On Friends and Strangers
Glenn Ligon and Thelma Golden
The artistic exchanges between Glenn Ligon and Thelma Golden that unfolded in the 1990s and early 2000s have had a lasting impact within the field of art history. From Ligon’s inclusion in Golden’s groundbreaking Black Male (1994–95) exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art to Golden’s curation of the debut of Ligon’s Stranger paintings (1996–ongoing) at the Studio Museum in Harlem, their collaborations demonstrate the profound role of interpersonal relationships and community in shaping both artistic and curatorial practices. Their conversation offers a glimpse into the shared histories, mutual influences, and evolving dialogues that continue to shape their lifelong friendship. The talk preceded Ligon’s honoring later that evening at the Museum’s annual ArtCrush gala.
Bluhm-Kaul Keynote
Francis Kéré
The work of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Francis Kéré demonstrates that thoughtful design is rooted in community engagement and social responsibility. Kéré’s keynote presentation will explore the concept of togetherness, highlighting the social and cultural importance of public spaces in fostering connection and shared experiences, as well as the collaborative processes essential to their creation. Drawing on his wide-ranging projects—from schools and cultural centers to civic buildings—he will reflect on architecture’s essential role in shaping inclusive, collaborative environments that support and strengthen community life.
The Layered History of Buildings
José Esparza Chong Cuy and Frida Escobedo
The work of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Francis Kéré demonstrates that thoughtful design is rooted in community engagement and social responsibility. Kéré’s keynote presentation will explore the concept of togetherness, highlighting the social and cultural importance of public spaces in fostering connection and shared experiences, as well as the collaborative processes essential to their creation. Drawing on his wide-ranging projects—from schools and cultural centers to civic buildings—he will reflect on architecture’s essential role in shaping inclusive, collaborative environments that support and strengthen community life.
Off-Modernism
Aria Dean and Courtney J. Martin
Leading voices in contemporary art and critical theory, artist and writer Aria Dean and foundation director and art historian Courtney J. Martin engage in a critical exchange that reframes legacies of modernism from within. Through the lens of Dean’s research and her forthcoming performance The Color Scheme (Performa Biennial 2025) they consider how contemporary practices can intervene in, and complicate, inherited aesthetic and ideological structures.
Sympathy for the Devil in the Machine
Paul Chan
Since 2018, artist Paul Chan has been developing and working in the machine learning space. He wanted to understand what this new kind of computation could and could not do for artists and writers. He also wanted to know if there were other ways machine intelligence could play a role in an artist’s life beyond empowering them to generate “content” at scale, ad nauseam, in perpetuity. In this presentation, Chan demonstrated the latest version of Paul′ (the ′ symbol, or “prime,” is a mathematical notation for denoting a value as derivative of some original). Chan calls Paul′ a “synthetic self-portrait,” or “synth” for short. Chan talks about the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and thanatological influences that have shaped Paul’, and give an account of his evolving understanding of what a “machine” is, what “intelligence” means, and how life (biological or synthetic) becomes enlivened or deadened by the quality of that understanding.
After On Blue
P. Staff and Jamieson Webster
Following the performance of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Rafiq Bhatia’s On Blue, artist P. Staff and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster reflect on the intersections of dreams and consciousness, and mortality and breath, in a moment defined by the shared vulnerabilities of environmental harm. For Staff, death is an antonym of power—a transformative force that transcends societal, physical, and existential boundaries. Webster, meanwhile, draws on psychoanalytic theory to examine the psychological and poetic dimensions of breath as a site of interdependence.
Art and Consciousness after AGI
Anil Seth and Zoë Hitzig
Neuroscientist Anil Seth and poet and technology researcher Zoë Hitzig delve into the evolving concept of consciousness as it relates to the rise of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Their dialogue touches on the boundaries between human and machine cognition, the future of AGI, and how the development of intelligent machines may challenge our understanding of the mind, subjectivity, and art.
Discover more about AIR at airaspen.org
