Contributors

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Waikato/Tainui) is an artist, writer and occasional curator based in Aotearoa. In 2020, Aoake published their first book, ‘A bathful of kawakawa and hot water’ with Compound Press. In 2025, they have forthcoming books with Discipline and No More Poetry (Australia), and Compound Press (New Zealand). In 2024, Pera Aoake undertook a residency with the Delfina Foundation and Metroland Cultures. This year they begin a PhD at Auckland University of Technology, but mostly they are a mum to a hectic three-year-old.

Aoake has published widely, including with Granta, It’s Freezing in LA!, Overland, and the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art. Recent projects include: participating in the Digital Fellowship Programme 2024 with Creative Australia and Creative New Zealand; creating the video work ‘I saw the mountain erupt’ (2023) for the Mason’s Screen commission; creating a collaborative artwork with Taarn Scott for ‘Folded Memory’, an exhibition at Adam Art Gallery (2023-24) curated by Sophie Thorn and Susan Ballard; and being a finalist in the 2023 Kiingi Tuheitia Portraiture Prize.

Aoake is born and based in New Zealand/Aotearoa.

Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles, United States) is an artist, writer and filmmaker based in New York City. Her work across moving image, writing, sculpture, and installation mounts a critique of representational systems, examining the structures of individual and collective subjectivity in relation to aesthetics, cultural histories and technology. She has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. Recent exhibitions include ‘Facts Worth Knowing’ at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2024); ‘Figuer Sucia’ at Greene Naftali, New York (2023); ‘Abattoir, U.S.A!’ at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2023), and ‘Quiet as It’s Kept: Whitney Biennial 2022’ at the Whitney Museum, New York (2022). Dean’s first book of collected writing is out via Sternberg Press.

Nolan Oswald Dennis (b. 1988, Lusaka, Zambia) lives and works in Johannesburg. Dennis holds a BArch from the University of the Witwatersrand and an MS in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They are a founding member of two artist groups – NTU and the Index Literacy Program – and the convenor of Black Earth Study Club. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘understudies’, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2024); ‘geo-logics’, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2024), and ‘a recurse 4 [3] worlds’, Kunsthalle Basel (2023). Recent group exhibitions include ‘Traces of Ecstasy’, Lagos Biennial Fourth Edition (2024) and Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (2024); ‘Cinema Cosmos’ at the 14th Shanghai Biennial (2024); ‘Memory is an Editing Station’ at the Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (2023); and ‘THIS TOO IS A MAP’, Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023). Dennis is the winner of the 2016 FNB Arts Prize and the 2023 Videobrasil Jury prize. Their writing has been published in academic and art publications including The Funambulist, CLARA Architecture/Recherche Journal, Unearthing Traces, and Mater, amongst others. They are currently a Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg, and co-editor of ‘Indexing Imaginaries’, Volume 8 of the DATA Browser book series published by Open Humanities Press (2024).

Tosia Leniarska is a writer, curator and researcher born in Poland and based in London. She holds a BA in Philosophy and History of Art from University College London and has undertaken postgraduate research with the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Leniarska is currently the Assistant Director at Emalin, a contemporary art gallery in London, where she has contributed to a wide range of exhibitions and projects. In 2023, she curated the group exhibition ‘World as Diagram, Work as Dance’, with works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, E Barker, Simon Denny, Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Win McCarthy, Gretchen Lawrence, Carolyn Lazard, Coumba Samba, and Diamond Stingily. In 2024, she conceived the video exhibition project ‘One for sorrow, two for joy’ with Lauren Auder at Emalin, which involved 50 contributing artists, curators, musicians, and anonymous individuals.

Since 2020, Leniarska has also played a key role in developing Kem School, an alternative institutional artist residency in Warsaw, focused on critical practice and expanded choreography. She has delivered lectures, panel discussions and workshops at Tate Modern, ICA London, Emalin, Eye To Pencil, and Kem School, alongside public events in collaboration with Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Nuts International and other artists.

Leniarska has contributed writing to the artist book ‘Propaganda and Decoration’ by Ana Viktoria Dzinic and Richard Turley, and to publications such as Apartamento, Buffalo Zine, Studio Magazine, AnOther, and i-D. In London, you can see a permanent exhibition curated by Leniarska at La Camionera, a lesbian bar in Hackney.

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer and writer who creates multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her highly experimental productions include ‘Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance’ and ‘Bronx Gothic’ – both of which won Bessie awards – as well as ‘Poor People’s TV Room’, ‘When I Return Who Will Receive Me’, ‘Adaku’s Revolt’, and the participatory performance installation ‘Sitting on a Man’s Head’. In 2022, Okpokwasili was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship.

Gary Zhexi Zhang (b. 1993, Suzhou, China) is an artist and writer whose works explore systemic connections between cosmology, technology and economy. He operates individually, collaboratively and with organisations in various modalities – including installation, film, performance, writing, teaching, and conducting research within the framework of cultural institutions and think tanks. Zhang recently edited a book of fictions, essays and interviews about finance and time, ‘Catastrophe Time!’ (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). ‘Dead Cat Bounce’, the opera he co-created with Waste Paper Opera, premiered at Somerset House in 2022 and toured in 2024. In 2024, his exhibitions included the solo presentation ‘METAMERS’ at EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne, and his participation in the 9th Asian Art Biennial in Taichung.

Zhang has taught as a Lecturer in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths MFA and Adjunct Lecturer at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he also co-founded the design studio Foreign Objects. His book publications include ‘Against Reduction’ (contributor, MIT Press, 2021), ‘Incomputable Earth’ (contributor, Bloomsbury, upcoming), ‘Platforms: Around, Inbetween and Through’ (contributor, Singapore Biennale, 2023), and ‘Future Art Ecosystems’ editions III and VI (co-author; Serpentine, 2022 and 2024).