Lilly Markaki
Writing
*Text written to accompany SUBLIME RAGE, an exhibition curated by Heloise Chassepot and Maya Shoham, gathering the work(s) of Tom Bull, Heloise Chassepot, Naia Combary, Ndayé Kouagou, Rafael Moreno, Paul Paillet, Katie Shannon, Maya Shoham, Temitayo Shonibare and Koyo Waldorf. 9 French Place, London, May 27 — June 9, 2022.
“This is not a game: On Aria Dean’s Abattoir,” Elephant Magazine, Feb. 21, 2024
“Desiring Collectivities,” ARTWORKS, Issue 5, ed. Alexia Alexandropoulou, Ariana Kalliga, Caterina Stamou, Despoina Tzanou (SNF), 2024
“Will the Complicit Body Please Stand Up?” ArtReview, November 27, 2023
“Review of Black Enlightenment by Surya Parekh,” LSE Review of Books, Oct. 18, 2023
“It Takes Two to Butoh,” Motor Dance Journal,
2/3: Duets & Dialogues (Nov. 2023): 52-57
“Anna Uddenberg’s Home Wreckers,”
Elephant Magazine, October 18, 2023
“Against Their Economies of Death and for a Poet(h)ics of the Passage,” Korazon, Vol.2 (2023): 18-21
“Porn Rap(s): Everything you ever wanted to say about porn, but were too afaid to be asked,”
Spike Art Magazine, April 11, 2023
“Review of On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant,” LSE Review of Books, May 16, 2023
“Dark Advances: ‘Affect aliens’, revolutionary despair, and the imperative to go wild,” 3:AM Magazine, Jan. 2, 2023
“What If Everyone Had A Home?” Open Space Contemporary, May 4, 2022
“Sublime Rage: Ours, Not Yours,”
Kuba Paris, May 26, 2022
*Text written to accompany SUBLIME RAGE, an exhibition curated by Heloise Chassepot and Maya Shoham, gathering the work(s) of Tom Bull, Heloise Chassepot, Naia Combary, Ndayé Kouagou, Rafael Moreno, Paul Paillet, Katie Shannon, Maya Shoham, Temitayo Shonibare and Koyo Waldorf. 9 French Place, London, May 27 — June 9, 2022.
“Grace, not Gravity: Bas Jan Ader’s Fall Pieces,” Platform Journal, Vol.15, Issue 1: Balancing Acts (Fall 2021): 154-158
“Headpetting” (poem), Catalogue of Failures,
Issue 2, December 2021
“Dark Halo Dreams/To be, more or less,” PALA, Issue I: Dark Matter, Glasgow: Pala Press, 2021, pp. 9-11
“Next of Kin/I Choose You,” Love Spells & Rituals for Another World, London: Independent Publishing
Network, 2021, pp. 26-29
“Review of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan,” LSE Review of Books, May 31, 2019
“Review of Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi): Art, Anthropology
and Mongol Futurism by Hermione Spriggs (ed.),”
LSE Review of Books, Nov. 29, 2018
“Review of Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World by William Davies,” LSE Review of Books,
September 24, 2018
“Review of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic by Emily Apter,” LSE Review
of Books, July 11, 2018
“Review of Courting Dissolution: Adumbration, Alterity and the Dislocation of Sacrifice from Space to Image by Michael Lent,” LSE Review of Books, April 19, 2018
“Every mouth needs filling: Hilton Als’s White Girls,”
Product Magazine, April 2016
“Giorgio Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm,” Product Magazine, Dec. 10, 2015
Editorial
Lilly Markaki w/ Sami Khatib eds., “Decolonisation is Not a Metaphor”: A Reader for Palestine, Berlin: CutPress, 2024
Lilly Markaki, ed., Deleuzine, Vol. 2: She-Dogs, London: Self-published, 2023
Lilly Markaki, ed., Deleuzine, Vol. 1: Sprouting in All Directions…, London: Selfpublished, 2021
Lilly Markaki w/ Caroline Harris, eds., Love Spells & Rituals for Another World, London: Independent Publishing Network, 2021
“E-flux Reader: Closeness,” E-flux Journal, March 26, 2020
Lilly Markaki, ed., The Modernist Review, Vol. 5, Modernism Beyond the Literary (Winter 2019)
Talks/Lectures
“Thinking Water from Below (A Response to Sonia Levy’s We Marry You, O Sea, As a
Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion)”, Royal College of Art, March 3, 2024
“Sex in the Event of Happiness,”
LEVEL Platform, October 19, 2023
“Escaping the Inescapable: Contemporary Speculative Poet(h)ics of the Passage,”
15th International Deleuze and Guattari Conference. Institute for
Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, July 10-12, 2023
“Object Lessons in Xenosolidarity,”
LEVEL Platform, June 7, 2023
“Dark Advances: Cosmic Danger Music, ‘affect aliens’ and revolutionary despair.”
Performance lecture delivered as part of Emilia Tapprest - Zhōuwei Network, curated
by Felice Moramarco for Art City Bologna 2022. Centro di Ricera Musicale Teatro
San Leonardo, May 12, 2022
“Things That Feel & Technologies of Romance.” Invited talk, School of Media and
Communication, London College of Fashion, March 4, 2022
GDS Talks: Entangled Encounters: Artists Lito Kattou and Petros Moris in
conversation w/ Lilly Markaki and Despoina Tzanou. Galeria
Duarte Sequeira, Braga,
Portugal, October 8, 2020
“Notes Towards an Erotics of Indeterminacy,” Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy (Transdisciplinary Conference). University of Dundee, Scotland, November 13-15, 2020
“A Crisis is an Opportunity,” 7th International Conference of the EAM: CRiSiS. University of Leuven, Belgium,
September 17-19, 2020
“Folding Time with Duchamp & Deleuze,” The Modernist Studies in Asia Network 2nd International Conference. Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Sept. 12-14, 2019
“Back to the Future: Reflections on Life and Art,” Memories of the Future Conference. The Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, March 29-30, 2019
“Kisses, not Stones: The (Readymade) Real in Marcel Duchamp,” 6th International Conference of the EAM: Realism(s) of the Avant-Garde and Modernism. WWU Münster, Germany, September 5-7, 2018
“Marcel Duchamp: A Poetics of Becoming,” 2nd CEMS Conference: Temporalities of Modernism. Babes-Bolybai University, Romania, May 2-4, 2018.
“A little game between ‘I’ and ‘me’: Marcel Duchamp, Autonomy and the Self,” (reworked) 46th Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. University of Louisville, February 22-24, 2018
“A little game between ‘I’ and ‘me’: Marcel Duchamp, Autonomy and the Self,” The 7th Annual BAMS Postgraduate Conference: New Work in Modernist Studies. Leeds University, December 15, 2017
“(Collaborating) Here. Right Now.” 12-hour Studio Jamming: Artists’ Collaborations in Scotland Symposium. Cooper Gallery, Dundee, July 25, 2014
Radio Work
Resident Host/Producer @A Reader’s Catalogue, Stegi Radio, Onassis Foundation, Athens, Greece, May 2021 — Present
Founding Member & Content Curator, No Bounds Radio, 2020–2021
Public Programming/Curatorial
Shuruq Harb - Al Mashrou’, Storming Haven x Demo Moving Image x CCD Palestine, Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths University, March 1, 2024
*A group show featuring works by Spiros Kokkonis, Candice Nembhard (okcandice), Kari Rosenfeld, Lou Lou Sainsbury and Kwamé Sorrell. The exhibition opened with an evening of readings/performances by: Lucie de Bréchard, Toni Brell, Genevieve Costello, Danya, Jesse Darling, Susan Finlay, Céline Ma thieu, Kari Rosenfeld, Anna Winslow. It closed with an evening of readings/performances by: Sabeen Chaudhry, Francesca Flora, Nobile, Céline Mathieu, Circular Ruins ft. oxi pëng, Sarah Messerschmidt, Eric Peter, and Kari Rosenfeld. The finissage was co-curated with Felice Moramarco.
With a distinct, sex-positive approach, Love Spells & Rituals for Another World presents a cluster of events that together re-address the question of desire from the perspective of the contemporary moment. Engaging with queer, feminist and decolonial approaches and drawing on developments in cultural studies more broadly, we move not just beyond Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’ but beyond Freud himself, and invite ourselves to think of desire as ‘schizo-’ instead: “A primary relay to individuated social identity, as in coupling, family, reproduction, and other sites of personal history,” desire, as Lauren Berlant notes in Desire/Love, is “also the impulse that most destabilises people, putting them into plots beyond their control”. As a kind of evental magick, this destabilisation also binds us together in unexpected ways, carrying the power to perform the impossible: it “reorganises worlds.” How, we ask, do we call on this power of desire, reinvigorated today by black, feminist, and queer perspectives, to design rituals that further enable communities of difference and bring about another world? Keynote Speakers: Keti Chukhrov (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow); Mijke van der Drift (Royal College of Art, London; BAK, Utrecht); Antke Engel (Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin); Chandra Frank (Goldsmiths University, London); Nat Raha (Edinburgh College of Art).
Grace Screening 2: Susan Schuppli, Trace Evidence,
*Public research series, co-organised with Prof. Olga Goriunova. With: Zach Blas, Andrew Goffey, Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji. Funded by the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway University of London, UK.
*A series of five lectures and workshops, co-organised with Prof. Olga Goriunova. With: Erica Scourti, Annet Dekker, Kristoffer Gansing, Katrina Sluis, and Nicola Triscott. Funded by the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway University of London, UK.
Shuruq Harb - Al Mashrou’, Storming Haven x Demo Moving Image x CCD Palestine, Stuart Hall Building, Goldsmiths University, March 1, 2024
Sami Khatib - Singularity Effects: Undoing History from Above, Senate House, London, Dec. 14, 2023
Dark Advances: ‘Affect Aliens’ & Revolutionary Despair, Motto Books, Berlin, 6 August—11 September 2022
*A group show featuring works by Spiros Kokkonis, Candice Nembhard (okcandice), Kari Rosenfeld, Lou Lou Sainsbury and Kwamé Sorrell. The exhibition opened with an evening of readings/performances by: Lucie de Bréchard, Toni Brell, Genevieve Costello, Danya, Jesse Darling, Susan Finlay, Céline Ma thieu, Kari Rosenfeld, Anna Winslow. It closed with an evening of readings/performances by: Sabeen Chaudhry, Francesca Flora, Nobile, Céline Mathieu, Circular Ruins ft. oxi pëng, Sarah Messerschmidt, Eric Peter, and Kari Rosenfeld. The finissage was co-curated with Felice Moramarco.Sensing Things / Mutant Futures, ICA, London, May 12, 2022
*The future is not what it used to be. Ours is a time of unprecedented ecological devastation, of global civil war, of mass surveillance and the dominion of predictive algorithms. A world in trouble. This transdisciplinary workshop invites participants to experiment in imaginative world-building beyond this backdrop of crisis. Embracing the creative possibilities of fictioning, we will attempt to temporarily release ourselves of our human skins and tendencies, so as to inhabit an ecology of things instead. Romancing the material world, and tapping into the possibilities of new media technologies, we will play and work together to bring about possibilities for thinking and (re)making the future. Guiding our inquiry will be two questions: How might perspectives alien to the human allow us to rethink our relationship to the world and to one another? Second: how might this other knowledge feed into and transform our creative practices into ones capable of sustaining new and better modes of coexisting?EVERYWHERE IT IS MACHINES, Feb.— June 2021, School of Performing & Digital Arts, RHUL
*Titled after a line from Anti-Oedipus (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, EVERYWHERE IT IS MACHINES was a PGR-led seminar series investigating the application of digital technologies across art and the humanities. Taking place between February and June 2021, the series consisted of (virtual) seminars engaging invited speakers for talks, presentations and workshops, all designed to showcase how digital aesthetics/humanities operate in practice, while contributing to a broader conversation around what living, thinking, and creating with and through the digital might mean today. With: Amy Earhart & Toniesha Taylor, Pekka Airaxin, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Cornelia Sollfrank, Mercedes Bunz, William O’Hara, Christina Jauernik, Maya Man, Aouefa Amoussouvi, Genevieve Costello & Giuliana Kiersz. The series funded by the School of Performing & Digital Arts, Royal Holloway University of London. Led by Lilly Markaki and developed in collaboration with Lucía Camacho Acevedo, Genevieve Costello, Lisa Moravec and Zlatina Nicolova.Love Spells & Rituals for Another World, Virtual Symposium, May 28-30, 2020, School of Performing & Digital Arts, RHUL
*2020 marks 100 years since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” A turning point in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the essay complicated the pursuit of pleasure led by the sexual instinct or libido, ushering in a second, competing desire that moves life in the opposite direction and down a path of negativity and destruction, articulated by Freud as the ‘death drive’.With a distinct, sex-positive approach, Love Spells & Rituals for Another World presents a cluster of events that together re-address the question of desire from the perspective of the contemporary moment. Engaging with queer, feminist and decolonial approaches and drawing on developments in cultural studies more broadly, we move not just beyond Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’ but beyond Freud himself, and invite ourselves to think of desire as ‘schizo-’ instead: “A primary relay to individuated social identity, as in coupling, family, reproduction, and other sites of personal history,” desire, as Lauren Berlant notes in Desire/Love, is “also the impulse that most destabilises people, putting them into plots beyond their control”. As a kind of evental magick, this destabilisation also binds us together in unexpected ways, carrying the power to perform the impossible: it “reorganises worlds.” How, we ask, do we call on this power of desire, reinvigorated today by black, feminist, and queer perspectives, to design rituals that further enable communities of difference and bring about another world? Keynote Speakers: Keti Chukhrov (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow); Mijke van der Drift (Royal College of Art, London; BAK, Utrecht); Antke Engel (Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin); Chandra Frank (Goldsmiths University, London); Nat Raha (Edinburgh College of Art).