Discussion / “War After War,” with Simon Leung and Barry Schwabsky

Date: Saturday, 5 December 2020, 12:30–2:00 pm Eastern Standard Time / 6:30–8:00 pm Central European Time
Venue: Online via Zoom. Please register here. The discussion will also be streamed live on Youtube here. Clips from Leung’s film are available here.
Moderated by Joanna Warsza and Sina Najafi
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition “And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There”

Since 1992, artist Simon Leung has made a number of works about, or in collaboration with, Warren Niesłuchowski. Like many of these works, the film War After War from 2011 attends to the rhythms, conditions, and trajectories of Niesłuchowski’s itinerant life. In the same year, writer and art critic Barry Schwabsky’s “The Perpetual Guest”—a portrait of Niesłuchowski framed around questions of radical hospitality—appeared in The Nation. This event will use several short clips from Leung’s film as a point of departure for a discussion of what it means to live a life of “homelessness” by birth and by choice in the postwar era. Q&A to follow for those attending on Zoom.

About the Participants
Simon Leung is a Hong Kong–born artist living in New York and Los Angeles. His foremost concern as an artist is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced. War After War is currently on view at the Queens Museum together with POE, a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe. In the latter, Niesłuchowski plays an amalgam of Poe characters and Yvonne Rainer plays Poe.

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine. He is the co-editor, with Joanna Warsza, of And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There: Ontological Nomad, Guest, Host, Ghost (Cabinet Books and Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2020), published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg Press, 2020) and Gillian Carnegie (Lund Humphries, 2020). Forthcoming is a collection of poetry, A Feeling of And (Black Square Editions, 2021).

Joanna Warsza is a program director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm and an independent curator interested in how art functions politically and socially outside the white cube. She was the artistic director of Public Art Munich 2018 and curator of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Recent publications include Red Love. A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai (co-edited with Maria Lind and Michele Masucci; Sternberg Press, Konstfack Collections, and Tensta Konsthall, 2020), and And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There: Ontological Nomad, Guest, Host, Ghost (co-edited with Sina Najafi; Cabinet Books and Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2020).