Reprise exhibition: Iran|Usa with artist talk

The first of the past weekend’s Middle East attacks on Saturday (28 Feb 2026) came the day of reprise exhibit of my 2015 Iran|Usa show in Tehran. New York’s Hudson Milliner Art Salon, which is already including one of the installations in their current group show (Jan-March), made an evening of the event with a screening of my trilogy along with an artist talk and discussion (via Zoom). I had been looking forward to showing the three pieces together in the USA. Understandably, given the unexpected and disturbing context, it was an animated conversation about the art, politics, and the relation between the two.

I’m working on getting a recording or transcript of the discussion. Sprung from the long-standing geopolitical Möbius strip relation between Iran and the U.S., the show and discussion focus on two themes: (1) the poetic (and political) question of “synchronization” (of visual footage and narration, moving image and audience, observation – by witnessship or memory – and experience; and (2) the politics of enjoyment and the law of transgression in the era of Trump.

 
 
 

The End of an Error 01 (video triptych): more information.

Acorus Calamus: more information.

Erased Mossadegh: more information.

Group exhibition: Reimagining Americana (Jan-March 2026)

My video installation, «The End of an Error», is screening in the Nation Faces: Reimagining Americana (curated by Trevor Slowinski) at the Hudson Milliner Art Salon gallery, Jan 17-March 17, 2026. Just up the Hudson in Hudson, New York.

 

An expanded screening of my Iran|Usa installation trilogy is slated for the night of Saturday, 28 February 2026, followed by Q&A plus discussion with Hudson Milliner audience.

Conference: Time, Art & Contemporary Subjectivity (11-12 December 2025)

 
 

Last week I attended and did a talk+screening in the two-day conference, «Time, Art & Contemporary Subjectivity», at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The program line-up:

DAY 1

Peter Osborne (Kingston University London). The I and the We (the You, the It, and the They): Subjectivity, Personhood and Thingness in Hegel, Benveniste, Freud and Marx

Anaïs Nony (Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study). Beyond preemptive time, towards a political ecology of minds in the age of AI

Peter Freund (Saint Mary’s College of California). The Productive Impasse of Synchronization

Pol Capdevila (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Who’s that? Exploring Subjectivity in Moving Portraiture

Gregorio Tenti (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Painting Deep Time. Art and Incommensurable Temporalities

Marta Echaves (Independent). K-Time

Maria Pinell Plana (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Together in rhythm. Experimental cinema and collectivity through Artistic Research


DAY 2

Mauro Carbone (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3). Subjectivation: individual, dividual, condividual

Alice Iacobone (University of St. Gallen). Minor Subjectivities, Nonlinear Temporalities. Aesthetics, Poetics and Politics in the Curatorial and Theoretical Work of Georges Didi-Huberman

Víctor Ramírez Tur (Universitat de Barcelona). What Does the Time of the Dead Awaken in Me? Mourning Intersubjectivities in Artistic Practice – Canceled

Sabel Gavaldon (MACBA). Surviving Liveness: Archives of Gesture and the Voguing Body

Marta Nijhuis (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3). Wasting Time, Making Time: Artistic Practice in the Age of Real-Time

Aimar Pérez Galí (Institut del Teatre de Barcelona). Anacronismos somáticos

DU-DA (Independent). Lenta estrella fugaz

 

Poetry Open Mic 2

Gypsy Lounge Barcelona open mic, this past Saturday night, presenting a vignette from the novel in progress. Reading aloud can be like pulling a painting off the easel and holding it to a mirror. You see more in reverse. As for the program, there was a lot of variety (a mix of poetry, prose, pantomime, song) and a nice turnout. And it seems, always newcomers and regulars.

 
 

Mudas Museum Exhibit De-installation

Our (May-October 2025) exhibit at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art closed today. (For more information and photos, see June 1, 2025 blog post.) Packing boxes are out, lights off for projections (back half of main room pictured below). What a process leading up to this show. Nearly four years since the initial proposal. Along the way, many many obstacles – some absurdities – we turned to benefits. Truly «retractive», in my vocabulary. Vitor did a Portuguese TV interview on the exhibit and will be publishing an article in a very good magazine. Next up: prepare the exhibit catalogue/book.

 
 
 
 

Poetry Open Mic

Gypsy Lounge Barcelona, first time. To wobble things up a little, I went to the open mic last night. Read a few pieces of performative poetry. Program a mix of poetry, stories, and live music. Nice vibe and turnout.

 

«The wager of the algorithm» just published in ARTEACTA journal, issue 13.

 
 

Driven by a twist of humor, a political annoyance, and a flight of fancy, I present this hybrid essay and artwork. Two ideas of artificial intelligence prevail today: one utopian, the other paranoid. My exposition endeavors to find a third path (artistic+political) beyond these two views by tampering with internal structural contradictions in the very logic of artificial intelligence itself.

My calculated misstep of academic prose «The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture» was just published in the SAR performance studies journal ARTEACTA (Czech Republic), this issue #13 on AI (and) Art: The Poetics of Prompting. Allusions to computation theory, art history, philosophy, and work I’ve done with AI and code give context for the central argument. Some experimentation with the conventions and limits of academic prose should be expected.

[View URL on computer only for proper formatting. Click link here:
The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture.]


ABSTRACT:
The fantasy of the algorithm and, by extension, artificial intelligence imagines that each performs by executing an operational task. Yet, based on its inherent computational structure, the digital performance fails to live up to its instrumental promise. This failure foregrounds an occasion for artistic intervention. “The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture” presents a theoretical statement (illustrated via artwork by the author) in which the overall exposition underscores a dialectic within instrumental reason itself. The “prompt” names a shorthand for the fulcrum of this problematic.

 

New Exhibition at Mudas Contemporary Art Museum (Portugal)

After four years of developments and preparations, our exhibition «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue» opened the evening of May 30 at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal. The show, a collaboration between the Barcelona-based art collective Adversorecto (Peter Freund and Werner Thöni) and Portuguese artist and professor Vítor Magalhães, runs May 30 - Oct 25, 2025. The opening intervention, «The Right Hand Doesn’t Know What the Left Hand Is Doing», a live performance art presentation featuring the trio, was launched during the May 30 opening.

 
 
 

WALL TEXT:
The Question of the Curator, or Three Torsions of Retraction 

Prohibition. It will have come down to an absence. The classical exhibition of visual art begins and ends with a prohibition: Do not touch. Touch, of course, between the work on display and the observer whose reflections will have been sparked by this withdrawal from physical and intellectual possession. The same prohibition will have applied, like the flip side of a coin, to the requisite space individuating the works themselves.

Inhibition. This pervasive inhibition will have created openings and formed a placeholder for the missing element that makes possible the artistic presentation: the organizing concept, the combinatorial of objects, the pouring rain outside, the shrinking gallery space, the delay of the lost spectator, the guard's outgrown shoe, the empty elevator, the intermittent flashing of the exit sign, the janitor's bucket behind the closing of the closet door, the death of the old mason…. In the end, as in the beginning, the placeholder will have signaled the undefined prime mover: the absent curator. And yet this absence remains, at bottom, a lacuna.

Exhibition. It will have been no accident that the three words – prohibition, inhibition, and exhibition – have related histories. The invited curator ex post facto will have lofted the unexpected concept of the decalogue over a previously proposed exhibit of ten pieces like a nautical fishing net. The curator's surprise net will have in turn made prohibition into the inspiration for merging the individuated pieces into new works. The original exhibit proposal presented a «bout» between Karl and Ady: Marx and his furry companion. A beard and a dog. A forest paradise. A fashion show. A twitching neck and shoulders below an unseen beard. In the curatorial net, the dog will have turned herself inside out in order to reappear as a beard made of billiard sticks. The gallery rooms become a pool table for a match at the precise moment of initial contact. Crackk!


Quick tour of «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue», an Adversorecto + Magalhães exhibition 2025 (Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art, Madeira, Portugal).

Poetry Reading

I participated in a reading at a local English bookshop for a writing competition. The true triumph: first time walking down stairs into a cultural venue since the busted leg and surgeries during the three months prior. The nice surprise in the end: winning the poetry competition.

Family collecting me after the reading.

What do you mean by what I say? :: encontro em torno do livro «M [objecto]» ::

As the opening of our exhibit at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art (Madeira, Portugal) approaches, a publication from my collaboration last year with artist and professor Vitor Magalhães recently came out. The publication creatively documents an intervention that was presented at the University of Madeira in conjunction with Vitor’s Mudas 2023-24 exhibition, to which I’d contributed a fictional text for an artist book and an audio installation. For the intervention, I made a video installation. A few sample pages from the publication are below.

« ZERO (0): A LOVE STORY » : WORK IN PROGRESS


Zero (0): A Love Story is a novella written entirely with numbers. The more than 200-page hand-stenciled book recounts a tale of two characters and the serial rendezvous of their enumerative affair. 

The first character embodies a succession of numbers belonging to the phi (aka Fibonacci) sequence, the traditional gold standard of aesthetic proportion. Over the course of the tale, the ordinal trajectory of this figure’s fall in love starts from a 21-digit number and proceeds in reverse, moving progressively backwards across 100 integers until eventually arriving at and continuing to descend beyond zero (0). 

The second character takes the form of corrected errors appearing in the positive expression of the first character’s integers. These visible erasures and amendments move forward in the opposite direction within the phi sequence. The book thereby begins with zero errors, then moves to one error, then one again, then two errors, then three, then five, then eight and so forth until the redressed mistakes reach the limit of digits in the numbers the first character happens to express at a given instant in the series. At this threshold, the second character reverses its restorative course back toward zero and then from zero proceeds again upward through the Fibonacci sequence. The second figure repeats this to-and-fro pattern oscillating like a breath or tide that continuously permeates the ongoing retrocession of the first figure. 

The narrative arc provides on each page a singular encounter between the two characters who advance hand in hand as if ships at every moment inseparably passing in the night. 

Zero (0): A Love Story will take the form of a physical book as well as a series of projected still images.


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« Address Unknown » : Work in Progress

Lead (Pb) envelope (41cm x 27cm) to be used for «Address Unknown»

«Address Unknown» (2024)

Herein lies an endeavor to transform into a sublime object a vexing compensatory gift sent from a close family relative – a personal portrait made from compiled childhood photographs. The concept of this work-in-progress, titled «Address Unknown», is realized according to the following process.

A photo-collage poster print (51cm x 41cm), the original portrait gift, is carefully cut up along the edges of its assembled individual photographs. The now-separated images are each numbered on the back based on their position in the original collage layout. The exact pattern of cutting and numbering is duplicated on a thick blank translucent polyethylene film sheet. The cut and numbered pieces of thick translucent paper are subsequently re-taped into the initial overall collage configuration so as to preserve the original gift’s compositional form, now devoid of its content.

In the next steps, the set of (19) cut photographs are enveloped, stored, and sealed inside three layers of materials. First, the photographs are placed into a 37cm x 24cm envelope made from tin foil (aluminum paper) in order to mirror the images back on themselves (not to mention, protect them against alien observation). Second, the tin foil layer containing the images is inserted and sealed inside a 41cm x 27cm envelope made from 2mm lead (Pb) paper. (Even the x-ray vision of Superman will be unable to penetrate the surface.)

Finally, the cut photographs – duly and respectfully protected by the two layers of enveloping materials – are placed inside a hardwood box constructed to match the size of the original uncut collage (51cm x 41cm). In the end, the box is to be permanently sealed with a hardwood backing. A translucent edge will be applied to the re-taped acrylic duplicate so as to make the dimensions of the numbered acrylic sheet and those of the original portrait gift correspond as precisely as possible. The box and sheet ensemble will ultimately be wall-mounted side-by-side as a single piece.

Here at rest, the gift – including its fraught, ambivalent gesture – will be transfigured.

Materials + Process
Showing the materials and process to-date

Numbered cut photos

Photos into tin foil envelope

Tin foil envelope containing cut photos (37cm x 24cm)

Tin foil envelope put into lead envelope

Sealed lead envelope (41cm x 27cm)

Empty box, without wood backing (51cm x 41cm)

Lead envelope in open box

Left: Box (51cm x 41cm). Right: Translucent composition (edges to be finished, 51cm x 41cm). (Total dim: 51cm x 100cm.)

Approximated assembly before creating the final enclosure of a transparent vitrine fitted exactly to the wooden canvas with its multi-leveled contents centered and affixed to the canvas interior.

 

New librito (booklet) from Adversorecto: « teenytension: a fairy tale »

 

Sample page from «Teenytension: A Fairy Tale» (2024)

 

The Adversorecto collective has produced another librito (booklet), «Teenytension», a pamphlet that experiments with image-text relations via an original fairy tale, images, and page layout. Available in pdf and print versions, the librito extends the concept of artistic retraction into a pre-retractive state: tension, suspension, stretching, longing. Why is Elastic Man so darned alluring?

From the librito series, two other examples by Adversorecto:
• L’Auca d’en Felix
• Crescendo Cantabile: Retracted Descriptions + Score (Partitura)