliant new poem ’Sewer Theory’, in which the stinking sewer is both figure and method: a subterranean channel of waste, odour, memory, and lyric overflow. The poem insists that reading is less a clean decipherment than a contamination—sniffing, rubbing, catching whiffs, being marked by what escapes containment. American artist and writer @nwa_studios is coming from New York to read sections of his essay ‘The Fault in Their Eyes: Fascists Fast in a Perceptual Hole’, in which fascism is seen to feast, or fast, upon the holes in our world left by the absconding of mythological containers like God. But, catching a glimpse of a glitch in the eyes of one of Trump’s underlings, Anderson shows us that holes can also offer opportunities for resistance. We will watch a film by Palestinian-Danish artists @larissasansour and Søren Lind. ‘In Vitro’ (2019) is a sci-fi allegory set in post-apocalyptic Bethlehem, where a dying elder and her lab-born successor debate memory, exile, and the future within an underground orchard sustained by ancestral seeds, viscerally evoking the Nakba (the catastrophic displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 during the creation of the state of Israel). We will also watch ‘Neighboring Animals’ (2024) by American artist @maryhelenaclark . The film is centered on the mouth—as a tool to bite and chew, as an instrument of speech, and as a site of disgust and desire. It incorporates footage of animal dentistry, bite mark analysis, and a reliquary containing the tooth of Mary Magdalene. It is a two-channel film, and projected alongside the extraordinary visuals is a text collaging language from psychological studies on disgust, philosophical inquiries on human nature and animality, and poetry. Please join us! https://www.ica.art/glue-effects-journal-launch or search ‘ICA Effects Launch’

We’re excited to announce that the fourth issue - Effects 4: Holes - has gone to print! You can find out more and pre-order a copy on the Effects website, link in bio. The issue is all about holes 🕳️ Holes in the body and the psyche, political and philosophical holes, holes in architecture and geology, holes as destructive and productive, holes as grave-pits and birth canals. The issue contains fascinating essays, poems and works of art. We are launching the issue @icalondon on Sunday September 14th, 4.30-6pm. There will be readings by @nwa_studios and @daisylafarge and films by @larissasansour & Søren Lind and @maryhelenaclark . The event is free but ticketed: https://www.ica.art/glue-effects-journal-launch. More announcements about the issue coming soon! #effectsjournal #effects #newissue #holes #launch #icalondon #ica #gluebookfair #noelwanderson #daisylafarge #larissasansour #maryhelenaclark

“Ernaux’s use of images takes us to the heart of what makes her writing so distinctive and also so difficult to define.” In a major new essay for Effects, Anna Moser looks at three recent explorations of French writer and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s relationship to the photographic image. First, a book of texts and images, ‘The Uses of Photography,’ recently published in English by Fitzcarraldo, documenting Ernaux’s love affair with a photographer; secondly, a 2024 exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris curated by Lou Stoppard; finally, a 2022 film, ‘The Super 8 Years,’ a collaboration between the writer and her son, juxtaposing old family footage. Moser reveals a “fundamental opposition between the woman the camera shows us and her interior thoughts and feelings.” Read it online now, link in bio. #effectsjournal #annamoser @annaccmoser #annieernaux #ernauxsimages @fitzcarraldoeditions @loustoppard