Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman – Some Notes on the Fires to Come

Some Notes on the Fires to Come

The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at the University of New York. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on themes and questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), The Impagavel Divide (Workshop of Political Imagination and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has performed shows and lectures in important artistic spaces, such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), MASP (São Paulo), Guggenheim (New York) and MoMa (New York). She also wrote and created for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; 2023 Venice Biennale, 2017 and Documenta 14, São Paulo Biennale, 2023) and published in art spaces such as Canadian Art, Texte zur Kunst and e-flux.

Arjuna Neuman was born on an airplane, that’s why he has so many passports. He is an artist, filmmaker, and writer.

Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthaal Extra City, Antwerp; Munch Museum, Oslo; Kunsthalle Wien; Macba Barcelona; CCA Glasgow and Glasgow International, Scotland; Showroom Gallery, London; Belkin Gallery and Or Gallery, Vancouver; TPW Gallery, Toronto amongst others. Recent biennials include Hacer Noche, Mexico; Ural Industrial Biennial, Russia; Lubumbashi Biennial, DWC; Bergen Assembly, Norway; Sharjah Biennial, UAE; Venice Biennial, Italy and Qalandia Biennial, Palestine. Notable group shows include the Madre Museum, Naples Italy; Ludwig Forum Museum, Germany; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; MAAT, Portugal; Museum of

Image and Sound, Brazil; Whitechapel Gallery, Bold Tendencies and LUX in London amongst many others. Film festivals include Berlinale Forum Expanded, Docslisboa, Third Horizon, Images Festival and many others.

His work is held in the Belkin Collection, IAC Lyon, and Platform UK collection. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, Into the Pines Press, The Journal for New Writing, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings, World Records, Umbau and e-flux. He has a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books. He has mixtapes essays on Dublab, Radio Alhara and NTS.

And he is the co-founder owww.archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees.