Elvia Wilk

Writer and editor, New York

‘I’m exploring this tension between the aesthetics of what we want the future to look like versus the politics that we want to create,’ Elvia Wilk has said of her essay ‘Future Looks’ – though it’s a statement with broader application to her extensive body of writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Working in a tradition that includes William Gibson, Donna Haraway and Mark Fisher, Wilk is interested above all in the ways that art can create its own ecosystems. Wilk’s books are Oval (2019) – set in Berlin (where she spent much of the 2010s) of the near future, when an oval pill has been created that increases human generosity – and Death by Landscape (2022), a collection of essays on ‘love, death, plants, and weird fiction’, taking in ‘the erotics of compost, vampire-themed live-action roleplaying, intoxicated birds, medieval nuns’ and more besides. Wilk has written reviews, interviews, essays and features for publications including Frieze, Artforum and the White Review among many others. She is a contributing editor at e-flux and from 2012 to 2016 she was a founding editor at uncube magazine. She received a 2019–20 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and in 2020 she was a fellow at the Berggruen Institute.

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