Pina magazine #1: Conversation with Asad Raza, William Kinney, and Catalina Imizcoz

Join us on Friday, May 2 at 7pm to celebrate the New York City launch of Pina magazine. Artist Asad Raza will be in conversation with physics professor Will Kinney and Pina’s founder and editor Catalina Imizcoz. Together, they will consider ‘Array,’ Raza’s exhibition featured in Pina issue #1, which merges worlding on an astronomical level with worlding as a publishing practice.

Pina is a commissioning platform and portable exhibition space, founded in London. Each issue invites two artists to create a 60-page exhibition, reimagining the exhibition format as a worldbuilding experience that unfolds within a flat, collectable, and portable space.

Asad Raza’s ‘Array’ is a dialogue between particles, perception, and deep time. Raza traces the journey of radiation across the universe to Earth, with two destinations: first, photosynthesised by trees into the paper on which Pina is printed, and finally, bouncing off that paper into the reader’s eyes. Using data from the Cosmic Microwave Background, images of distant galaxies and our sun, and photographs of forests in southern Germany, Raza constructs a sensorial meditation on presence, distance, and the invisible forces that shape us.

Kinney was a scientific advisor on ‘Array.’ In his latest book, An Infinity of Worlds (MIT, 2022), he argues that “cosmic inflation” is a transformational idea in cosmology. As the physics of the very large—the structure of the cosmos—converges with the physics of the very small—particles and quantum fields—a new understanding of the universe’s origins begins to take shape, revealing its fundamentally quantum nature.

This conversation will explore the cosmic scale of relationality, the exhibition as a site of intra-action, and how ‘Array’ engages with multiple historicities and the dialogical union of particles.

Free entry. RSVP encouraged. The conversation will be held in English.

About Pina
Pina is a new exhibition space in-print—a commissioning platform that collaborates with artists to build exhibitions within the pages of a magazine. Each commission spans 60 pages, offering artists the space to construct worlds that audiences can explore as they would any other exhibition. The commonality with other art galleries lies in the encounter—though this one is portable. Each issue also pairs its exhibitions-in-print with short stories, using fiction as a portal to reimagine exhibitions as worldbuilding experiences. The magazine’s name derives from pinax – a painted board or tablet – and the root for pinacoteca, meaning a home for images, a gallery.

Pina issue #1 features exhibitions by Gala Porras-Kim and Asad Raza. Porras-Kim’s project, “Conditions for recognising a living stone,” is accompanied by a conversation with Adam Kleinman and the fiction piece Bedtime Story by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. Raza’s exhibition comes with a conversation with Karen Barad and a newly commissioned short story by Akil Kumarasamy.

Asad Raza creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active encounter within and beyond the exhibition setting. Raza’s practice often takes planetary ecologies as a focus, with a strong emphasis on the participatory and the performative aspects of art, as well as an engagement with all of the senses. His projects have been realized by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Manifesta 15, Barcelona; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt; Ruhrtriennale, Essen; Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; the Lahore Biennale; Museion, Bolzano; and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Will Kinney is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, where he studies the structure and origin of the universe.

Catalina Imizcoz is a researcher and editor. She is an associate lecturer in the MRes Art: Exhibition Studies program at Central Saint Martins and has a PhD in exhibition design. She is the founding editor of Pina magazine and director of Cthulhu Books, the editorial platform of the Institute for Postnatural Studies.