Momus: The Podcast

Епизоди

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  To Build and Sustain: Publishing Roundtable – Season 9, Episode 8 25.08.2026 1ч 37мин

  The final episode of season 9 features a live recording from Momus’s To Build and Sustain Publishing Roundtable, held at PHI in Montreal on June 26. Bringing together leaders of independent publishing initiatives across Canada and the US, the conversation asks how platforms for art writing are being shaped, challenged, and sustained in the present moment. Moderated by Tiana Reid (critic and co-editor of Pinko), the roundtable included Dr. Kemi Adeyemi (Director, The Black Embodiments Studio), Sky Goodden (Publisher, Momus), and Molly Kleiman (Director, Triple Canopy) in a wide-ranging discussion of the financial, political, and structural conditions of the field today. They also reflect on the pressures facing independent arts publishing—and the possibilities that persist within them. Together, they consider publishing as both a cultural practice and a form of civic life, and the value of art writing that is vital, rigorous, and accessible.This roundtable was the culminating public event of the 2026 Momus Convening: To Build and Sustain, a gathering of independent art publishers and editors from across Canada and the US focused on sharing resources, strengthening peer networks, and imagining more sustainable futures for critical art writing. The Convening was supported by Terra Foundation for American Art, Critical Minded, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery and Esker Foundation, for supporting our work.
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  Lisa Robertson – Season 9, Episode 7 05.08.2026 1ч 1мин

  The latest episode of Momus: The Podcast features Lisa Robertson speaking about her newest publication, Riverwork (Coach House Books, 2026), in conversation with Lauren Wetmore. Robertson reads from the book and discusses writing as a process of refusal, questioning ideas of artistic "practice" in favor of fracture, explosion, and continual revision. Robertson and Wetmore also discuss late style, feminist labor, and poetry's expansive relationship to the novel. The conversation was recorded in Brussels in front of a live audience at celador, a collective space founded in 2023 by a reading group of ten curators working on the intersection of visual art and writing. Robertson’s influential body of work spans poetry and experimental prose. Her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Riverwork, Robertson’s much-anticipated follow-up novel, follows Lucy Frost (a writer, archivist, flaneuse, and domestic cleaner) as she takes up her disappeared great aunt’s research into the Bièvre, an ancient river under the streets of Paris. Riverwork flows through histories of industry, labor, water, and writing, propelled by Robertson’s extraordinary style. Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.
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  M. Neelika Jayawardane – Season 9, Episode 6 23.06.2026 1ч 8мин

  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.
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  Abbas Akhavan – Season 9, Episode 5 27.05.2026 1ч 12мин

  This episode features Abbas Akhavan, a Tehran-born artist based between Montreal and Berlin, who is representing Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale. In a conversation recorded a few days before the opening, Akhavan discusses art as an ethics of encounter, the limits of language and representation, and the challenge of engaging non-human life without collapsing it into symbol or metaphor. Reflecting on institutional pressure, artistic refusal, and the importance of maintaining balance within one’s practice, he describes art as “a rehearsal, not re-enactment.” Framed by a reading from Charles Siebert’s 2016 New York Times Magazine feature “What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?,” the conversation explores trauma, presence, and the possibility of holding intimacy without possession. Host Sky Goodden also reflects on attending a strike organized by the Art Not Genocide Alliance during the Biennale’s preview week, during which the Canadian Pavilion was one of many that closed in solidarity. Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Coach House Books and Esker Foundation, for supporting our work.
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  Camille Bacon – Season 9, Episode 4 22.04.2026 54мин

  This episode features Camille Bacon, a Chicago-based writer, editor, and the co-founder of Jupiter Magazine. In a far-ranging conversation with Sky Goodden, Bacon discusses the potential and power of a “criticism in the commons,” the Black feminist constellations she’s participating in more broadly, and, as a publisher, her metrics for success. “ For me, success would be someone coming through the doors of our publication coming out the other side and being more audacious about what they demand.”Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.
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  Line Ajan – Season 9, Episode 3 17.03.2026 1ч 1мин

  In this episode of Momus: The Podcast, Lauren Wetmore speaks with Line Ajan, a Franco-Syrian curator and translator and member of the editorial, artistic, and curatorial collective Qalqalah. The conversation unfolds through a reading of Iranian artist Ashkan Sepahvand’s text “Showing Without Revealing,” written for the 2017 exhibition he curated at Berlin’s Schwules Museum, which presented a decolonial perspective on institutional histories of homosexuality. Ajan discusses translating Sepahvand’s text into French with Qalqalah, whose members work across English, French, and Arabic. Reflecting on the process, she considers translation as a collaborative and situated practice and speaks about her own work across languages shaped by different colonial histories. She also brings forward the intimacy of translation as a form of reading, and the influence of writers including Sarah Rifky, Karim Kattan, Etel Adnan, and Gayatri Spivak.Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Thanks to Line Ajan for her contribution to this season.
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  Jeneen Frei Njootli – Season 9, Episode 2 18.02.2026 45мин

  Jeneen Frei Njootli joins this episode of Momus: The Podcast from their ancestral homelands in Old Crow, Yukon, a Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation community north of the Arctic Circle. Frei Njootli reflects on how life in Old Crow has shaped their artistic practice, which is deeply intertwined with community, land, and language—including the Gwich’in language, Dinjii Zhuh k’yuu.Frei Njootli shares an excerpt from fellow community member Brandon Kyikavichik’s forthcoming book, Gijiint’aii: Try Your Best, reflecting on Elder Erwin Linklater’s teachings about the generational significance of the night sky and constellations in Gwitchin life and culture. Frei Njootli describes “witnessing and being witnessed by the stars,” illustrating the intimate relationship between sky, land, and cultural knowledge in their practice. They also speak about writing as inseparable from making: a constant consideration of language that informs both thought and form, “It’s something that I don’t know how to not do.”Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Thanks to Jeneen Frei Njootli for their contribution to this season.
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  Luther Konadu – Season 9, Episode 1 20.01.2026 49мин

  Season 9 of Momus: The Podcast launches with Luther Konadu, an artist and publisher based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Reading from an influential book in his practice—The Narrow Door (Graywolf Press, 2016), subtitled “A Memoir of Friendship,” by Paul Lisicky—Konadu speaks with Sky Goodden about the intricacies, influences, and productive frictions of working with your friends. “I think because we've known each other [a long time], any kind of criticism that can come our way is seen as a sign of love… holding each other ahead of time before we step into the world.”As the publisher of Public Parking and co-founding publisher of Carnation, Konadu also reflects on the pressures and rewards of producing art publications that respond to a regional context while operating within an international discourse—reaching beyond borders and speaking to diaspora. Threading that needle, alongside an art practice that features and involves members of his community, requires clarity, care, and a commitment to honesty. “I think maybe that's part of what attracted me to Paul's work. The very notion of talking about friendship in a book-length form is a way of talking about something that isn't talked about.”Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Thanks to Luther Konadu for his contribution to this season.
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  Minh Nguyen and Tiana Reid – Season 8, Bonus Episode 17.12.2025 59мин

  Tune in to a special bonus episode of Momus: The Podcast featuring a live recording from the launch of writer and critic Minh Nguyen’s new book Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam (Art Metropole & Wendy’s Subway, 2025). This event, co-presented by Art Metropole and Momus as part of the Momus Talks series, brought Nguyen into conversation with writer Tiana Reid to discuss writing about place, the personal as critical position, and how art criticism can open up broader cultural histories and experiences by “using art to write about something else.” More about the book from Wendy’s Subway: “Driven by a diasporic curiosity that seeks discovery over dwelling on loss, Memorial Park avoids nostalgic idealism or reflexive condemnation. Instead, Nguyen takes seriously the legacy of Vietnamese liberation by naming what it has become—and what it has not. What emerges is a complex picture of the country today and a reflection on how we inherit and reckon with radical histories that shape our world.”Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Rose Bouthillier and Chris Andrews.Thanks to this episode’s sponsor Rabkin Foundation for supporting our work.Thanks to Minh Nguyen and Tiana Reid for their contribution to this season.
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  Lucy Sante – Season 8, Episode 8 21.10.2025 53мин

  Lucy Sante joins us for the finale of Season 8. The Belgian-born American critic, writer, and artist talks about her lifelong textual engagement with an extraordinary miscellany of culture and history. Sante shares the figures that have shaped her work, from a grade-school report on Nostradamus to Barbara Epstein, her editor at the New York Review of Books, to her various writing students across twenty years of teaching at Columbia and Bard. For her “meaningful text,” Sante focuses on Manny Farber, an early inspiration whose writing "infected me from the word go." She reads from his essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (Film Culture, No. 27, Winter 1962/63), an electric ode to "termite tapeworm-fungus-moss art ... that goes always forward eating its own boundaries."Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Rabkin Foundation, PHI, and Esker Foundation, for supporting our work.Thanks to Lucy Sante for her contribution to this season.
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  Andrii Ushytskyi – Season 8, Episode 7 16.09.2025 56мин

  In the season’s penultimate episode, we feature Andrii Ushytskyi, a Kyiv-based writer, dancer, and co-editor of Solomiya, an independent magazine founded in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ushytskyi begins by reading a short essay by Natalia Ginzburg, “The Son of Man” (Unita, 1946), and then speaks with Sky Goodden about his editorial arc and the responsiveness and faith that stewarding a publication—and writing—through a war has required. He also speaks to how the invasion has changed the nature of his writing, and how, for Ushytskyi, dance has emerged as a form of kinesthetic expression and release.Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Rabkin Foundation and Art Toronto, for supporting our work.Thanks to Andrii Ushytskyi for his contribution to this season.And our many thanks to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.
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  Re’al Christian, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Diana SeoHyung – Season 8, Episode 6 19.08.2025 1ч 36мин

  This special summer episode includes a live recording of the Spring issue of Post/doc, co-published by Momus and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The collaborative issue of the VLC’s biannual publishing series for discursive, speculative, experimental writing, and artistic practices features a new sound work by artist JJJJJerome Ellis and a new text by writer Diana SeoHyung, both reflecting on the theme of intervals—on languaging, language breaks, aphasia, riffing, and repeating. This recording of the launch, which took place in early May at Storm Books & Candy, in Brooklyn, includes SeoHyung's reading of her text 가는 길: Decision to Leave / On Leaving / Leaving, and Ellis's performance of Havensong. The episode is introduced by Lauren Wetmore in conversation with Re'al Christian, Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the VLC, about originating Post/doc, and her own writing and editorial practice.Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Marian Goodman Gallery and The Blue Building, for supporting our work.Thanks to JJJJJerome Ellis, Diana SeoHyung, and Re'al Christian for their contributions to this season.And as always, many thanks to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.
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  Paul Chan – Season 8, Episode 5 15.07.2025 1ч 2мин

  Paul Chan is an artist, writer, and former publisher. For this episode of Momus: The Podcast, Chan’s self-made automated doppelganger reads “Sade Today (after Judith Butler),” a piece he wrote for Evergreen (Spring/Summer 2025). He speaks to Sky Goodden about the implications of AI on writers (though they agree that criticism could present a special resistance) and his recent efforts to increase accessibility to his writing through audio recordings, while “hemlocking” its content against AI co-option. Chan also discusses the challenges of independent publishing, how he perceives writing as a form of daring, and how writing informs making. But in either case, he says, “ Choices are real choices when they're neither given nor self-evident. That, to me, is the core of what it means to think creatively.” Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Plug In ICA, for supporting our work.Thanks to Paul Chan for his contribution to this season.And thanks to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.
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  Meghan O'Rourke – Season 8, Episode 4 17.06.2025 52мин

  In this episode, Meghan O'Rourke, poet, author and editor of The Yale Review, speaks frankly about pursuing a creative and professional life with chronic illness. Joining Lauren Wetmore in conversation, and following a reading from Susan Sontag's pivotal text "Illness as a Metaphor" (The New York Review of Books, 1979), which O'Rourke updated for the 21st century with her medical memoir The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books, 2022), O’Rourke speaks to how "The way you make work might not look as consistent as a kind of late-capitalist notion of productivity insists." She also touches on her experiences as a critic and editor of criticism, insisting that both require one to be "capable of generosity and describing love."Thanks to this episode’s sponsor, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta University of the Arts (AUArts), for their support of our work.Thanks to Meghan O'Rourke for her contribution to this season.And thank you to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.
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  Legacy Russell – Season 8, Episode 3 20.05.2025 59мин

  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.
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  Nizan Shaked – Season 8, Episode 2 21.04.2025 59мин

  Nizan Shaked is our guest this month! Shaked is Professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum, and Curatorial Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and most recently the author of Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections (Bloomsbury, 2022). She speaks to Lauren Wetmore about the resources offered by criticality, writing for ”liberals that I want to become more radical,” and researching her forthcoming book Art Against the System, for which she recently won a Warhol Arts Writers Grant. Shaked offers artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s book The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014) to consider the devastation perpetrated by imperial industry, its connection to art systems, and how artists provide models for how to deal with authoritarianism.Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Centre PHI and Night Gallery, for their support of our work.Our deepest thanks to Nizan Shaked for her contribution to this season.And a big thank you to Jacob Irish, our editor, and Chris Andrews, for production assistance.
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  Ajay Kurian – Season 8, Episode 1 18.03.2025 1ч 1мин

  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.
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  Tiana Reid – Season 7, Episode 8 20.01.2025 49мин

  Momus: The Podcast’s Season 07 finale features Tiana Reid, a Toronto-based critic and assistant professor of English at York University. Reid is a former editor at The New Inquiry and her writing has been featured in Frieze, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among others. She reads from an early influence on her practice, Sylvia Wynter, whose text "Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of the Folk Dance as a Cultural Process" (Jamaica Journal, June, 1970) thinks about “what art's function is in unequal and oppressive societies and regimes.” In conversation with host Sky Goodden, Reid also discusses a forthcoming text for Momus, which focuses on an evacuated landscape in Toronto’s cultural institutions due to several curator dismissals, and moves Reid “to this question of action.”Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsor, Esker Foundation.
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  Claudia La Rocco – Season 7, Episode 7 17.12.2024 56мин

  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. 
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  Niela Orr – Season 7, Episode 6 20.11.2024 1ч 5мин

  Niela Orr is a culture writer and editor who has published in The Baffler, The Believer, and The Organist, among others. Since 2022 she has worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine. In conversation with Sky Goodden, Orr discusses her editing as being rooted in service, and her abiding sense of responsibility to the writers that she works with. Orr foregrounds this conversation with a reading from Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007; Wave Books, 2024), by Tisa Bryant, a former mentor of hers. She also talks about the profound pleasure and significance of reading fiction and poetry. “If I'm not reading poetry, I feel like I'm losing access to possibility,” she says. And in turn, Orr says, “I write for patient readers.”Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews. Many thanks to this episode’s sponsors, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation (feat. The Rabkin Interviews), the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Waddington's.