We had the great pleasure of being joined by techno-animist and Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey. We discuss UK Bikelife; commodity fetishism and how trainers and fashion are tokens of class with magic-like attributes; the repertory of spells the left still has against KeK’s Meme Magic; TechGnosis and conspiritualism in the age of Elon Musk. AND Lana Del Rey’s White Dress! You won’t want to miss this!

A series of nine remote screenings, events, and discussions in lieu of IRL gallery programming at Chen’s, a Brooklyn-based gallery directed by Howie Chen and Alex Ito. Chen’s Gallery With this Summer 2020 series, we focus on issues of hegemony, representation, solidarity, and new futures. With the ongoing uprising and the relentless news cycle, we hope to create a space that is communal and restorative by spending time with people whose individual efforts find ways to connect art to the pressing matters of life. We are interested in how Art — as a field of images, abstractions, gestures, ...

Screenings with researcher Bora Erden of SITU Research followed by a discussion focusing on liberatory applications of forensic spatial technology to counter the repression of public assembly. Drawing from three recent projects, the screenings include research on the death of a protestor (‘Euromaidan Event Reconstruction – I.F. Dmytriv case’, Ukraine 2014), dangers and police abuse of tear gas weapons (‘Choking Dissent’ commissioned by Amnesty International), and reconstruction of police violence against BLM protestors at Barclays Center in June. Bora Erden Bora Erden is a spatial researcher with a background in computer vision. At SITU Research, he applies architectural, geospatial and computational techniques to ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has attacked not only our individual bodies, but our collective body as well. Through thirteen contributions by writers who are mostly from former socialist countries where the space of freedom is contracting once again, this special issue of e-flux journal asks what this collective body actually means, and what it has become. These changes are not only happening in Europe’s former socialist countries. Something similar is also occurring in Greece and Turkey, where two essays in the issue originate. This is not to say that all is well elsewhere, that democracy is thriving in Western Europe and North ...

The Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documentspresents a re-enactment of the last big art exhibition in Yugoslavia. Titled Yugoslav Documents ’89, it was curated by the artists Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Rade Tadić and realized under the auspices of the ZOI ’84 Olimpijski centar Skenderija in the 8,000-square-meter Skenderija Center in Sarajevo in 1989. This was surely one of Yugoslavia’s largest exhibitions, if not, indeed, the largest. This re-enactment is interested in Yugoslav Documents primarily because this was the largest exhibition that bore the label “Yugoslav”, a label that, among other things, was meant to strengthen the ideology ...

Berkeley-based writer and co-host of the wildly popular anti-corruption podcast TrueAnon, LIZ FRANCZAK joins New Models for a cathartic reflection on pandemic politics and the pros, cons, and probability of popular revolt. This conversation was recorded March 25th.

Tactical Media employ the ‘tactics of the weak’ to operate on the terrain of strategic power by means of ‘any media necessary’. Once the rather exclusive practice of politically engaged artists and activists, the tactical appropriations of media tools and distribution infrastructures by the disenfranchised and the disgruntled have moved from the margins to centre stage. The explosive growth of mass participation in self-mediation in countless blogs, video sharing platforms, micro-blogging, social networking has created an unprecedented complexity in the info-sphere. While this frenzy of media activity has been heralded as the catalyst of the new democratisation movements in North-Africa and ...

“When all the talk is of who is a real American, it takes courage to ask: who is unreal?” A novelist details how to write the truth under fascism or in so-called democracies—and how to identify those who crave “the status of being a truth teller,” those who decry barbarism and risk nothing. A doctored video and an essay.

Arrancamos un nuevo año con 𝒪𝒩𝒯𝒪ℒ𝒪𝒢ℐ𝒜𝒮 𝒻ℰℳℐ𝒩ℐ𝒮𝒯𝒜𝒮, incendiario colectivo feminista que tanto ha ayudado a navegar las multiples dimensiones de un convulso 2020. Repasamos un poco sus actividades como Santuario Nocturno, Strolling you down, Feeling Raid etc… frenética actividad de relevancia capital para ser capaces de vivir el presente y poder conceptualizar y construir juntos un futuro. Discutimos la precariedad del medio cultural y paraacademico, traperos en la mediana edad y magia memética.

The first issue of Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, published in November 2014, deals with the question of language. The texts written by artists and scholars covere the topics such as the symbols of fascism, the theory of slogans, the rhetoric of punk, ideologies of artistic research, etc. Among the contributors to the first issue are John Roberts, Alexei Yurchak, Susan Kelly, Kalle Lampela, Michel Chevalier, Minna Henriksson, and others.

Hamzah, a car mechanic in Cairo, sets his eyes on a beautiful leather jacket. In the turmoil of the demon­strations around Tahrir Square, he goes onto a quest into the big shopping mall Arkadia. This narration about the every-day life of working class people in the Egyptian capital is the title story from the short collection Season of Migration to Arkadia by the Egyptian writer Muhammad Aladdin. It is regarded as one of the five best literary works about the Egyptian revolution.

Newly published by ROMA Publications in a yearly format, this inaugural issue of The Serving Library Annual is realised in collaboration with Public Fiction, a journal and exhibition-maker based in Los Angeles. Public Fiction’s next project, which runs broadly concurrent to this new Annual’s lifespan, is named The Conscientious Objector — a multifaceted endeavour commissioned by West Hollywood City Council that unfurls in parts from September 2017 to April 2018. These bulletins have been conceived as one part: they deal with acts of civil disobedience and other forms of resistance, particularly in view of the relationship between entertainment and power. Contributors ...