to ask what else: six talks

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Friday, November 14 at 7pm for to ask what else, featuring presentations by Joanna Evans, Sahar Khraibani, Stella Liantonio, Iulia Nistor,Adrienne Jacobson Oliver, and Stephen Woo.

This event sees six friends—writers, poets and theorists—asking “what else?” of their critical practices and investments. Rethinking established concepts and routinized gestures (such as work, language, and looking), they forge critical, bodily, and imaginative openings in tight places. The attentive curiosity of “what else” yields sometimes counterintuitive findings, such as ambivalence around dichotomies of labor/ease or returned colonial artifacts, the carceral implications of ecology, the absurd linguistic nationalism of fascist Italy, the inferential structure of meaning, and the refusal of repair and cure. In flesh, fantasy, imagination, and the incalculable—to ask what else searches for perceptual terminology that sustains, rather than forecloses, indeterminacy.

Program

Sahar Khraibani
always already in: notes on labor and the body
This text delves into the fantasies of eradicating fatigue from the body which are inseparable from the fantasies aroused by the rejection of misery as tied to a certain conception of the ideal worker. Presented in three parts, the text engages poetic resonances and fragments to argue for the refusal of labor.

Stephen Woo
Contradictions of Return and Repair
This presentation thinks alongside the film Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop, 2024), which follows the return of 26 cultural artifacts that were stolen by France from what is now the Republic of Benin. It reflects upon impossible and contradictory desires of postcolonial return and repair that Dahomey interrogates and itself stages aesthetically in the mode of fantasy.

Joanna Evans
Abolitionist Architecture, or why “eco” can’t do what we want it to
Evans explores the 12 year architectural collaboration between incarcerated Black Panther Herman Wallace and his friend, the artist Jackie Sumell. Their detailed, imaginative planning of “Herman’s House” surfaces a historical critique of the origins of ecology and its proximity to economic logics, and global capitalism in particular.

Stella Liantonio
Tied tongues
This text investigates how Fascist-era regulations on language shape artistic production in contemporary Italy. It analyzes works that engage with public space to reclaim histories deliberately omitted from the national narrative.

Iulia Nistor
given/made
This talk is part of a larger project which identifies the distinction between “given” and “made” as a dichotomy of our thinking, and explores the capacity of artworks to question this binary.

Adrienne Jacobson Oliver
free state
Exploring resonance with/in blackened histories, free state investigates how B/blackness articulates itself in vernacular, sensual, and sonic anarrangements. Orchestrating “Sankofic attunement”—a critically erotic listening positionality of B/black maternality in the afterlives of reproductive enslavement—this text reads the American South as a condition, silence as dialect, and imagines non-curative poetics.

Bios

Joanna Evans is a performance theorist, theater artist, and research associate at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute. They research improvisational creative practices and the history of environmental thought, with an emphasis on Southern Africa and the US South. Their scholarship has been published in Women&Performance Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Performance Research and Ecumencia. Joanna holds a Ph.D in performance studies from New York University and is an alum of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.

Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose work has been presented with Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, Magnum Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Hyperallergic, among others. Sahar is the author of Anatomy of a Refusal (1080PRESS, 2025) and ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST (Wendy’s Subway, 2025). A recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship at The Poetry Project, a MacDowell Fellowship, and was a 2024 artist in residence at Mass MoCA, Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Stella Liantonio is an independent curator, whose work focuses on public and collaborative artistic practices. Their work has been presented in Switzerland at One gee in fog, Espace eeeh!, FMAC, and in Italy at PARSEC Bologna. Stella was a resident of the Lab for new imaginations 2023 at MACRO (Museum of Contemporary art of Rome) and a 2024/25 Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Iulia Nistor is a philosopher and visual artist working at the intersection of philosophy of mind and epistemology. The practice spans text, spatial intervention, and painting. Nistor holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Regensburg, Germany, a Meisterschüler degree from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recipient of fellowships from the Bavarian State, Kunstfonds, DAAD, and Pivô Arte e Pesquisa. Represented by Plan B and Mendes Wood DM. The forthcoming book, properties without objects, explores whether the independent depiction of accidental properties is possible.

Adrienne Jacobson Oliver is an artist-researcher whose work has been supported and presented by the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, Tin House, the Sonya Hayes Stone Center for Black Culture and History, Periplus Collective, Burnaway Magazine, The Plentitudes, Apogee Journal, New School Arts Modality, and the Virginia Film Festival, among others. A 2025/26 Artist-in-Residence at New City Arts, Adrienne trained in performance theory and media studies. Adrienne holds an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a 2024/25 Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She is writing her first book.

Stephen Woo is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at Marist College and a 2024–25 Critical Studies Fellow in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His research has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, New Literary History, and Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.