Momus: The Podcast

This episode features M. Neelika Jayawardane, a writer and scholar whose work is informed by Southern Africa’s history, and by contemporary artists and their visual worlds. Jayawardane speaks to Sky Goodden about her recent Momus feature on artist Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy (2015–ongoing), a work of collective mourning that became newly resonant amid the attempts to silence it that played out at this year's Venice Biennale.Their conversation asks what it means to continue when neither justice nor resolution can be taken for granted. Jayawardane reflects on writing as a form of responsibility—to artists, to readers, and to one's own experience—and on why some stories demand that the writer step fully into the frame.Together, Jayawardane and Goodden discuss the unfinished work of repair, the obligations and pleasures of being read, and the unexpected role that lap swimming plays in the writing process. Jayawardane talks about using her voice to survive, and finding language for what cannot be neatly resolved.Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, PHI, for supporting our work.

In this episode, we feature Legacy Russell, the writer, curator, and Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, an artist-driven non-profit space in New York City. As a cultural critic she has published the books Glitch Feminism (Verso Books, 2020) and Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us (Verso Books, 2024), which questions how we define Blackness through mediated material. For the podcast, Russell reads from Lorraine O’Grady’s iconic essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” first published in Afterimage in 1992, and collected in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (Routledge, 1994). Russell speaks with Sky Goodden about her relationship to O’Grady’s essay—one that “came before its time and carried us into the future”—and touches on the central conceit that perhaps also explains its controversy: “Lorraine truly believed in a culture that would allow for contestation.” But, Legacy reflects, perhaps our culture hasn’t caught up to her yet. Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, the artist Cui Jinzhe, for her support of our work.Thanks to Legacy Russell for her contribution to this season.And thank you to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.

Season 8 of Momus: The Podcast launches with Ajay Kurian, an artist, critic, and co-founder of New Crits, a platform for artist mentorship. Kurian speaks with Sky Goodden about a text by Robert Pogue Harrison on the art of the zen garden (Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 2008), and about his artist-writer influences including Robert Smithson, Paul Chan, and Hannah Black. He also touches on his recent response (in Cultured Mag) to Dean Kissick's screed on identity politics (in Harper’s), and what it required to “clean the public restroom” in the wake of Kissick’s feature going viral. “I think I was more upset by how bad the piece was than the ideas in the piece. […] I think especially for artists of color, like none of that stuff is new to us. And to think that there was massive progress … it could all be taken away in a second. I'm not holding it as new solid ground.”Kurian’s solo exhibition Peanuts (Deluxe) is on view at 47 Canal in New York through March 22. Many thanks for this episode’s sponsors, CONTACT Photography Festival, Plural Art Fair, and Workman Arts, for their support of our work.Thank you to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.

Esteemed critic and writer Claudia La Rocco speaks to Lauren Wetmore about being a “dance partisan” and how “language can nail things down in a way that dance doesn’t.” This wide-ranging conversation touches on artists including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Simone Forti, and Moriah Evans, through critics including Jill Johnston and Megan Metcalf, to consider how dance and writing move through different institutions and histories. La Rocco reads American choreographer Susan Rethorst’s “Dailiness” from A Choreographic Mind: Autobodygraphical Writings (University of the Arts, Helsinki, 2015), which she describes as a text that “was formative for me but still fits me pretty well, and relates to both how I think about writing, and what is so special about dance.” Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor, The Blue Building.

Joshua Schwebel speaks to long-time collaborator Lauren Wetmore about their shared interest in closing the gap between how art is discursively framed and what it actually does. Schwebel’s artistic practice stems from a deep need to understand the world, coupled with an allergy to authority. “Art is rhetorically positioned as radical,” notes Schwebel, “but what we're doing is advancing capitalism for people who benefit from it and this is not in our interest as artists or workers.” With Nizan Shaked’s Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022) as a prompt, Schwebel and Wetmore talk about their upcoming book project, The Employee (forthcoming from Art Metropole in 2025). They also discuss The Paydirt Seminars, a series of talks dedicated to examining the intersections between art, finance, and resource extraction that Schwebel has organized as part of his current exhibition One Hand Washes the Other at Struts Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick.Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors, NSCAD University, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, and Esker Foundation.

Palestinian-American artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi speaks with Lauren Wetmore about the political implication of form through two texts: Tbakhi’s own piece "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide" (Protean Magazine, 2023), and Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif’s “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” (The Volta, 2013). “In times of extreme crisis we end up bumping against particular limitations of art,” reflects Tbakhi, while also reminding us that “the idea of artistic engagement with moments of crisis has been curtailed and limited by state powers and oppressive ideologies in many different forms.” This episode continues the Podcast’s platforming of Palestinian voices in line with Momus’s ongoing commitment to PACBI.Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Daniel Faria Gallery.All episodes are available on momus.ca, and through Google Podcasts, Stitcher, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Launching Season 7, Elvia Wilk, an essayist, critic, and novelist, talks to Sky Goodden about the decision to quit writing—if only to be able to start again. In discussing rejection, the changing conditions of the field, and the denuding of successful female writers, Wilk also touches on the authors who have modeled quitting ("the authors of the no"), or who have mitigated against their own exposure, including Olivia Sudjic, Enrique Vila-Matas, Rachel Cusk, and Elena Ferrante.Thank you to Elvia Wilk for her contribution to this season.Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: Night Gallery and the AGYU.

For the 50th (!) episode of Momus: The Podcast, Lauren Wetmore speaks to Nasrin Himada, a Palestinian curator and writer who is currently associate curator at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. "I write for my people. I write for Palestinians, and I write for the liberation of our lands," Himada says of their practice, which foregrounds "embodiment as method, desire as transformation, and liberation through many forms." Wetmore and Himada discuss esteemed Caribbean-Canadian poet and writer M. NourbeSe Philip's text, “Interview with an Empire'' (2003), thinking through how Philip teaches us to decontaminate language from imperialism so that it can "truly speak our truths." Himada touches on strategies, including artistic experimentation, collective action, and love.Thank you to Nasrin Himada for their contribution to the season.Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors: the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery’s In/Tension podcast, and the Sobey Art Awards at the National Gallery of Canada.