Recorded Live at Bar Laika: Palto Flats is a record label based out of NYC specializing in idiomatic forms of pop, electronic, and experimental music. Several of the releases on their catalog seek to highlight the work of Japanese multi-instrumentalist/composer Yasuaki Shimizu, through his work as the bandleader of Mariah, as well as his solo releases, Kakashi and Kiren. The label also focuses on contemporary material from experimental electronic artists including Georgia, Foodman, and others. Their most recent release is the first full reissue of UK ambient electronic duo Woo’s 1990 release Into the Heart of Love. https://www.instagram.com/paltoflats/

Playback is a series of listening events curated by Kamran Sadeghi where record labels, musicians, composers, and producers feature recordings from their catalog, and premiere album pre-releases, archives, and other rarities.

Playback 005 feat. Palto Flats

Recorded live at Bar Laika: Ergot Records is a shop in NYC’s East Village founded by Adrian Rew in 2021 as an expansion of his label of the same name. Although primarily an outlet for the dissemination of music, outré sonic emissions, and related printed matter, the shop also regularly hosts performances, readings, and DJ sessions at its 32 E. 2nd St space. The label focuses on experimental music and has released music by Annea Lockwood & Ruth Anderson, Aaron Dilloway, Dominique Lawalrée, and The Master Musicians of Joujouka.
http://ergotrecords.blogspot.com/
https://www.instagram.com/ergotrecords/

Playback is a series of listening events curated by Kamran Sadeghi where record labels, musicians, composers, and producers feature recordings from their catalog, and premiere album pre-releases, archives, and other rarities.


Playback 004 feat. Ergot Records

Recorded Live at Bar Laika: Composer, musician, and producer Faten Kanaan uses counterpoint as a narrative tool to create music that is mysterious, smudgy, and deeply melodic.

From the repetitive structures of modern minimalism and early music/baroque influences, to more languid textural ebbs and tides, there’s a warmth in her use of synthesizers / live keyboard performances that gives her work a curiously timeless feel. Composing intuitively, her music has often been described as “strange,” mostly because it creates its own world. In symbiosis with electronics, it is an appreciation for the vulnerability of human limitations and nuances. A Syrian-Palestinian-Jordanian-Lebanese, Faten was born in Walsrode, Germany, and grew up between Europe and the Middle East/SWANA. She is currently based in Jordan.
https://www.fatenkanaan.com/

Playback is a series of listening events curated by Kamran Sadeghi where record labels, musicians, composers, and producers feature recordings from their catalog, and premiere album pre-releases, archives, and other rarities.

Playback 008 feat. Faten Kanaan

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.&nbsp; The episode begins with three short audio excerpts from&nbsp;[1]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;[2]&nbsp;&nbsp;[3]&nbsp; 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) featuring Glenn Ligon and Julius Eastman at 52 Walker.&nbsp;&nbsp; The “” series in e-flux journal reflects on the resounding presence of the late writer, curator, and theoretician. Along with a focus on his many innovative concepts like the “postcolonial constellation,” the series presents a wide evaluation of Enwezor’s curatorial and theoretical practice following other similar initiatives, such as the special issue on Enwezor by the journal he founded, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art. Moving beyond tributes and biography, this series covers topics such as the relevance of Enwezor’s approach to politics, the limits of the exhibition as a form for critique, his conception of modernity and writing on the contemporary, his nomadic epistemology, accounts of his biennials in Seville, Paris, and Venice as institutional critique, and the specific contribution of non-Western artists in the art world.  is the curator and Senior Director at , a David Zwirner gallery space presenting longer format exhibitions with primarily conceptual and research-based artists.  is a curator of media and performance at New York's Museum of Modern Art, where he has co-organized Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (2018), Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022) and Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon (2024) among others. Thomas began his career at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he contributed to the landmark “f show” contemporary art series in 2012 and put together When The Stars Begin To Fall: Imagination and the American South in 2014.  is an artist, writer, curator, and art advisor. Nnamdie ran , a curatorial project between 2018 and 2025 based on their interest in the intersection between hospitality and the arts. Nnamdie also directed anonymous gallery between 2021 and 2024.&nbsp;&nbsp;

“After Okwui Enwezor”: Ebony L. Haynes, T. Lax, K.O. Nnamdie

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. &nbsp;  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 2019, he participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.&nbsp; Recent exhibitions and screenings have taken place at&nbsp;, New York; Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles; Herald Street, London; Soldes, Los Angeles; the Palestine Festival of Literature, Jerusalem/Ramallah; Larder, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; Brief Histories, New York; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

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Coleman Collins on The Upper Room and Specular Fiction

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.&nbsp; Read all four installments of the series here: , , , and .&nbsp; &nbsp; 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 agency that can be found in the interval when nothing works like it's supposed to? Evan Calder Williams is an associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies for Bard College, where he also teaches in the Human Rights program. He is the author of the books Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and, forthcoming with Sternberg Press, Inhuman Resources. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism and is a Contributing Editor to e-flux journal, as well as a former member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine.

Evan Calder Williams: On Paralysis

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 shots), which he meticulously samples and re-edits to expose an uncanny emptiness underneath. From the hyperreality of photo retouching and digital erasure to the endless repetition of video loops, his mastery of postproduction allows him to magnify the surreal aspects of contemporary existence, where bodies become sites of saturated observation, and violence-as-entertainment flirts with nationalism, religion, and ancient myth. While he also experiments with the format and scale of his works, immersive audiovisual installations often cohabit with portable fetish objects in his exhibitions. Throughout his practice, Pfeiffer seeks to reflect and heighten the existential condition of the viewer as consumer by perversely blurring the boundary between voyeurism and contemplation.

The recent exhibition discussed in this episode, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the MCA Chicago. 

Read a review from e-flux Criticism of Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles by Juliana Halpert.

Anthony Elms organizes exhibitions and writes. He recently organized Rodney McMillian: Neighbors for the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Wa. opening in October 2025. An essay on artist Oliver Ressler, "Ellipsesverse," posts online this fall for Ressler's exhibition Scenes from the Invention of Democracy at the Museum Tinguely. His essay "Begin to begin to begin to begin to begin" is forthcoming in Ecstatic Aperture: Perspectives on the Life and Work of Terry Riley. from Auryfa / Shelter Press.



Paul Pfeiffer, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Anthony Elms

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 what it means to live—and resist—within the contradictions of our time.

Sven Lütticken is an associate professor at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts / PhDArts and he coordinates the research master’s track, Critical Studies in Art and Culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His books include Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Vol. 1 (Sternberg Press, 2022), the critical reader Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022), and States of Divergence (Minor Compositions, 2025).


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Sven Lütticken on States of Divergence

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 Jazeera, he is the author or editor of almost 30 books and hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics—labor and work, urbanism, politics, technology, environmental justice, alternative economics, music, film, TV, art, architecture, and poetry. His articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines as well as in academic and public interest journals, and his books are published by mainstream trade, academic, and independent presses. He has lectured at hundreds of universities and cultural institutions in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Australia. Politically active in many movement fields, he is the co-founder of several groups–Gulf Labor Artists Coalition, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Coalition for Fair Labor, Occupy Student Debt Campaign, Strike Debt, the Debt Collective, and Decolonize This Place—and is an organizer with others, including the American Association of University Professors and the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He also serves on the steering committee of the national network of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

Ross's books include The Weather Report; A Journey Through Unsettled Climates, Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (winner of a Palestine Book Award), Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade–Lessons from Shanghai, Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits, and No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.

Andrew Ross on The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/87/164975/lounge-act-at-thek-lounge/

Wayne Koestenbaum: Lounge Act at Thek Lounge

Conversations with some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today.

e-flux is a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform, and enterprise which was founded in 1998. Its news digest, events, exhibitions, schools, journal, books, and the art projects produced and/or disseminated by e-flux describe strains of critical discourse surrounding contemporary art, culture, and theory internationally. Its monthly publication e-flux journal has produced essays commissioned since 2008 about cultural, political, and structural paradigms that inform contemporary artistic production.