Megan Tamati-Quennell

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Season 6, Episode 2

Throughout the season, Lauren Wetmore and Sky Goodden will speak with participants of the Momus residency, “Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency,” created with Forge Project and led by Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa) and Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish).

To launch this series, Wetmore speaks with writer and curator Megan Tamati-Quennell, who is of Te Āti Awa, Ngāi Tahu, KātiMāmoe, and Waitaha Māori descent and is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Māori and Indigenous Art at Museum of New Zealand | Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand. Wetmore and Tamati-Quennell discuss a 2006 text on artist Michael Riley by Australian historian Nikos Papastergiadis, as well as Tamati-Quennell’s own writing and research, where she makes use of “Whakapapa,” a knowledge system that binds all Māori people.

“The joy is being able to put something into the world, and honor some people, and maybe shift some ground,” says Tamati-Quennell about her ongoing work.

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Sky Goodden

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Season 6, Episode 1

To launch our sixth season, Lauren Wetmore interviews Sky Goodden on a book that has recently got her all “twirled up.” They discuss Art Writing in Crisis (Sternberg Press, 2021) which sits adjacent to an exhausting list of books on art criticism in crisis and points instead to the emancipatory potential of criticism, and, as Goodden and Lauren term it, the “present imperfect” of a field actively redefining itself. “I think it’s important to understand what art writing and criticism has recently been in order to have a sense of its future,” reflects Goodden. “However, I find that, for decades now, we can get so stuck in what it’s been, we never get to the second part.”

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Jessica Lynne and Kemi Adeyemi

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Season 5, Episode 10

The finale of Season 5 features a conversation between writer, art critic, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, Jessica Lynne, and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi about her new book Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke UP, 2022). An “art-adjacent academic,” Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and Director of The Black Embodiment Studio at the University of Washington. Lynne speaks to Adeyemi about writing an ethnography of how Black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Their conversation looks at the pleasures (and challenges) of working between the classroom and the dancefloor in order to pay a different kind of attention to Black queer women’s lives. “What pleasures are sweeter than talking with your friends about the brilliant things they write, create, and offer to us” says Lynne.

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Cecilia Alemani

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Season 5, Episode 9

For the penultimate episode of Season 5, Sky Goodden interviews Cecilia Alemani, the Artistic Director of the 59th Venice BiennaleAfter three years of research and commissioning (an extended period of preparation, due to the pandemic) and 7 months of The Milk of Dreams being open to an immense public, Alemani takes a rearview look onto a show that responded to—and endured—several seismic shocks over the course of its run, and was, in so many respects, unprecedented. She touches on “history knocking on the door of the biennial” with regards to both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and the ways in which she embedded history in the exhibition, in turn. She also speaks to the impact of art writing, both its influence on a longer-researched edition of the biennial—one “curated from a desk”—but also in terms of the reviews, too, some of which underscored the need for more female-driven programming. Perhaps most poignantly, Alemani remembers the slow time of this show’s creation, and her drawing on sensorial and somatic influences, however unconsciously, as she worked at a remove from artists’ studios. “I think [the biennial] was a reaction to what I missed the most.”

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Meeka Walsh

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Season 5, Episode 8

On the occasion of her first book of collected art writings, Malleable Forms (ARP Books), Meeka Walsh, editor of Border Crossings magazine, speaks to guest-host Jarrett Earnest about geographic isolation, the eroticism of art writing, her connection with an emerging spiritual lineage, and about a set of relationships driving her engagement with art. In this far-ranging and generous conversation around publishing, editing, looking, and listening, Walsh reflects, “I’m happiest when I’m writing.”

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Ben Davis

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Season 5, Episode 7

In the introduction to Ben Davis’s new book, a bracing and perspectival collection of essays titled Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books), he reflects that “the only thing that has grown faster than the demands on art has been doubt that art can respond adequately to those demands.” In a generous and thoughtful conversation with Sky Goodden, Davis expands on those cultural tensions that exacerbate an already fraught cultural dialogue, and touches on other central themes to this collection of writing, including the economic structures that inform contemporary art and its technologies, the roots of cultural appropriation, the context collapse of our critical reception, and the ambient shifts in contemporary art’s ‘connoisseurship’.

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Arushi Vats

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Season 5, Episode 6

“We are post-purity,” observes Arushi Vats, a Delhi-based writer and inaugural fellow of the Momus/Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship. Rooted in field research and expanded through poetics, Vat’s text Exit the Rehearsal: A Body in Delhi, published by Runway Journal, is a precise yet capacious meditation on our “epoch of waste”— ecocide, legacy waste, and the Anthropocene in which Vats suggests that what we waste is “highly proximate, right under your skin, in your gut, and there is something radical in accepting that this is a part of your lifecycle.” In this interview with Lauren Wetmore, Vats discusses building a text from both a bodily and civic curiosity, and why sometimes, when writing about culture, it is important to leave the artworks out.

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Rahel Aima

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Season 5, Episode 5

This month, Sky Goodden speaks with Rahel Aima, a prolific critic, art writer, and Associate Editor at Momus. We focus on a text Aima published in Momus, “Depleting Felix Gonzales-Torres” (July 2020), that takes aim at “a mammoth exhibition” of the late Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 work Untitled (Fortune Cookie Corner). Aima writes “In a move taken right out of the influencer marketing playbook,” Andrea Rosen and David Zwirner, who co-represent his estate, shipped the piece around the world to collectors who would then display and “document them for the ‘gram.” While Gonzales-Torres’s work conjures a body through accumulation and depletion, “we can understand the exhibition as an extension of overwhelmingly white, moneyed arts professionals and their tendency to trivialize Black and Indigenous death by trying to relate it to the art world.” Aima engages us in a gripping conversation about writing, including the discomfort of penning a polemic that goes viral.

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Raimundas Malašauskas

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Season 5, Episode 4

Days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Lithuanian curator and writer Raimundas Malašauskas resigned as curator of the Russian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Bienniale, along with participating artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, citing the war as “politically and emotionally unbearable.”

Using his letter of resignation, which Malašauskas posted to Instagram on February 27th, Lauren Wetmore interviews him about what led to this decision—“I started from my experience of being in the Empire and not wanting to go back”—and the complexities of its reception within different networks of impact across the international art world, the Russian political and cultural regime, and Malašauskas’s Lithuanian community.

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Dana Kopel

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Season 5, Episode 3

In this episode Lauren Wetmore speaks with writer and organizer Dana Kopel about her widely-read article “Against Artspolitation: Unionizing the New Museum,” published in September 2021 by The Baffler. In conversation, Kopel expands on “the personal and messy dimensions” of unionizing work, and reflects on the challenges of calling out the exploitation, abuses, and hypocrisies of an art industry that, at the time, she was actively working in. She doesn’t hold back on the sacrifices made or the consequences suffered as a result of this successful union drive, but she also stresses that there is never a sole author. Kopel offers emotional and practical resources for organizing work but also acknowledges that “the fight really doesn’t end … the end point is the end of capitalism, the end of institutions, and abolition. And until we get there, this is just what we keep doing every fucking day.”

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