22 August 2026
Queer Sex Worker Shorts
Carnal Productions
A screening of short films by queer sex workers, who reclaim the authorship of intimacy.
Hard Labour
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
33 Results for Abjection | Nihility
The various incarnations of nihilist thinking that popped up from time to time through the history of Arika events can be explored here in the context of work that deals with the body, abjection and performance. Episode 2: A Special Form of Darkness took the ideas of Abjection and Nihility to heart and most of the events had some relationship with this theme. Some highlights: Junko’s intense vocal performance, Taku Unami’s absurdist cardboard box theatre piece and Mattin and Ray Brassier’s experiment in self-organisation, handing over the final evening of Instal 10 to the audience.
16 – 19 November 2017
Tramway
Kinning Park Complex
Many Studios
Episode 9: Other Worlds Already Exist
4 days of performances, discussions, workshops, screenings with mutant dancers, prison abolitionist poets, transfeminist revolutionaries, haunted noise, science fiction, sex worker resistance, crip erotics, radical pornography and militant fiction.
18 November 2017
Tramway
Being for Others
Samuel R. Delany
Chip’s written some of the greatest of all Sci-Fi and Fantasy—page turning character driven diamond-hard novels and short stories: each a lens that refracts our real-life struggles and desires.
Episode 9:
Other Worlds Already Exist
27 September 2014
Tramway
Speculum Orum
M Lamar
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
Episode 6:
Make a Way Out of No Way
21 April 2013
Tramway
Unfree Improvisation / Compulsive Freedom
Mattin Ray Brassier
How do you know what you want? Should freedom be doing what you ought, not doing what you want? How might a philosopher and artist turn this thinking into an enabling condition in the context of noise and improvisation?
Episode 4:
Freedom is a Constant Struggle
5 May 2012
Whitney Museum of American Art
Cosmic Pessimism
Eugene Thacker
A performed lecture concerned with Renaissance occult (musical) thinkers of the cosmic who put forward the notion of the “disharmony of the world”
A survey is a process of listening
26 February 2012
Tramway
Keiji Haino
Keiji Haino
Torrential, wrenching wordless wails, guttural screams and roars, a Haino solo vocal performance.
Episode 2:
A Special Form of Darkness
26 February 2012
Tramway
Inhuman Grand-Guignol Theatre
Taku Unami
Inspired by the supernatural horror of H. P. Lovecraft, black metal and a sense of worry as to what constitutes an object, or a world.
Episode 2:
A Special Form of Darkness
26 February 2012
Tramway
Cosmic Pessimism
Eugene Thacker
A chat with Eugene Thacker. Can we rethink the world as unthinkable, and without us?
Episode 2:
A Special Form of Darkness
26 February 2012
Tramway
All the Colours of the Dark, Except Black
Evan Calder Williams
A chat, with examples (Zola, H. P. Lovecraft, Hammer Horror), about blackness and the sheer stupid thickness of what has no profundity whatsoever.
Episode 2:
A Special Form of Darkness
25 February 2012
Tramway
Junko
Junko
Harrowing but musical confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.
Episode 2:
A Special Form of Darkness
25 February 2012
Tramway
Rehearsal after Reflect Soft Matte Discourse
Clara López Imri Sandström Malin Arnell
A performed reflection on Malin’s previous re-enacting of a super influential landmark of performance art from the French feminist and artist Gina Pane.
Episode 2:
A Special Form of Darkness