e-flux podcast

This episode was recorded live at e-flux on February 10, 2026, celebrating the launch of e-flux Index #8. The recording features Piper Marshall reading from her remembrance of Dara Birnbaum.
Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025) was a pioneering American video and installation artist whose various critiques and transformations of the moving image have inspired artists internationally. An architect and painter by training, Birnbaum entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television's ever-growing presence within the American household. Her work primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media, involving the re-manipulation of television's idiomatic grammar and enacting a complex and critical engagement with the medium's representation of political events and the public's reception of history.
Piper Marshall is an art historian, curator, and critic whose practice combines rigorous research with exhibition-making. She leads innovative, interdisciplinary work on modern and contemporary art, with a focus on art and technology. She has served on curatorial teams for Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning (2024) and Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Additional exhibitions and collaborations include: Media and Mind Control (2025); Growing Sideways: Artists Performing Childhood (2024); Laurie Simmons: Clothes Make the Man (2018); Nina Chanel Abney: Safe House (2017); Judith Barry: Imagination Dead Imagine (2017); Silke Otto Knapp: Monotones (2017); Fia Backstrom: Woe Men Keep Going (2017); Sinister Feminism (2017); Judith Bernstein: Voyeur (2015); Ericka Beckman: You The Better (2015). She has written and lectured widely, contributing numerous essays and articles on the work of Joan Jonas, Dara Birnbaum, Eric N. Mack, Ed Atkins, and Carolyn Lazard. She has taught at Columbia and Wesleyan Universities. From 2014–2018, she served as an independent curator at Mary Boone Gallery. From 2007–2013, she was a curator at Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York. Marshall earned her PhD in the history of art and architecture from Columbia University and her BA from Barnard College.
Index #8 explores the fragmentary complexity of the current moment through pointing out eleven emergent themes drawn from texts commissioned by e-flux throughout the spring of 2025. These indications for reading refuse the xenophobic illogic of the us/them, friend/enemy strategies of categorizing, and instead seek to index multiple temporalities and positions simultaneously—in a non-linear way. They bring together exhibition and film reviews, in-depth theoretical and historical essays on contemporary art, architecture, and design, interviews with artists, theorists, and filmmakers, journeys into the archive of film history, and shorter missives on sociopolitics and contemporary culture.
The printed edition of the Index is available to purchase online and from select art and design bookstores, as well as museums, throughout Canada, East Asia, Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom. The publication is distributed by Antenne Books (Europe and the UK), Les presses du réel (Europe), Asterism Books (USA), Art Metropole (Canada), The Book Society (East Asia), and Buchhandlung Walther König (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Annual subscriptions, covering four issues, are available at both institutional and individual rates here.

e-flux journal Associate Editor Andreas Petrossiants talks to author Andrew Ross about his recent book, The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates.
Between the summers of 2023 and 2024, Andrew Ross visited Ramallah (Palestine), Dubai (UAE), Phoenix (USA), and Shanghai (China)—some of the landscapes most disturbed by human activity, whether through active warfare or massive development projects. Rather than offering another eco-polemic or recalling for us the dread prognostications of Malthus in the 19th century or Ehrlich in the 20th, The Weather Report is a clear-eyed and essentially optimistic book that proposes a pragmatic, just, and urgent new common ground reestablishing scalable projects of mutual aid and care as a new, essential center for our economic, ecological, and social well-being. 
Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. A contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, Artforum, Jacobin, New York Review of Books, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of almost 30 books and hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics—labor and work, urbanism, politics, technology, environmental justice, alternative economics, music, film, TV, art, architecture, and poetry. His articles have appeared in newspapers and magazines as well as in academic and public interest journals, and his books are published by mainstream trade, academic, and independent presses. He has lectured at hundreds of universities and cultural institutions in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Australia. Politically active in many movement fields, he is the co-founder of several groups–Gulf Labor Artists Coalition, Global Ultra Luxury Faction, Coalition for Fair Labor, Occupy Student Debt Campaign, Strike Debt, the Debt Collective, and Decolonize This Place—and is an organizer with others, including the American Association of University Professors and the US Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He also serves on the steering committee of the national network of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
Ross's books include The Weather Report; A Journey Through Unsettled Climates, Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing, Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel (winner of a Palestine Book Award), Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal, Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City, Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade–Lessons from Shanghai, Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town, Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits, and No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture.

e-flux journal Associate Editor Andreas Petrossiants discusses States of Divergence with author Sven Lütticken. 
In States of Divergence, Sven Lütticken invites readers into an exploration of history as accelerating catastrophe—and of alternative, oppositional, divergent practices in life, art and revolutionary thought. Set against the backdrop of global crises, from climate change to pandemics, Lütticken dissects contemporary cultural and political practices that attempt to break free from the disastrous momentum of capitalist modernity. His journey traverses fields including art theory, philosophy, and politics, presenting a nuanced critique of the ways in which deviant temporalities and forms of life confront or adapt to catastrophe. 
Through a series of essays, the book tackles issues ranging from survival to prefigurative practice, indigeneity and internationalism, and the dialectics of critique and revolution. Lütticken blends personal narrative, historical inquiry, and theoretical reflection to question what it means to live—and resist—within the contradictions of our time.
Sven Lütticken is an associate professor at Leiden University's Academy of Creative and Performing Arts / PhDArts and he coordinates the research master's track, Critical Studies in Art and Culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His books include Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Vol. 1 (Sternberg Press, 2022), the critical reader Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022), and States of Divergence (Minor Compositions, 2025).
Read essays by Sven Lütticken in e-flux journal here.

A conversation with Paul Pfeiffer, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Anthony Elms recorded in May 2025.
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa makes art, writes about it, and occasionally edits essay anthologies. His artist's book, INDEX 2025, is out now from ROMA Publications, and his recent essay "ECHO—LOCATION," on installations at Dia Art Foundation by Cameron Rowland and Steve McQueen, featured in the April issue of e-flux journal. 
Recent exhibitions include Scene at Eastman, at George Eastman Museum (2025), Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2021), and But Still, It Turns at the International Center of Photography, New York (2021). 
Read more essays in e-flux journal by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa here.
Paul Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to investigate how media images shape our perception of the world and ourselves. Working in video, photography, sculpture, and sound, he is drawn to moments intended for mass audiences (live sports events, stadium concert tours, televised game shows, celebrity glamour shots), which he meticulously samples and re-edits to expose an uncanny emptiness underneath. From the hyperreality of photo retouching and digital erasure to the endless repetition of video loops, his mastery of postproduction allows him to magnify the surreal aspects of contemporary existence, where bodies become sites of saturated observation, and violence-as-entertainment flirts with nationalism, religion, and ancient myth. While he also experiments with the format and scale of his works, immersive audiovisual installations often cohabit with portable fetish objects in his exhibitions. Throughout his practice, Pfeiffer seeks to reflect and heighten the existential condition of the viewer as consumer by perversely blurring the boundary between voyeurism and contemplation.
The recent exhibition discussed in this episode, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the MCA Chicago. 
Read a review from e-flux Criticism of Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles by Juliana Halpert.
Anthony Elms organizes exhibitions and writes. He recently organized Rodney McMillian: Neighbors for the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Wa. opening in October 2025. An essay on artist Oliver Ressler, "Ellipsesverse," posts online this fall for Ressler's exhibition Scenes from the Invention of Democracy at the Museum Tinguely. His essay "Begin to begin to begin to begin to begin" is forthcoming in Ecstatic Aperture: Perspectives on the Life and Work of Terry Riley. from Auryfa / Shelter Press.

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. 
Read all four installments of the series here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four. 
 
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.