May events

This May at e-flux, we look forward to readings, screenings, talks, and a performance featuring Luis Camnitzer, Coco Fusco, Leo Goldsmith, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, and Naeem Mohaiemen; Wallabout Film Festival 2025; Charles Tonderai Mudede; Joyce Joumaa and Danae Io, with Ariana Kalliga; Marina Otero Verzier; Akira Mizuta Lippit; Anthony McCall and Jeff Preiss; Viktor Timofeev with Ericka Beckman; work by Derek Jarman and by Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi. At Bar Laika, we are pleased to host the next two editions of Playback, listening events featuring RVNG Intl. and Gryphon Rue.

Thursday, May 1, 2025, 7pm
Consulting the Index: Readings from e-flux Index #5
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Join us at e-flux for a night of readings and presentations emerging from the fifth issue of e-flux’s new quarterly print publication, e-flux Index. For the occasion, we are delighted to welcome Luis Camnitzer, Coco Fusco, Leo Goldsmith, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, and Naeem Mohaiemen. They will each expand upon their contributions to issue 5 of the Index, covering the increasingly technocratic role of STEM in education, the aporias of cultural politics in contemporary Cuba, the investigative images of Harun Farocki, the bureaucratic “paper language” of George Maciunas’ Fluxus administration analyzed in the new book by Coby Chamberlain,  and the authoritarian dream of enforcing “shothik itihash” (correct history) in Bangladesh. This event will be hosted by e-flux Index editor George MacBeth. Read more here.

Saturday, May 3, 2025, 3pm
Wallabout Film Festival 2025
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Wallabout Film Festival is curated annually by an interdisciplinary group of Pratt students who spend the semester examining the history and theory behind film festivals and learning the practical tools required to put on a public-facing festival. Under the guidance of a professor, the course culminates in the Wallabout Film Festival, planned and organized by the students. e-flux Screening Room is pleased to host day one of Wallabout Film Festival 2025, comprising a screening of experimental and artist-made student films curated for e-flux Screening Room, a panel discussion with select filmmakers, and special remarks from the festival organizers. A reception will follow. Read more about the day one program at e-flux here, and find details on the festival schedule as a whole here.

Wednesday, May 7, 2025, 6pm
Bar Laika presents Playback 0012 with RVNG Intl.
For the twelfth edition of Playback, Bar Laika welcomes RVNG Intl. for an evening of play-throughs of new albums from Satomimagae, The Vernon Spring, and Repetition Repetition, alongside upcoming test pressings of unreleased music from RVNG and Freedom To Spend, and some other surprises. RVNG Intl. is an NYC institution that operates on few but fortified principles, supporting forward-reaching and thinking artists. This support has manifested in over one hundred “original” releases, the label’s intergenerational and contemporary collaboration series, FRKWYS and Reflections, career spanning anthologies for pioneering musicians, and as programming for backyard and international stages. Read more here.

Thursday, May 8, 2025, 7pm
Charles Tonderai Mudede, “What Can We Learn From Black Robots?”
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Following up to his lecture “Will AI Also Remember the Days of Slavery?” in winter 2024, Charles Mudede returns to e-flux with a lecture titled “What Can We Learn From Black Robots?” Mudede writes: “It is without question that the most profound episode of the science fiction anthology Electric Dreams (Amazon Studios’ attempt to replicate, in 2018, the success of Netflix’s Black Mirror) is ‘Autofac.’ There are several reasons for this, the main of which is the robot played by the pop star Janelle Monae. She plays Alice, a customer service robot for a corporation that in many ways resembles the one that produced the TV series. But what makes Alice exceptional, and what adds unusual depth to ‘Autofac,’ is precisely Monae’s color: black. The racial history of the US means a black robot cannot be a mere robot. It adds another enigma. We sense something deeper in this figure, and, as it turns out, even explosive. We can learn a lot from the black robot Jeff Bezos paid to create. And when we combine Alice with the exo-terrestrial black machines we find in Sondra Perry’s work, we can finally appreciate what Grace Jones meant when she sang: ‘Don’t cry, it’s only the rhythm.’” Read more here.

Monday, May 12, 2025, 6pm
Bar Laika presents Playback 0013 with Gryphon Rue
Join us at Bar Laika for the thirteenth edition of Playback, featuring Gryphon Rue. The artist and composer of electro-acoustic music will present his latest full-length album, I Keep My Diamond Necklace in a Pond of Sparkling Water—“recorded in the forests and fields around the former bungalow colony deep in the Catskills, where the yipping of coyotes or a chorus of spring peepers is warped and wound around pulsing rhythms born from bowed chimes, singing saws, bowed electric bass, flutes, synths and gongs.” Read more here.

Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 7pm
The Sun is Burning the Unspoken: Joyce Joumaa and Danae Io
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This screening program stages a dialogue between two artists who use film and video to approach infrastructure and landscape as being subject to interruption and inscription by larger historical forces. Presenting films shot in Lebanon and Greece respectively, the screening does not attempt to map one context onto another. Rather, it aims to reveal the connecting threads that run through both artists’ engagements with the contemporary realities of land, agriculture, and infrastructure. Join us for “The Sun is Burning the Unspoken,” featuring Mutable Cycles II (2024) by Joyce Joumaa, alongside Seven Types of Dust (2023) and Sprouts of a Dragon’s Teeth (2023) by Danae Io. The screenings will be followed by a conversation with the artists, moderated by Ariana Kalliga. This program is co-presented with CCS Bard in conjunction with the group exhibition Mutable Cycles, curated by Kalliga at the Hessel Museum of Art. Read more here.

Thursday, May 15, 2025, 7pm
Marina Otero Verzier, “When Pixels Wash Ashore”
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This lecture by Marina Otero Verzier will analyze the case of Tuvalu and its plans to become a fully virtual and digitized nation. Amid the unraveling of worlds, the possibility of Tuvalu’s digital twin opens questions on how to address the fragility of environments and communities, their care, custodianship, preservation and eventual loss in the face of the climate catastrophe. Otero will delve into the inherent tension between digital custodianship and the unsustainable practices of the data storage industry and explore notions of preservation, proliferation, and decay. Presented as part of e-flux Architecture Lectures. Read more here.

Tuesday, May 20, 2025, 7pm
Under the “Eye of the Sun” (ekleipsis): A Talk by Akira Mizuta Lippit
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In this talk, Akira Mizuta Lippit will consider eclipses as a trope for theorizing cinema. What occurs during an eclipse—solar or lunar—and what are its effects, both actual and imagined? Why have eclipses held such enduring sway over the human imagination across history? A part of an early-stage inquiry, this talk will move from a reflection on eclipses as planetary and light phenomena, to their effects on time—particularly the way they disturb the balance between day and night. En route to imagining a planetary cinema, it also considers translation and the myth of the Tower of Babel. Ultimately, the talk seeks to explore the light effects produced by eclipses—specifically, the penumbra, a dark within dark, and the line at the edge of darkness (shadows)—as phenomena that might illuminate a primordial, elemental, and perhaps even universal myth of the founding of cinema. Presented as part the ongoing lecture series “Film Beyond Film: Art and the Moving Image” at e-flux Screening Room. Read more here.

Thursday, May 22, 2025, 7pm
Jeff Preiss and Anthony McCall: Beckoning Cats and Five Minute Drawing
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e-flux is pleased to present a collaborative screening and live performance by Jeff Preiss and Anthony McCall. The evening opens with the premiere of Beckoning Cats (2025), a new film by Preiss created specifically for this occasion. An homage to Chris Marker, Beckoning Cats reflects on an anonymous shrine discovered outside Light Industry in Brooklyn on August 26, 2016—twenty-eight days after Marker’s death. Following the screening, the program continues with a reimagined performance: the eighth iteration of Anthony McCall’s Five Minute Drawing, first performed in 1974. McCall’s precisely choreographed live drawing unfolds alongside Preiss’s real-time documentary projection—an orchestration of filmed gestures and reworked imagery drawn from their earlier collaboration at Orchard Gallery’s final exhibition in 2008. Together, the artists construct a layered temporal structure in which past and present are superimposed, expanding the documentary mode into a poetics of re-staging. Read more here.

Tuesday, May 27, 2025, 7pm
Stairway to Melon: Works by Viktor Timofeev
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“Stairway To Melon” presents six works by Viktor Timofeev created between 2015 and 2024, each exploring the poetics and structures of rule-based systems. Spanning cinematic works made in game engines, experimental alphabets, performative simulations, and collaborative drawing sessions, the program traces a throughline in Timofeev’s practice: a sustained interest in how does functioning of systems—linguistic, algorithmic, or behavioral—impacts one’s agency and govern expression. Following the screening, Timofeev will be joined by artist and filmmaker Ericka Beckman to discuss cinematic worldmaking, generative aesthetics, and abstraction as a method of reconfiguring systems of meaning. Read more here.

Thursday, May 29, 2025, 7pm
Economies of Love. Part 3: Sensing Body
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The third installment of the Economies of Love series, this screening considers how film gives form to embodied experience—through image or its absence, through rhythm, sound, and the sense of duration. In Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), made as he was losing his sight to AIDS-related illness, Jarman dispenses with the image altogether, composing a monochrome field of International Klein Blue over which voice and sound trace the contours of his body in decline. The film’s visual austerity intensifies sensory perception, transforming the screen into a space for imagining the limits of one’s bodily connection to others. Ren Ebel and Laida Lertxundi’s In a Nearby Field (2023), by contrast, is filmed from within daily life: created with their young daughter, Ebel and Lertxundi integrate domestic actions—learning, naming, holding—into the act of filmmaking that itself appears as part of the broader web of life. Whether in voicing what’s impermanent, or in imaging saturated entanglements, both films present a distinct way of giving form to the sense of body: one suspended at the threshold of disappearance, the other filled with the presence of becoming. Read more here.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our Events mailing list here.

For more information about programs at e-flux, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com; for information about Playback at Bar Laika, contact laika [​at​] e-flux.com.