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“War After War,” with Simon Leung and Barry Schwabsky

Since 1992, artist Simon Leung has made a number of works about, or in collaboration with, Warren Niesłuchowski, among them the 2011 film “War After War,” which traces Niesłuchowski’s life as an itinerant dependent on the generosity of friends. In the same year, writer and art critic Barry Schwabsky’s “The Perpetual Guest”—a portrait of Niesłuchowski framed around questions of radical hospitality—appeared in “The Nation.” This event will use several short clips from Leung’s film as a point of departure for a discussion of what it means to live a life of “homelessness” by birth and by choice in the postwar era. Q&A to follow.

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Simon Leung is a Hong Kong–born artist living in New York and Los Angeles. His foremost concern as an artist is how “the ethical,” broadly defined, can be thought and traced. "War After War" is currently on view at the Queens Museum together with "POE," a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe. In the latter, Niesłuchowski plays an amalgam of Poe characters and Yvonne Rainer plays Poe.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include "The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting" (Sternberg Press, 2020) and "Gillian Carnegie" (Lund Humphries, 2020). Forthcoming is a collection of poetry, "A Feeling of And" (Black Square Editions, 2021).

Dec 5, 2020 12:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)