Conversations: Dave Beech and Esther Leslie

To mark the first UK publication of 'American Genius: A Comedy', author Lynne Tillman is joined by Emily LaBarge and Michael Bracewell for a discussion at Camden Art Centre.

Curator and writer Isabel Seligman discusses Matthew Krishanu’s works on paper and their relationship to his wider painting practice. 

This episode marks the launch of Hedva's latest book, Your Love is Not Good. It features a reading and discussion with esteemed art critic Philippa Snow. The episode provides an insightful exchange, bridging literature, art, and contemporary issues at the time of recording in Autumn 2023.   Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, as well as Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, and Rewire Festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, Frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, and is anthologised in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages.   Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, The White Review, Vogue, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New Republic. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater.

The discussion recorded in Autumn 2023 is complemented by readings from Innominate by Pearce and Ill Feelings by Hattrick. These works reflect on the character of "queer evidence" and their shared interest in blending autobiography with historical narrative.   Naomi Pearce is a writer and curator. Recent projects include Good Bad Books? At the Barbican (co-programmed with Anna Bunting-Branch) and Almost Conceptual, Matt’s Gallery, both in London. Her writing has been published by Art Monthly, Happy Hypocrite, Kunstverein Munich, e-flux Criticism and The White Review, among others. From 2018-2022 she was a member of the Rita Keegan Archive Project, a social history and curatorial collective, whose recent activity includes an exhibition at South London Gallery and the publication Mirror Reflecting Darkly with MIT Press. Innominate is her first novel.   Alice Hattrick’s criticism and interviews have appeared in publications such as frieze magazine, Art Review and The White Review. Alice’s work has most recently been included in Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art: HEALTH (ed. Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, 2020) and Mine Searching Yours (Forma, 2020). They are the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, made in collaboration with artists Leah Clements and Lizzy Rose. In 2016, they were shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. Ill Feelings, their non-fiction book on chronic illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021.

With Martin Clark, Darian Leader, Ralph Rugoff and Mohammed Sami Building upon themes and visual quotations from Sami’s exhibition , The Point 0, this panel discussion examines contemporary painting and its capacity to exist as repositories of information, invoking subjective interpretations of private and public experiences through various material and technical processes.

How can discourses between seemingly disparate disciplines inspire art? Tenant of Culture and historian Arwen P. Mohun reflect on the importance of research in their respective practices and discuss the influence of Mohun’s book Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 on the exhibit Soft Acid.  

Episode 2 focuses on past, present and future of the Detroit-Berlin axis. By means of an interview collage, writer and Make Techno Black Again activist DeForrest Brown, Jr., Lerato Khathi aka Lakuti (founder of Uzuri Recordings and the Bring Down the Walls initiative), Boris Dolinski (resident DJ at Berghain) and Mark Ernestus (musician and founder of the Hard Wax record store) explore how the rapid growth of techno and club culture in Germany after 1989 relates to the music’s origins in the Black neighbourhoods of the post-industrialised city of Detroit.

This podcast is led by DeForrest Brown Jr, author of Assembling a Black Counter Culture, in conversation with Steve Goodman (aka Kode9 and founder of Hyperdub) and Nkisi (co-founder of NON Worldwide). Collectively they discuss the migration of techno music from North America to Europe with an initial focus on the situated contexts of the dance music scene in London and across the U.K. during the early 1990s. With reference to techno’s spiritual and technological origins, evolution, and relationship with the Hardcore Continuum movement. Techno at the End of the Future – Episode 1: London was produced by Zakia Sewell.

For this episode of Conversations, Dave Beech and Esther Leslie navigate Olga Balema’s installation Computer to examine a range of formal, material and theoretical concerns. With a focus on the geographies of production, digital processes, architectural grids, artistic labour, and how domestic spaces have also functioned as workplaces since the onset of the pandemic. In doing so, they reflect on Walter Benjamin’s writing on the reception, engagement and interaction of the horizontal plane in art, design and media, whilst interweaving historical narratives regarding Goethe’s fascination with the Ginkgo plant. Dave Beech is an artist and writer. He is a Reader in Art and Marxism at Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon, the University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art (Brill 2020), Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production(Pluto 2019) and Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill 2015), which was shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Beech is an artist who worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. His solo art practice revisits the critical traditions of photomontage, documentary photography, digital print, the photo archive and the photobook. Esther Leslie is a Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck. Her books include Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde; Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry; Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage; Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form, and the milk projects, Deeper in the Pyramid and The Inextinguishable (both with Melanie Jackson). Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

On March 20th, 1980, Mount St. Helens (traditionally known as Lawetlat’la or Loowit) erupted. Rocks boiled, rivers evaporated into clouds, and Spirit Lake—a site connected with Indigenous whistling spirits known as Tsiatko—was smothered under a blanket of pyrolized trees. As part of a continuing series of works under the “Echomaking” umbrella, in this audio essay, Kristen Gallerneaux (Métis-Wendat) uncovers the sonic, material, and poetic resonances connected to this story. She will focus on the contagion effect of folklore born out of cataclysmic events, new mineral formats, and recovering knowledge within charged landscapes affected by geological and ecological transformation. This recording was made on land occupying the ancestral, traditional and contemporary homelands of the Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox), Peoria, Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi), and Myaamia people.  The people of these nations were forced from their land through the 1807 Treaty of Detroit. Kristen Gallerneaux is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher holding a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University). She is also the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. In 2018, she was a Future Thought speaker at Moogfest and premiered the experimental short film, The Hum. She has presented at Unsound editions Dislocation (2014), Presence (2018), and Intermission (2020). In 2017, she spoke about the history of the Votrax text-to-speech synthesizer and taught an electronic music production workshop at Pop Kultur Berlin. She has written for the Barbican Center, ARTnews, the Quietus, and Herman Miller’s WHY magazine. She has published on wide-ranging topics like mathematics in mid-century design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world’s first mousepad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. Her book, High Static, Dead Lines, is available via Strange Attractor Press and distributed by MIT Press in the United States. Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.