Conjuring #2

Andrea Phillips: BALTIC Professor of Art, Northumbria University Newcastle UK; writer, organiser, Director of BxNU Institute. Phillips lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture.

Amal Alhaag is a researcher and co-founder of several initiatives, such as Metro54, a platform for experimental sonic, dialogic and visual culture. Alhaag develops ongoing experimental and collaborative research practice, public programs and projects on global spatial politics, archives, colonialism, counter-culture, oral histories and popular culture. She is based in Amsterdam.

Amanda Piña's work embodies the political and social power of movement grounded in indigenous forms of knowledge and world making/maintaining. Piña is a plurifaceted artist working through choreographic and dance research, creating and curating educational frameworks, writing and editing publications around what she refers as endangered movement practices. Her work is presented inside performing and visual arts contexts. Piña is Chilean-Mexican-Austrian based in Vienna and Mexico City.

Ayesha is a Queens based artist whose tactile club productions trace an arc across techno, bass, and diasporic influences. The release of the EP ‘Potential Energy’ on UK label Scuffed Recordings has marked the crescendo of a year-long wave of momentum for the artist whose latest work received critical praise from Mixmag, RA, DJ Mag, and the Lobster Theremin. In March 2022, Ayesha joined the highly regarded roster of residents at Nowadays. Her nights are widely known for their euphoric dance-floor moments and heavy bass sound.

DJ Black Helmet (he/him) has been playing the jams outside for over 15 years. He currently has a weekly radio show on WFMU where he focuses on jams that are bountiful and righteous from all parts of the world. He also self describes as “a guy who makes stuff,” producing objects and spaces specifically intended to welcome and serve communities the fine arts world often overlooks. He is based in New York.

The Black School (TBS)  is an experimental art school teaching Black/PoC students and  allies to become radical agents of change. Based on our commitment to community building and our core principles of Black love, wellness, and self- determination, TBS’ mission is to extend the legacy of art in Black radical histories through innovative, multi-generational

workshops/programs, an annual festival, and our youth staffed art and design studio- TBS: Design Studio.With  this foundation we are now moving from the initial mobile model we developed in NYC towards building a 21st century schoolhouse that will serve as a community center in our co-founders birthplace  New Orleans. The Black Schoolhouse will create a home base and allow TBS to expand our work and deepen roots through long-term community engagements.

Brandon López and Fred Moten are two thirds of a trio that also includes percussionist Gerald Cleaver. The first (and eponymous) album was just released by Reading Group Records. Brandon is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. Fred is a New York-based educator and writer working in the blur of poetry and criticism.

cy x (they/we) is a pleasure ceremonialist and cyber witch doing the magical work of integrating indigenous, ancestral, and emerging technologies. They often think about pleasure, the eco-erotic, and how to embody ways of being that move beyond binaries and reliance on techno-capitalist fixes. In fusing art and technology with the practice of witchcraft, they use rituals, movement, ceremony, and performance to unearth unspoken stories and fundamentally alter the world around us.

DonChristian Jones is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and director. Their work spans painting, musical albums, videos, and performance installation.  Don has shown and performed in spaces such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and The Shed.

Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City, and a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. His publications include From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (2006), Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (2015, with Lauren Cornell), From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader (2018, with Barney Rosset).

Kwami Coleman is a musician, composer, producer, and musicologist specializing in improvised music. His research interests include experimental music history, jazz history, black music and the African Diaspora, the political economy of music, music technology, aesthetics, and cultural studies. Coleman is an assistant professor of music at the Gallatin School of New York University, and lives in New York City.

Johann Diedrick artist, engineer, and musician that makes installations, performances, and sculptures for experiencing the world through sonic encounter. He surfaces resonant histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back vibratory layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software, proposing new sonic possibilities off the grid.

Louis Chude-Sokei's work includes the award-winning, The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black on Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, the acclaimed memoir, Floating in A Most Peculiar Way and the recent album AAI recorded with electronica legends, Mouse on Mars. He teaches at Boston University, directs the African American Studies Program, and edits the iconic journal, The Black Scholar. He is founder of the sonic art and archival project, Echolocution and co-curated Carnegie Hall's 2022 Festival of Afrofuturism.

Mahan Moalemi is researching a multiplicity of futurisms, past and present. With respect to the vicissitudes of globalization, he looks for the aesthetic registers of how time is reshaped, technically and conceptually, from one model of history to another. He is the co-editor of Ethnofuturisms (Merve Verlag, 2018) and currently pursues a PhD in Film & Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Mimi Bai is an interdisciplinary artist born in Xi’an, China, and based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation, and film. Using the imagery of ghosts and camouflage, her work engages with ideas of labor, assimilation, invisibility/hyper-visibility, and survival as lived reality and fantasy.

Miya Masaoka is a composer, sound artist and performer. Her work explores bodily perception of vibration, movement and time while foregrounding complex timbre relationships. She has created a body of work that encompasses interdisciplinary sound art, hybrid acoustic/electronic performance, improvisation, music composition, research, sound installations, listening, and interactive media. She creates instruments, three-dimensional scores, wearable computing, and sonifies the behavior of plants.

Negarra Kudumu is an interlocutrice working at the intersection of art and healing with a focus on contemporary art from the Pacific Northwest, Africa, South Asia, and their respective diasporas. She is a priestess in the Brama Con Brama lineage of Palo Monte; a lay person in the Pimienta lineage of Lukumi; a practitioner of Muerterismo, Espiritismo Cruzado, Conjure, and alevel II Reiki practitioner. She resides in Seattle, WA where she focuses on client facing work in art and healing as a coach, teacher, content producer, contemporary art curator, independent scholar, and healer.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002. Its work is research-based and spans the moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. The Otolith Group incorporates filmmaking and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face.

Pedro Neves Marques (they/them) is an artist, film director, and writer. Influenced by anthropology and feminist and queer historians of science, their work highlights the clash between disputing images of nature, technology and gender, with science fiction and speculative writing being key to imagining other futures. They have recently received the Ammodo Tiger Short Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, They co-founded the poetry press Pântano Books in 2020.

Sam B. Jones is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker working in narrative, documentary, and hybrid forms. He’s directed films and music videos for artists such as Josh Kline, Yung Jake, and DonChristian. His debut feature film 'Red, White & Wasted' (Tribeca 2019) is an observational documentary exploring race, politics, and class in America by following a Florida family obsessed with the off-road truck subculture of "mudding."

Zain Alam (Humeysha) is an artist and musician of Indian-Pakistani origin based in Brooklyn, NY. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” Alam’s recording project Humeysha began while working as an oral historian for the 1947 Partition Archive. Alam’s practice extends his sonic vision into video, performance, and writing; a project in translation using contemporary pop forms, found sound, and oral history.

Zeena Parkins is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist active in experimental, free improvised, contemporary classical, and avant-jazz music; she is known for having "reinvented the harp". Parkins performs on standard harps, several custom electric harps, piano, and accordion.