Momus: The Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Palestinian-American artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi speaks with Lauren Wetmore about the political implication of form through two texts: Tbakhi’s own piece "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide" (Protean Magazine, 2023), and Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” (The Volta, 2013). “In times of extreme crisis we end up bumping against particular limitations of art,” reflects Tbakhi, while also reminding us that “the idea of artistic engagement with moments of crisis has been curtailed and limited by state powers and oppressive ideologies in many different forms.” This episode continues the Podcast’s platforming of Palestinian voices in line with Momus’s ongoing commitment to PACBI.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Daniel Faria Gallery.

All episodes are available on momus.ca, and through Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Earlier this year, the Momus editorial team gathered for a talk at Plural Art Fair in Montreal. It marked the first time Sky Goodden, Catherine G. Wagley, Jessica Lynne, and Merray Gerges were all together IRL. The lively conversation touched on how we’ve shifted from a discourse of “crisis” in art criticism to its material reality; the ethics of editorial care; and how to address the need for mentorship across all stages of a writer’s career.

Thank you to the Momus editorial team for their contribution to this season. Thank you to Artspeaks for sponsoring the panel.

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: Night Gallery and Art Toronto.

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."

All thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer).

Our deepest appreciation to this episode's advertisers: Plural Contemporary Art Fair and Maleko Mokgosi: Imaging Imaginations at the Art Gallery of York University.

Look for us on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: [email protected].

The season finale for Momus: The Podcast’s fifth season features a conversation between writer, art critic, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, Jessica Lynne, and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi, an “art-adjacent academic” and Director of The Black Embodiment Studio at the University of Washington. Adeyemi talks about her new book, Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022), an ethnography of how Black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Her conversation with Lynne looks at the pleasures (and challenges) of working between the classroom and the dance floor in an effort 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?” asks Lynne. 

Our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Jessica Lynne and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi for their contribution to our fifth season finale.

Many thanks, as well, to Cui Jinzhe for her support.

Look for us on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: [email protected].

For the penultimate episode of Season 5, Sky Goodden interviews Cecilia Alemani, the Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale. After 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."

Our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Cecilia Alemani for her contribution to our fifth season.

This conversation is presented in collaboration with Art Toronto; our deepest thanks to them for in part making this possible.

Many thanks to Gallery 44 for their support.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: [email protected].

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."

Meeka Walsh is a writer, art critic, editor and curator who has had a major influence on the arts in Canada. She is the editor of Border Crossings, an internationally renowned and award-winning quarterly magazine that investigates contemporary culture.

Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018); editor of Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2017 by Peter Schjeldahl (Abrams, 2019), The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955 (David Zwirner 2020), and Devotion: today's future becomes tomorrow archive (PUBLIC books, 2022), among others. His criticism and long-form interviews have appeared in New York Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Vulture, The Village Voice, ​Los Angeles Review of Books, Art in America, New York Magazine, and many exhibition catalogues and other publications. In 2021 Earnest was awarded a Dorothea and Leo Rabkin prize for visual arts journalism.

Our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Jarrett Earnest and Meeka Walsh for their contribution to our fifth season.

Many thanks to SFU Galleries for their support; you can listen to their ten-part radio program Listening to Pictures: Artists on the Art Collection, featuring artist voices with lived experience on the West Coast.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

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'.

Of course, this is also a conversation about writing. In discussing a book that has taken the better part of a decade to come out, and has required significant rewriting as Davis responded to a shape-shifting present, he reflects, “It’s a process that resembles depression in the psychoanalytic sense. You feel, for a long period of time, that you have this giant object, a presence in your life that can’t be expressed, that hangs over you like a dark cloud. I don't have a life hack around that except to say that I think it really helps to believe in what you're doing.”

Ben Davis is the National Art Critic at artnet News, where he’s also a senior editor. His first book, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, came out in 2013 (Haymarket Books) and, as one artist put it, delivered "a truth-bomb of a book.”

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"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.

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.

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.

With this episode Momus both condemns the Russian war on Ukraine, and echoes Malašauskas’s assertion of the existence of many “different Russias” by extending solidarity to its artists and creative communities.

All our thanks to Jacob Irish (Editor) and Chris Andrews (Assistant Producer), and thanks especially to Raimundas Malašauskas for his contribution to this season.

Thanks to the Sobey Art Award for its support.

Look for us on Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Please consider donating through our Patreon campaign.

To inquire about advertising opportunities or other forms of support, please contact: [email protected].