Name: Talk by scholar and writer Esther Leslie
Start: 2026-06-03T19:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-06-03T20:30:00+01:00
Location: Chisenhale Gallery

A talk by scholar and writer Esther Leslie on the contemporary engineering of atmosphere and its sensory and political stakes.
About this Event

Focusing on the engineered nature of atmospheres, this talk will trace how sensory experience has been understood as both all-encompassing and politically charged – from early allegories of the senses to chemical warfare and postwar experiments in environmental control. Moving across histories of ‘sensism’ and contemporary concerns around pollution, toxicity, and imperceptible intrusion, this lecture will consider how invisible particles, scents, and hues act upon bodies and environments, shaping perception in ways that are at once intimate and systemic.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and imbrications of politics and technologies, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness.

Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts (2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment (2023). Work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes Deeper in the Pyramid (2018/2023). A study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) appeared in 2023: Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century.