As part of our continuing collaboration with Northwestern University's Department of Art Theory and Practice, the Graham is pleased to host Joshua Simon, who will present The Kids Want Communism, a yearlong program of exhibitions marking 99 years since the October Revolution, which he initiated in collaboration with State of Concept Athens, Free/Slow University of Warsaw, Tranzit Prague, Skuc gallery in Ljubljana, the Visual Culture Research Center in Kiev, and MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam. The talk will outline how the communist horizon and real existing socialism can inform our understanding of the current social and cultural, political, and economic realities we are facing with the implosion of the neoliberal order. Simon's research in the past several years has been focused on notions of materiality and subjectivity, therefore, this talk will move between animism and productivism, commodity fetish and debt economy, double negation and metabolism, shock work and the dividual.

Joshua Simon is director and chief curator at MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam, as well as a co-founding editor of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa based Maayan publishing. He is the author of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), and editor of Ruti Sela: For The Record (Archive Books, 2015). Recent curatorial projects include: Factory Fetish at Westspace, Melbourne, co-curated with Liang Luscombe in 2015; Roee Rosen: Group Exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, co-curated with Gilad Melzer in 2016; and The Kids Want Communism at MoBY in 2016. From 2011-2013, he was a Vera List Center for Art and Politics fellow.

This lecture is part of the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University Visiting Artist Lecture Series, and is made possible with generous support from The Myers Foundations and the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the arts.

Image: El Lissitzky, Poster for the Russian Exhibition (Russische Ausstellung), Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, March 24- April 28, 1929.

The Graham would like to thank Perrier for supporting our public programs.