A Sequence of Letters

The Machine, the Ghost, and the Limits of Understanding

Faith and Attribution

You're So Smooth

Opening reception: Thursday, March 7, 5-7pm 

Ortuzar Projects is pleased to present 'American Landscape, the gallery's second exhibition with Cologne-based artist Julia Scher. The exhibition features works made over the past four decades centered around the gallery-scaled installation, 'Security By Julia XLV, alongside new marble sculptures and previously un-exhibited paintings from the 1980s.

Sadie Laska's (@sadiealaskaa) 'Homesick' 

With oil paintings, fabric works and monoprints, Laska creates a spectacle that is political but not polemical, posing questions and provoking reflection as she takes on the ambiguities of contemporary life. While opposing the normalization of war, environmental destruction and social dysfunction, Laska stands up for people living in conscientious connection with one another, able to fulfill authentic desires. Through image and text, Laska endeavors to wrest the power of language away from double-talking politicians and pushers of rapacious consumerism, delivering its innate power back to people.

Transmissions, a solo exhibition of the artist's collages, drawings, and films. The exhibition expands across three floors to include a curated selection of works made between 1950 and 1970 that demonstrate how VanDerBeek's experiments with transmission, animation, and recomposed fragments of ephemeral media ramify throughout his rich archive.

Where Thought and Matter Merge, an exhibition in various media that reflects upon the age-old quest of humanity to change matter and substances by turning them into precious elements- and to materialize the immaterial. As time passed on Earth, and with developing scientific knowledge, the alchemist's quest of transmutation became a chemist's endeavor; and it was not far from there - and not long from then- that physicists discovered particle collision that set the stage for astrophysicists to discover stellar or large particle cluster/galaxy collisions that can create the heaviest elements in the periodic table, from precious metals through to the heaviest radioactive elements.

Landscape Art 

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people mediated by images."

Of the many ideas developed by the Situationist International, the notion of the spectacle is among its most powerful and long-lived. A major influence on the ideas behind the May 1968 insurrections in France and later discourses of postmodernism, the spectacle is not just a theory of media, but a holistic critique of an entire culture that continues to resonate with revolutionary fervor after more than 50 years of attempted recuperation.

Spread over four weeks, this series will focus on a close reading of Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" with supplementary readings from other members of the Situationist International. In addition to understanding just what the spectacle is and how it operates, we will also touch upon some strategies of subversion including détournement, dérive, and "the construction of situations".

"The Society of the Spectacle" accompanied by selections from the "Situationist International Anthology" and "The Revolution of Everyday Life".

The Society of the Spectacle

a four week long series looking at highly cited contemporary works from the field of anthropology. 

A few topics covered include epistemology, the city, embodiment, affect, violence, time, & sound. 

There will probably be an online series in addition to the in person discussions. 

Contemporary Anthropology Series

Friday: Happy Hour 8-10 with Lanav and then...

HYPNOPOMPIA a new Performance by @joni.com

The Intima, 16-15 weirfield street Ridgewood, 7PM

This Weekend

announcing “Trad Medium” - ah yes…the trad medium…the trad use of material…the trad dichotomy of subject and object…the trad decision to figure or abstract…shall we try to escape it? no…not today…we will embrace it…study it…move forth…appreciating…the works…like a successful trad gallery ought to, should do…ZXY Gal at your trad service sir… 

trad medium

From the Miguel Abreu Gallery's Instagram page: 

"This Saturday, 1/27, 7pm: Sequence Press and Urbanomic are pleased to host Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh and Reza Negarestani at Miguel Abreu Gallery for a conversation and book launch of Mohaghegh’s recently released, “Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-in-Deception.”

In a new work in which conceptual elaboration, storytelling, and poetics are fused in the infernal heat of the desert, the cycle of Omnicide is closed with a philosophy of doom and deception, plunging headlong into the inevitable, the fatal, and the infinite. There are certain games which can only be played at the end of worlds: their stakes are impossibly higher; their rules are unique to the collapse of all things. The author will be joined by fellow philosopher Reza Negarestani for a sequence of spirited reflections on those apocalyptic poetries of the Middle East found throughout the book—calling up the voices of Adonis, Joyce Mansour, Forugh Farrokhzad, Ibrahim al-Koni, Mahmoud Darwish, and Ahmad Shamlu.

Here, language starts to resemble a deck of cards; consciousness turns with the throw of dice; the mind becomes a blank domino. Through these rare challenges of thought, Mohaghegh and Negarestani will articulate an endgame that belongs to those strange plays of imagination (mirage) that surface only at the hour of pure vanishing.

Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please visit the link in our bio for more information. @sequencepress @urbanomicdotcom"

Omnicide II An evening trial of riddles, poetry, and a new game

If you felt catfished by How to Blow Up a Pipeline, or if you love Bataille & Kaczynski, then you should check out Atassa. Now available at @toposbookstore, @humanrelationsnyc, @molassesbooks, & @aeonbooks

In this first issue of the journal the contributors tell the history of eco-extremism — a post-Kaczynski international network of anonymous and autonomous groups who have abandoned all morals in their struggle against civilization.

Atassa 1: Readings In Eco-extremism

The Theory of Bloom is the theory of the isolated subject of the modern era.

The Bloom is forced to fixate on certain social roles in order to survive. Worker, housewife, professional, student, citizen, all of the roles are but masks, donned and rarely removed. The Bloom must remain positive while wearing these masks, ignoring its own power and sovereignty. -Review of The Theory of Bloom

This short book lays bare our social isolation and the conceptually simple (yet practically difficult) solution to it. This is a foundational text of Tiqqun's thought, and this version is the translation by Robert Hurley (translator of Anti-Oedipus and multiple books by Foucault, Bataille, and Deleuze).