e-flux podcast

Ghostly Int. Live at Bar Laika by e-flux for Playback:

Playback with Ghostly International label founder Sam Valenti IV (DJ SV4), plays a selections from the record label’s vinyl releases.

Ghostly International is a record label that started as a collective known for electronic music out of Ann Arbor, MI, and has grown to an internationally recognized platform for the work of some of the world’s singular musicians, visual artists, and designers. Ghostly’s music—as with all of its artistic pursuits—straddles stylistic divisions, carving out space where sounds and ideas can cavort without inhibition or category.

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 003 feat. Ghostly Int. Live

eclectic vinyl mix from A-1 Records recorded live at Bar Laika

Playback 007 feat. A-1 Records

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

McKenzie Wark on her essay, "My Collectible Ass," published in the 85th issue of e-flux journal, October 2017.&nbsp;In conversation with journal editor Stephen Squibb. 

Read the essay: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156418/my-collectible-ass/
Subscribe to the podcast via itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mckenzie-wark-on-fate-art-collecting-in-digital-age/id1332021431?i=1000399156007&mt=2

McKenzie Wark on the fate of art collecting in the digital age

Vivian Ziherl&nbsp;discusses her curatorial platform Frontier Imaginaries&nbsp;on the occasion of&nbsp;TOXIC ASSETS: Frontier Imaginaries Ed.No3&nbsp;at e-flux, Columbia University, and UnionDocs in October 2017. In conversation with journal editor Brian Kuan Wood. 

Watch day one of TOXIC ASSETS on e-flux film & video: http://www.e-flux.com/video/167822/toxic-assets-nbsp-frontier-imaginaries-ed-no3-at-e-flux-and-columbia-university-day-1/
"The Fourfold Articulation" in e-flux journal #81, April 2017: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/126968/the-fourfold-articulation/
Subscribe via itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vivian-ziherl-on-frontier-imaginaries-toxic-assets/id1332021431?i=1000399960426&mt=2

Vivian Ziherl on Frontier Imaginaries, Toxic Assets, and The Fourfold Articulation

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 (http://www.e-flux.com/journal/): 

"Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories" from issue 81, April 2017
"Geontologies: The Figures and the Tactics" from issue 78, December 2016

Elizabeth A. Povinelli on the four axioms of critical theory

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&nbsp;(February 2018).&nbsp;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.&nbsp;

Immortality for all: Anton Vidokle on cosmism

Zach Blas in conversation with Laurel Ptak, Art in General's Executive Director &amp; Curator, on the occasion of Blas's exhibition&nbsp;Contra-Internet&nbsp;at Art in General and his lecture-performance&nbsp;Metric Mysticism&nbsp;at e-flux. 

Zach Blas&nbsp;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 http://www.artingeneral.org/exhibitions/650

Read Zach Blas' essay in e-flux journal #74 (June 2016): "Contra-Internet" http://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59816/contra-internet/

Contra-Internet with Zach Blas and Laurel Ptak

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.

Masha Gessen on how to survive an autocracy

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.

Masha Gessen on how to survive an autocracy

e-flux

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