Karimah Ashadu 

aaajiao

Kobby Adi

Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Dara Birnbaum

Zheng Bo

Nate Boyce

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Tony Cokes

Stephanie Comilang

Alex Da Corte

Jeremy Deller

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Rei Hayama

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

AKI INOMATA

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Eisa Jocson

Joan Jonas

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Tang Kwok-Hin

Quỳnh Lâm

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Amy Lien

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Takeshi Murata

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

Thao Nguyen Phan

Wong Ping

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Ingrid Pollard

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Kobby Adi & Nina Porter

Walid Raad

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph

James Richards

Robert Sandler

Aki Sasamoto

Jacolby Satterwhite

Shimabuku

Tiffany Sia

Julian Simmons

P. Staff

Angela Su

Martine Syms

Kenneth Tam

Maria Taniguchi

Luke Willis Thompson

Rirkrit Tiravanija

 (2023) is a short video that cohabits the complex realms of the artist’s sculptural and installation works. Over a series of largely depopulated scenes – a bedroom, an empty swimming pool, a backyard and other snowy vistas – we hear a voice-over repeatedly set the scene for a would-be play, each a dizzying revision that replaces the last. Here we discuss Marten’s impetus for making the film, her reasons to be merciless when making an artwork, and the need to talk about the weather.



, I was taken by the voice-over, read by Gwendoline Christie, which describes a process of the excision of body parts – of cutting off a leg, an arm and removing innards. It seems you want to begin by throwing out the body.




This text is excerpted from a chapter in Roger Caillois’ book 

 (1961) that describes the social function of games. It recounts a dystopic Inuit game of cup-and-ball, where a single participant is disguised as a schematically stylized animal – a fish or a bear – and ‘stabbed’ many times by countless friends engaged in playing the game. The highly specific nature of the play means that each mode of attack, the positioning of the knife in the hand, the rhythmic move towards the act of stabbing must be performed with the correct gesture and in the correct order; if the participant fails in this replication of given movements, the knife is passed to the next player. Throughout the actions of attack and withdrawal, the player with the knife must narrate the story of a journey or a hunt, enumerating each of the phases of attack and dismemberment. The player is free to envisage beyond animal prey, occasionally substituting the proxy ‘animal’ player into the dialogue and weaponizing the attack upon the friend in costume: I beat 

head. The dialogue that Caillois recounts is so abrupt, so distinctly unadorned in its literal linguistic tone, but the parsing of the actions themselves is tender and specific to the degree of total mania: 

 folds the skin in half, soaks it in urine, dries it in the sun

 I love the idea that within the pathology of a social death or excoriation, there are multiple speeds of revelation: that within the refrain of total violence, there is equally tactile specificity and instinct for preservation. I found the whole constellation fascinating, imagining that the use of animals as prey within the format of the game is something of an eccentric surplus, a kind of cute security function (like a notation) that permits social violence at a soft remove. I imagined the replication of this text within the video as a prologue, a cataloguing of a very specific emptying out of literally depicted figuration. The final words – 

the pieces for the dogs, the dogs eat – 

are algorithmic in the sense of having reduced the human physicality to zero – a subtraction – whilst offering a digestive filling – an addition – to the roaming animals forthcoming. The text is a portent of sorts, theatre in a diagrammatic and deliberate mode, but absolute abstraction too, if considering a system for quantifying pleasure.


The film shows a series of depopulated habitats that codes as a generic suburban North American town, including a vacated home and barn surrounded by woodland. Contours of lives are felt but not made visible. A sense of unease is underscored by the strike of a pensive piano chord and occasional digital brush of sound. What led you to want to make these environments for this film?



The score is brilliantly composed by Beatrice Dillon, using physical modelling synthesis combined with live piano and clarinet sequences. The sound terms of such a method of composition enable the building of certain hypothetical ‘spaces’ and reciprocal ‘instigators’, such that you can invent the tonal quality of both the receiving environment and the tool that activates it: a shape made of lead struck by an object made of glass wrapped in leather, for instance. The approach is radically expansive, but of course the sonic delivery of the score does not itemize the ingredients. This type of hyper-specificity is also important to each of the environments of the video. Every scene unfolds with an incredible amount of detail – the wooden remnant texture and number of holes excavated in a concrete wall; the slump and quantity of snow on a branch; the positioning of planks and stones on a burnt-out car. Each of these details is pre-drawn in ink, plotted by me in endless written descriptions and animation cel sheets. I’m interested in this spatial paradox of absurdly laboured detail existing in a suspended state, piled up until it almost negates itself to emptiness. The cognitive dissonance is extreme because these are all plausible environments – both domestically and as part of a ruptured capture of nature – but they are exactly nowhere. Of course there are inferences, and these are important too, but the gesturing is miscellaneous and changing rather than precisely underlined. And this simulation exists also in multiple dimensions because the literal substance we are crafting is a treachery, the ghost matter of CGI. Akin to the opening prologue, the dissection of parts is both overarchingly swift – the generic blanketing of snow – but sadistically controlled: the arrangement of objects on a table, how each falls into a geometrically gridded, diagram-like experiential traffic. These are careful instigations of overlap. And snow, too, like a white tablecloth, like an empty page, is a flirtatiously invitational plane.



Rather than encountering your own depictions of humans, we see the appearance of people or bodies through the quotation of other artists’ works, for example Gustave Courbet’s 

 (1933), alongside a more pornographic-type image pinned to a clothes line and flapping in the breeze. It is perhaps no accident that in two of these images we are looking at a vulva. Could you say something about the selection of these artworks?



I love this question! Each of the images belongs to a varying scale of unabashed perversity and indulgence. The Courbet is shorthand and universal. The pubic hair, the opened thighs are radically present and dense, but the body is dimensionally cropped in the manner of a bizarre amputation: there are no full limbs to mobilize the prowess of this implied female shape, so the body instead is inferred as a supplicant, a kind of ambiguous votive vessel to the be fucked and filled on repetitive terms that do not belong to the woman herself. Of course the title implicates both crassly and with wonder, but ultimately the image-vulva belongs to a domain of male structural power. The controversy of Balthus is his erotic fixation on young girls, but this abject complication leads to some very provocative painterly subversions. 

is paired in the video with a second Balthus painting, 

 (1955). The centralized graphic protagonist of 

 is an entirely white-clad and face-obscured baker/decorator carrying a wooden plank. The symbolism is fervent: the man totally unspecific, de-facialized, but radically phallic in his kinetic posture – the plank is diagonally elongated and upright in intent! In pairing the images side by side, I have deliberately rescaled the naked child to the same size as the mercantile man. They are newly equivalent forms. What’s interesting between them is the corruption of detail: the child figure may be completely naked, but she is highly stylized, softened to the degree of becoming only a few slight curve inflections, more like an economically moulded piece of bone than actual radiant flesh. She is an absent and unparticipating figure; the mantel she stands before becomes another surrogate and densely decorative vulva. The street scene in contrast is impressively detailed and painstakingly choreographed, such that every bodily interaction is an attentive part of highly mobile scenography.

In making a simple size analogy between the figures, the parity between male and pubescent child is staggeringly unhinged; terminologies of desire are sublimated beneath algorithmic painterly tricks: geometric forms that offer vectors and holes of flight. The pornography is equally removed, rendered in black and white as a photograph, but with none of the wet pleasure-warmth of any kind of sex. The bodies are once again cropped so they are part of an abstract figuration rather than pure depiction. In all cases, the images have been manipulated in CGI to appear as on paper – fly-posted, pasted to walls, blowing in the breeze. There is a recasting of historicized painting as deliberately causal, excerpted imagery, as casually snipped Jpegs. The historicizing intent has been stripped out, with each image not an icon but part of a poor relegation. The simple answer to this question would be that as bodies, we are all mad particles, raggedly sacks and a collection of small holes in continual mobile use; but the penetrative power in meaning and metaphor alike is continually rearranging. The more complicated answer is likely an avalanche of gender or sexuality marginalization and exploitation.

An occasional light wind animates sequences, while in other moments other seasons, rain or fire takes a prominent role; at other points we become aware in a shift in daylight. These more abstract forms of animation seem to hold fascination – it feels as if you are drawing our attention to the way moments and sequences of experience are in fact indirectly ordered by outside conditions.



, there is a deliberate reckoning of the world as complicit in a type of innate ‘languaging’, whereby all interactions of matter, in a default atomic way, are part of the mobile wonder of the universe: all pieces of all things scattered and overlapping in infinite combinations of tactile exchange. This premise is reliant on the idea of a default mode of forming grammar – rhythms and punctuation – from object overlap, from sound, from structure, from metaphor, and thus creating new vehicles of meaning into which bodies and conditions plunge themselves: a kind of Newtonian action and reaction clause. Birds take flight, accumulate and land, their silhouettes becoming punctuation and rhythm like notes on a music score. Wind is myth and temperament. Weather is analogous as a personal emotional barometer – the nuanced intensities of apathy or bodily dissatisfaction – but it is also social code and distraction. We talk about weather colloquially to disguise discomfort or alleviate social fatigue. Time, here, then, is perhaps not meant as pulse or metronomic speed but as more physical span or length – the space between 

 – but not something segmented like a ruler where portions are literal, but something mythic and encompassing, with the possibility of even and uneven behaviour, like a tree or a bush. The weather is conceptual instigator: beautiful; glacially erratic.


In one striking scene we see a deer that appears shot, its mouth bloody, while a drawing of a deer is lodged under the animal; an iPhone and a paper cut-out in the shape of a snowflake rest on its side as a more realistically rendered snow falls from above. Do you see your work as producing or commenting upon forms of dissociation that otherwise linger or are hidden in today’s dizzying material world?



I don’t see them as dissociation, but more an optimistic, wilful defiance. The dead deer is a literal bleeding animal, but the accumulation of parts atop its body are not composed for the convenience of presentation, rather they belong to the reality of our throbbing human insatiability. Pleasure taken and pleasure abandoned. The iPhone and the paper snowflake are loaded motifs, metaphor and analogy alike – they are 

 – but they are equally humble and shorthand. There is a powerful, refined stillness to the deer, despite its evidently draining prowess, to even offer itself as a tablet upon which to host these items – a collusion in the sacrilege of desecration that triumphs as a kind of elegiac clarity. The phone is replaced at times by ribbons, by oranges and lemons, by an owl that lands to post vigil – the symbolism is hefty. But there is absolutely no irony to this circulation of objects. The deer is the mystical avatar of unplottable realms of language or speech as the spectre. It is also desperate romanticism, unreasonable silence, passionate absurdity – love and shame conjoined.



We tend to think of the descriptive role of language as additive, as if we are endlessly refining the realms of the sensory and what is observed or thought. However, it doesn’t come as a surprise when the sentence ‘Mathematics is a major category’ is firmly uttered by the voice-over – given that one often feels when watching this film that one is in the realm of a visual and linguistic play of subtraction and addition. Indeed, there is even the use of homonyms of ‘nun’ and ‘deer’ to imagine a calculus of objects culminating as something both expensive and voided.



 became an important guide. The book speaks about complicated and fanatic systems of quantifying pleasure, the social function of games and performance, the corruption of intoxication, chance, competition and all manner of other strangeness. There is a refrain in the script, repeated numerous times: 

butterfly, plus elephant, plus cat, plus dead man, plus sailor, plus nun equals deer

. This text is taken from the Caillois book.

 I love the abstract absurdity of this surrogation or simulation – how a simple mathematical term is used as illustrative metaphor – with the animal as a cipher for a known quantity that is both its libidinal self and also a number or a recognizable graphic form. The text and the characters within it are constantly moving in and out of disguise, like putting on masks, or allowing themselves to be rigged, as though part of an analogue puppet show. The very logic of the script is that it follows a singular voice – the ‘I’ – that is aware of its participation in a theatrical event. This voice sometimes splits into ‘we’ and the control is shared, but disembodied. The whole text is deeply meta, a play within a play, within a play. The theatre of theatre! The voice-over is melancholic and solipsistic, but it also performs: the audience is privy to and must engage with both the images of the performance and the mechanics of it.

From the Caillois book, I learnt about a kind of bingo (

) played in Brazil and a form of ‘Chinese charades’ (

) played in Cuba. These games are fully life-encompassing organizations of betting and ritualistic performance. They illustrate the relationships between chance and superstition: money, animals, favours, objects – all change hands and become significant for gambling outcomes. The games are both a social and theoretical lottery (they are predisposed to corruption and the whim of the ceremonial organizers) but they also involve intense calculations and mathematic risk. Animals are given quantities and numbers, and the signs and concordance of the games are adopted into daily life: for instance, a child, instead of adding 2 + 9 + 3 = 14, will add something like the refrain: 

butterfly plus elephant plus cat plus whore plus peacock equals grave

. The terms are fantastical and gorgeous but lodged within a very specific and nuanced logic. The convolution is instead a form of shorthand, a pictographic means of rapid communication. In 

 there are 36 animal (and object) terms, and each is superimposed onto a corresponding body part (see diagram). There are 36 ‘chapters’ in my spoken script, and every animal, item or adjective used within the game is incorporated into the script’s text (and likewise the video’s visuals). Every part is accounted for, even if fleetingly, so the summation of parts belongs to a pre-existing circuitry. This is wildly exhilarating to me – the idea of inflicting panic or uncertainty on an otherwise lucid mind via complex diagrammatic games where the very substance of living becomes like a more embellished version of roulette.

Further, do you view the material construction of adding and subtracting material in your ‘sculptural’ gallery work differently from that of filmic or linguistic worlds?



It’s all a similar obsession – the continual möbius of image and language that is not binary, but operationally polyvocal; that ever speaks to root, to outline, to surface, to logic, but equally to temperature and speed and knot. Word-forms litter dozens of compound image-forms in their wake and vice versa. The exquisite miracle of this is a refusal of stillness, the dynamic reminder that when one thing touches another, this contextual proximity and possibility for structural rhyme shifts identities in space. A continual, perpetual engine.



I’m also interested in the durational aspect of both the book and filmic forms and how they often employ editors, a job often viewed as producing a ‘subtractive’ element or a ‘cut’ – it’s also a labour that is often rarely examined in the processes of production. Of course, I have an interest in this subject, but I wondered what your thoughts on editors might be – whether you use one or not?



For my fictional writing, yes, I use an editor – I have a literary agent and my novel was edited and generally recomposed in deep collaboration with the publisher. And likewise for my essayistic writing, but less so. For the videos, I make the editing decisions, the cuts, sequencing myself. Somebody wrote in the context of my work recently, ‘even Gertrude Stein had an editor’, which I found both hilarious and hurtful because its angry cynicism entirely missed the operative devotion! And equally the pleasure.

Your writing takes on a certain schematic way of parsing meaning – there is often a repeating of an opening phrase of a sentence, such as ‘I am’ or ‘What is’. With each repetition we try and construct a set of relations between things, but they ultimately and playfully seem to undo any given order of relations – at least in any obvious way. It is as if you use these kinds of schemata to enable descriptive words to become unmoored from their functioning use in a sentence, placing us somewhere materially odd. Sometimes this can feel almost suffocating, like wanting to take a breath back to some cognitive order – indeed, even the voice-over reminds herself to take a breath. Could you talk a little about how you conceptualize listing in your writing?



All words seek to rove and migrate, with their phonetic structures offering rules to be manipulated or stylized. Language incorporates whilst simultaneously being dislodged from concrete signifiers. The way a word is formed by the lips as languorous or repetitive, spiky or dripping thus shifts the first legibility of its register by the ear, then the mind’s eye. The circuitry is dialled up or down, guided by both motivated language modelling and social arbitrariness. The same is true for material, and its implementation over shape and space. Meaning is held and then kicked away. There are deliberate edges and shadow carriers in those gaps. The list could be thought of as a tactic of calculated expansion – a rapid means of pushing things together, but also, by virtue of the spoken or typographic format, creating productive gaps in which exponential newness arises. We are dealing with already laden discursive indexes, because language and its corresponding world-substances are ancient. They are baggage. And the list is a means of temporarily containing this elasticity. I love Lucy Ellmann’s 

 (2019) because it is exactly this kind of knowing expansion – a literal run-on of incidence and emotive flirtations that harbour all manner of semantic pathologies and therefore irritations. The list is a formal conundrum in this sense, because on first glimpse it is expedience, but what it actually tethers is sublime density. And I suppose that is the grand metaphor of contemporaneity: we have become masters of generating skins to rename objects, to falsely instil volume on emptiness and to reactivate substance with a glib performativity.



I remember hearing you describe, several years ago at the opening of your show at the Serpentine, how the process between drawing your work in CAD and its physical rendering for a gallery space is merciless in its translation – meaning that there is little alteration in the transference between two- and three-dimensional realms. I had never heard the word merciless ever used in the context of making art before – I wonder if you still feel the same way about the process between drawing and making?



Ha! Yes! I still think making of all kinds is merciless, but that mercilessness also accrues a delirious aggregation of pleasure. It’s not an uncomplicated satisfaction, but it isn’t merciless in the mode of masochism, either! I recently wrote about a friend’s work and described the process of a painter’s desire to conflate visual-linguistic operations as comedically akin to the cannibal or serial killer – a looped transcript of obsessive slicing and sticking back together again. There is some facetiousness here, but also genuine intent in the idea of finding the generative through pleasurable mess – through error, through distortion, through forcing your way between translation and towards something 

. Drawing is hugely important to me: drawing for actual works on paper, drawing to diagram, drawing to sketch, and drawing to catch and to catalogue. Drawing also as a kind of listing. I use it in very different speeds. What I meant about the ‘merciless’ translation between CAD space and real space is the deception of labour – there is so much ruthless detail and planning involved, and when something’s inherent material language is part of the hermetic process of fabrication, that is often simply not legible to an audience. Ask most people how any object on the table in front of them is made and they will be unable to break down even a few stages of the mechanics of its arrival in the world. It is fascinating to me to understand how that knowledge can be wielded and sublimated, how you can use the audibility of process at many different levels. The mercilessness I speak about is also to say that nothing is arbitrary. Each component belongs to a beginning intent that is held and carried through to the end. Of course, intuitive mannerisms occur, accident occurs, but the parts and their 

 moments are really defined right at the beginning.



You have mentioned the writing of Bernard Tschumi and his architectural treatise 

, dating from the late 1970s. The writing quite radically considers time, event and motion in relation to architecture, and his observation that ‘when spaces and events are functionally independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which no architectural considerations depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another’, seemed somehow prescient here.

 I’m interested in this idea of indifference and how your work seems to generate unexpected frictions, or bring things into play that are otherwise unrelated. Tschumi’s quote also brings to mind the high modernism of the gallery model itself – personally, I don’t view your work as functionally independent of or indifferent to the spaces it inhabits during the course of an exhibition, but I wondered what your thoughts might be here?

I love Tschumi’s writing and thinking, but I agree with you that the characterization of indifference might equally miss the idea of a given site’s contemporary flexibility, its multiple readings. Tschumi’s preoccupations somehow set the idea of the ‘state’ model and the ‘family’ or domestic model crashing together under conditions that restore primacy to the fixed concepts of form, measurement and mathematics: phobia and function. I’m totally into that idea, because it is part of architecture’s invitation to engage with its crassly symbolic persuasions. But there is definitely a whiff of heteronormativity in his writings that especially misses the energetic nuances of social or spatial queerness. Tschumi understands how to invent volumes that simultaneously constitute assurance and nefarious exploit. I also love that. I think 

 is a radically inspirational text. To imagine that a bench or a bush might be explicitly responsible for, or a reportable witness to, a suicide or a crime is an eccentric principle, but it also describes the radical overlap of the world’s addictively rhyming energies. He diagrams public space into the private space in a method that produces theatrical grammar akin to novelistic writing. Personally, when I am making work, its site-specificity is important because it necessitates on a very basic level how symbols can be manipulated or excerpted. I often mirror parts of a building within the work itself – conceptual markers of literal compass points; windows; the floor plan of walls projecting theoretically upwards and retranslated into the layout of other works, for example. So yes, I think space and logic belong to the same type of transcript, but you can dial in and out of their respective visibilities.



I guess not unrelated here is also Sara Ahmed’s writing on use, and the deliberate provocation of misuse as a way to queer or interrupt normative patterns of relations. Do you see your writing as producing different desiring arrangements?



Definitely! I always think about how the primary operative index of a tool, for instance, is male-dominated – the historicized function of it belongs with total and unflinching hegemony to the patriarchy. I think it is interesting that subculture and queerness has coopted that masculinity. The possibilities of utility fracturing out to adoption by unapologetic sexuality, by kitsch or generative pornography is beautiful. I think my work absolutely has a commitment to queerness that is not necessarily about a political positioning of gender or sexuality, but about the methods of 

 that allow a tonal kind of shading to appear in both words and materials. That ‘shading’ is the pertinent point – the degree by which anything chooses to become visible. And that visibility may also come unannounced or unlocatable, and that is part of the inexhaustibility of creating plural content. I think this idea of deliberate misuse might also be why animals so frequently appear in my work – the bestial apocalypse!

 observation of someone 'feeling' themselves ‘becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put’, seems somehow relevant when looking at your work.

 Or least it came to my mind when viewing your films, not least the vertiginous sense of the constructed digital image and the emptiness beyond what has been coded.



I love Caillois. Imagine the end of a human form as darkness, and thus dust. Fittingly, dust is the antithesis to the digital realm. In theory it is everything technology detests, but in reality it gathers on everything, on all our devices, our structural preservations, so there is an uncomfortable if not inevitable coupling. In making digital animation, the beginning process is in some ways comparable to sweeping a surface – clearing the counter for action. Layering skins and light in an algorithmic precision of tool adoption that is actually incredibly fleshy, creating renders in CGI involves deftness of movement. There’s rigging and calculation, so a deeply tactile, hand-skilled nod to traditional set design or model making. In piecing everything together, there is a haptic intensity to the physical labour, but this is a quality that is completely stripped out once the image is rendered. The final look of digital animation is seamlessly gorgeous, terrifying, airless. It is impossible to look around the corners, to judge the temperature. It is as if in the process of compiling, of cutting, editing and re-sampling, there’s a forcing of breath (of life!) into image. And then with each sealing off of the layers, of smoothing out the curves and filling in the weights with texture, colour or light, these breaths become sharper and sharper. The more realistic the digital becomes, the more restricted its breathing, until there is no space for excess air beyond the shell of the render. So, paradoxically, the more gorgeous and impenetrable a digital image becomes, the more brutal a set of masks it suggests, and the less life it lets in. The animation is impossibly lifeless, but incredulously animated. This is long-established fact in digital processing.

Notes

Biographies 

Writing A Play (dark blue orchard)

screening

Kick drum pattern, hi-hat sequence, ‘the bass is pulsing through’. Disco! Too much work. The picket line! Bad news. Evan Ifekoya’s 2014 video work 

 sends mixed signals. The disco ball is already spinning with gusto – and it’s still being made, by hand, from scratch. Archival footage of people bouncing through the tail end of the twentieth century is interspersed with close-ups of manual labour and Facebook timelines that look threateningly contemporary. The form of the work is clearly 

, but casually so: the artist-as-pop-star starring in it, played by Ifekoya themselves, has too much going on to really be bothered.

, like the best tracks in the genre, stems from the sequencing of several disparate historical layers: there are of course the glitzy 1980s colour schemes, MTV-era conventions, geometrical outfit choices. Part of this zeitgeist is sampled from found footage collected in the Prelinger archive, a collection dedicated precisely to ephemeral moving images of everyday life that would otherwise fly under the historical radar. On another level, however, this revival feels specific to a particular era of the internet that is also already historical: the beat is imbued with a bounce specific to the types of electroclash that emerged from pirated music production software in the 2000s; the montage style has gloriously goofy iMovie undertones. In a 2018 essay for 

, Ifekoya writes: ‘The way I relate to music today is the result of having had access to the internet from a young age.’

 They cite the magical anonymity of online forums, the ‘infinite libraries’ of Napster and Soulseek as templates for how they began to live with sound. In 2014, of course, thisversion of onlineness, its thrills of social experimentation and DIY cultural production, its promise of new political forms, had 

 mostly vanished into monetization, giving way to the addictive bombardment of bad news that has since been cutting into global attention spans. But in 

, a faint echo of internet optimism can at least still be constructed through sampling, in this case, through disco. If one could certainly come across a tonally similar, if less poignant, music video spoof on TikTok now, we can’t even access 

 is full of, by way of nostalgia anymore.

In a similar vein, when Ifekoya goes, ‘all these bad news on my Twitter feed’: what registered as 

 in 2014? As a decade sits awkwardly in the uncanny valley between not-the-present-anymore and not-quite-yet-history, one might have to google the specifics (at least I did): in February, Russia sent troops into Ukraine in an operation that would result in the annexation of Crimea. The summer of 2014 also saw over two thousand Palestinians killed in the deadliest twenty-first-century assault on Gaza before the current war. On 10 August, a day after a cop shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, protests began to foreshadow what we know now was a decade of uprisings against anti-Black police violence. So much of 2024 could be broken down to the escalation of the long 2014, and yet the playfulness of 

is a reminder of just how recently the scale of these world-historical disasters felt completely different: not necessarily less grave, but less doomed.

Against this backdrop, Ifekoya’s video stages an internal conflict that unfolds along at least four axes, once more (with feeling): bad news; the picket line; the studio; the discotheque. In other words, perhaps: history unfolding beneath our scrolling fingers; the necessity to organize in the face of it; the demands of work (which in this case, crucially, is artistic labour); and, lastly, pleasure, or maybe more simply, sweat, including someone else’s sweat. The ancient questions of getting through a Friday night in a late capitalist Western metropolis – questions that the very form of the music video deeply resonates with: Should I go out tonight? Can I afford to go out, in terms of workload, body battery, money? In terms of craving some time off, can I afford not to go out? In 

, Ifekoya refuses to resolve this conflict, to prioritize any of the wobbly variables in this problem in the name of hedonism, pragmatism or activism. The non-resolution that the video is propelled by is absurdly funny: are we supposed to understand that the protagonist mulling over their decision, instead of committing to either of these activities (the deadline, nightlife, strike action), is simply … procrastinating? Elaborately crafting a disco ball? Dancing and singing, yes, but 

bearing witness to the state of the world at the pace of the Facebook timeline? Procrastination as a way of holding contradictory social pressures, if for a moment, at bay?

In this context, Ifekoya’s performance style, too, is instructive: in interviews in the mid-2010s, the artist talked about wanting to refuse, in their work, the exoticized spectacle that pop culture often makes of Black dancers. Against this history, Ifekoya’s music video star offers the virtuosic 

 of pop culture’s aesthetic conventions: their dance moves resonate with a low intensity, not restrained but gleefully cool, heartfelt but not sentimental. This refusal makes the brief moment of release that pop offers in 

 feel less like a dramatically cathartic antidote to the woes of everyday life, but rather messy and tangible like everyday life itself, which is to say, more real. More fun.

In critical reception, the tone of the video has often been read as either self-flagellating (as in, ‘I should be at the picket line’) or hedonistic, but perhaps it can also be understood as cheerfully analytical. It conveys an antsy need of having to think – and dance – through the various demands, conditions and desires of the contemporary workday in relation to each other: without pitting them against each other, without simply conflating them. At the time, in 2014, artistic labour still seemed, to some, as the Platonic ideal of the so-called ‘new work’ environments that threatened to expand even deeper into personal life. Few curatorial statements could dispense with terms like immaterial labour, the entrepreneurial self, etc.The avant-garde artist abolishing the difference between work and life briefly appeared as 

paradigmatic worker. Although clearly in conversation with this discursive moment, Ifekoya’s work de-dramatizes this perspective. In 

, the artist is a worker who, like most workers, is just craving a night out.

, as Ifekoya has put it, the music video format. Other entries in the series, titled 

, explore different kinds of dichotomies central to Ifekoya’s work, playing with the paradoxical prompt of ‘trying to learn your mother’s tongue’ (Yoruba, in Ifekoya’s case) or the tension between ‘he-man’ and ‘she-male’. One can sense in these videos the urgency of what 

might have meant before, in the further course of the 2010s, the word often got turned into art writing clichés, institutional redemption arcs and, ultimately, bitter memes about the former. While the word still held some antagonistic charm and precision in 2014, it wasn’t long until we queered everything: straight culture, niche animal facts, time and materiality itself. And obviously, all these things deserve to be fucked with, radically transformed, revealed in their glitchy constructedness. Too often, though, the liberal tendencies of queer activism, theory and cultural production became dominant, setting the concept up for its simplifying abstraction until ‘queer’ became just another, supposedly more full-bodied word for ‘subvert’ or ‘do differently’. In the art world, in particular, institutions increasingly used concepts like ‘queer’ (and later, ‘care’, ‘community’ and so on) as a smokescreen for vague gestures at grandiose self-reflection, rather than actually building that wheelchair ramp, paying a better fee or – and this would have been a possibility too – actually deepening their engagement with what’s queer, irrepressibly sexual and gendered about queerness.

 describes less a virtuous act than, indexed by the curious extra ‘y’, the exploration of a surprisingly concrete angle: nightlife matters to strike action. Strike action matters to nightlife. The picket line of the intellect is dependent on the discotheque of the will and vice versa. To this day often misrecognized as being driven by ‘identity’, to radically think with queerness simply means recognizing that a ruthless critique of everything has to start somewhere, somewhere messy. And sometimes that’s precisely at the midpoint between working late and dancing so close I can feel you sweat. And sometimes that’s funny. There is a long Black and queer history of fighting for pleasure in the face of the ever-expanding workday. There is a long Black and queer history, too, of working with the knowledge that, whether we like it or not, the idiosyncratic forces of desire are not exclusive to supposedly ‘populist’ flavours of politics. 

, however makes palpable that these contradictions cannot simply be glossed over by paying lip service to how ‘pleasure is political’. They’ll have to be carefully mediated, with a wink.

Since 2014, Ifekoya’s engagement with sound has shifted as well, from the bright synth riffs of electroclash to a deeper, more immersive frequency. Their increasing interest in archival research and social dynamics has made them, in their own words, ‘disappear from the frame’ as a performer.

The collective Black Obsidian Sound System, for example, which Ifekoya initiated in 2018, is, among other things, renting out custom-made hi-fi equipment for community gatherings. The artist has described recent work like 

(2022) as ‘sacred sound installations’, in which visitors are invited to experience social energies beyond the confines of visual representation. And perhaps, one could retroactively read 

 through the lens of this framework as well. ‘Working late / the music / the bass / the bass is pulsing through.’ Like so many disco classics, that that sounds like a fun and agonizing prayer.


Biographies

Picket Line of the Intellect, Discotheque of the Will: Picket Line of the Intellect, Discotheque of the Will: On Evan Ifekoya’s 'Disco Breakdown'

Disco Breakdown

Picket Line of the Intellect, Discotheque of the Will

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

 (2022), the artist appropriates the close-up of Diana Ross performing the three-minute song of the same name from Sidney Lumet’s film 

 (1978). By obscuring Ross’s face with the insistent glare of a handheld spotlight and by silencing her voice, the emotional intensity of the performance is paradoxically heightened. Disguising Ross as the source of the song, the light accentuates those physical gestures that extend beyond the sphere of the beam: her shoulders and chest flex with effort, and the crown of her head rises from the pool of light during the song’s unheard crescendo. Rather than diminishing the emotion of the performance, Gale’s rejection of the cinematic close-up through its erasure works to defamiliarize it and disrupts a straightforward identification of the ‘representational economies’ of its Black subject in the projection of psychic pain. 

In refusing the coupling of audible voice and visible source, 

 also challenges the famous narrative denouement of L. Frank Baum’s novel 

 (1900). In that scene, the unlocatable, acousmatic voice of the Wizard – initially terrifyingly mysterious – is stripped of its mystical power by the classic curtain drop that reveals a frantic old man and, in so doing, binds an ordinary human image to the previously unknowable sound. Simultaneously rejecting what Michel Chion describes as the ‘dis-acousmatic’ gesture of a final reveal, Gale’s partial acousmatic transformation of Ross reveals her as the real source of power.

Akeroyd Collection

Artists