Presentations by Hannah Black, Ghalya Saadawi, Adelita Husni-Bey, and Antonia Majaca. Moderated by Ciarán Finlayson.
There will be a revolution or there will not. If the latter these poems were nothing but entertainments. If the former it will succeed or fail. … If the latter these poems went down fighting. If the former it will feature awful confrontations with former friends and there will be further manifestoes new slogans ongoing occupations and communes and lovers will be enemies.”
—Joshua Clover, “The Fire Sermon,” Red Epic
What makes the work of art different from other forms of work? What conditions determine its production, circulation, and consumption? Does art’s exceptional social and historical status grant it access to something beyond its material constitution, or does the claim to aesthetic exceptionality conceal the infrastructural relations of labor, extraction, and dispossession upon which artistic production depends?
The notion of art’s autonomy has long organized the distinction between artistic labor and other forms of work. Marxian critiques of art understand this distinction as a contradiction internal to capitalist modernity, where culture appears as an autonomous sphere precisely insofar as its material conditions are rendered secondary, external, or invisible.
This panel considers what happens when the autonomy of art is approached not as an aesthetic premise but as a social relation that is produced through institutions and forms of power. It asks how struggles over artistic labor, political identification, institutional legitimacy, and cultural freedom expose the contradictions through which art is produced as both commodity and critique, instrument and autonomous form. In making these conditions visible, the panel considers how practices of refusal, collective organization, and infrastructural transformation might interrupt the relations that sustain artistic autonomy. Drawing on workers’ and feminist movements, anticolonial cultural production, and forms of collective life, value, and exchange in which culture is inseparable from the social relations through which it is produced and sustained, the speakers ask, what other economies of production and circulation become imaginable when cultural practice is both understood and organized differently from its modern articulation?
The respective presentations will be folllowed by a moderated discussion and Q&A with the audience.
This event is held on the occasion of Combat Breathing Vol II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics - a multisite platform, spanning film screenings, critical discussions, and focused workshops, that unfolds throughout October 2026 at Anthology Film Archives, New York University, and Wendy's Subway. Curated by KJ Abudu and Adam HajYahia.
