MultiFutures

Alia Ali (Arabic: عاليه علي ) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist whose work explores cultural binaries, challenges culturally sanctioned oppression, and confronts the dualistic barriers of conflicted notions of gender, politics, media, and citizenship. Working between language, photography, video, textile, and installation, Ali’s work addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif. Ali’s research and practice are also informed by discourses of criminality, Yemeni Futurism, and feminist theory, all of which are tools to unpack practices of refusal and rupture. Ali calls upon oral histories to conceptualize these narratives, while reflecting on contemporary circumstances, in her native land Yemen, her adopted land the United States and the endless places and people that continue to inspire her.  

Ali is currently expanding her practice by drawing on stories from Yemen including the nostalgic past of Queen Belquis of Saba (also known as the Queen of Sheba). By investigating histories of the distant past, she addresses the realities of the dystopian present in order to carve out spaces for radically imagined possibilities for the future in what has evolved to be Yemeni Futurism. Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College and the California Institute of the Arts. She lives and works in and between New Orleans, Paris and Jaipur and is the recipient of the prestigious ARTSY Vanguard Emerging Artist Award and is a NIKON Global Ambassador. 

Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa (Rockers!; Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips (The AfroFuturist Affair; Metropolarity) exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalized communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. 

Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality. This vision and practice derives its facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. Under a BQF intersectional time orientation, the past and future are not cut off from the present - both dimensions have influence over the whole of our lives, who we are and who we become at any particular point in space-time. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing. Our work focuses on recovery, collection, and preservation of communal memories, histories, and stories. 

BQF Collective is a 2016 A Blade of Grass Fellow, 2015 artist-in-residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood Time Exchange, and had their experimental short, Black Bodies as Conductors of Gravity, premiere at the 2015 Afrofuturism Now! Festival in Rotterdam. Through various writing, music, film, visual art, and creative research projects, BQF Collective also explores personal, cultural, familial, and communal cycles of experience, and solutions for transforming negative cycles into positive ones using artistic and wholistic methods of healing.  

Edwina Green is a Trawlwoolway First Nations multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) that works across painting, film, design, installation and sculpture to investigate narratives of perception, historical re-framing, cultural reclamation and the post-colonial paradigm and it’s impact on people and place. Green has become recognised by both national and international collectors for her bull kelp woven bags, sculptures, intimate installation and abtract painting and printmaking. Graduating from The University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, she has since been exhibited extensively across Australia, and internationally, and shortlisted for a range of nationally recognised awards. Her practice prioritises provocative discourse, the entanglement of lived experiences and memory, and bringing ancestral stories to the present.  

In conjunction, her research- based practice, connection to culture, and ties to reclaiming intergenerational disconnection, further inform her practice and it’s aims to challenge understandings and interactions of Indigeneity through dynamic and poetic works. The utilisation of her deep understandings of colour theory have facilitated it’s immediate relation to her practice, and ways in which Fine Arts theory acts as a conduit for contemporary discourse. She has exhibited in respected galleries and festivals such as Firstdraft, Pari Ari, Incinerator Gallery, The Granville Centre, SEVENTH Gallery, TCB Gallery, Collarworks (New York), Yirramboi, Gertrude St Projection Festival, Brunswick Music Festival, and EFFA (Environmental Film Festival.) In addition to her artistic practice, Edwina is Curator of First Nations Art at NGV, Melbourne. 

Kalanjay Dhir is an artist and musician based in Sydney on unceded Dharug land. His work draws on popular culture, sci-fi and myth using sculpture and video. Kalanjay likes to make up near-future worlds that imagine hopeful ways humans could relate to their environment. He enjoys thinking about the imprint that terrestrial human consciousness will leave on the earth and surrounding cosmos.  

In the past three years, Kalanjay has used the language and techniques behind computer games to develop an experimental method of storytelling. Adding pings, virtual avatars and, a critique of gamification to his med-kit, Kalanjay is interested in fiction as a balm for an increasingly untrustworthy and attention-deficit visual culture. 

Currently, Kalanjay is creating a body of work exploring the potential of physical hand-rod puppets as didactic and speculative tools for beyond human thinking. He thinks of puppetry as a precursor to cartooning, augmented reality and avatarisation in games and online spaces. As a musician he performs under Uncle Kal and in the group Slim Set alongside DJ Atro. 

Lawrence Liang is a first-generation Australian Chinese artist. Lawrence began his journey as an artist by co-founding ANL Design with Anson Li in 2017. Lawrence has worked under mentors such as Lucy Keeler of Public Art Australia and Aaron Seeto of Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN). His practice currently focuses on Architectural Phenomenonology and immersive mixed media sculptures in urban spaces. Lawrence also creates spatially responsive works for gallery exhibitions. Alongside his art practice, Lawrence has practiced both as a Graduate Architect, Urban Designer and Structural Engineer. 

‘(Thuy Van) Christina Lam is a Vietnamese, Chinese and Cambodian Australian-born artist, with an interior architecture background. Christina draws inspiration from her upbringing in the NSW rural towns of Uralla, Armidale and a coastal town Toukley, with an exposure to different landscapes and communities it sparked interest in spaces within spaces and how they influence movement, emotions and memories using materiality, colours and shapes.’ 

Serwah Attafuah is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based on Dharug land/West Sydney, Australia. She creates surreal cyber dreamscapes and heavenly wastelands, populated by afro-futuristic abstractions of self with strong ancestral and contemporary themes. 

 Serwah has collaborated and been commissioned by clients including Mercedes Benz, Nike, GQ, Microsoft, Adobe, Paris Hilton and Valentino. Notable achievements include her participation in Sotheby's 'Natively Digital': A Curated NFT auction, 'Apotheosis': a live motion capture experience with Soft Centre at The Sydney Opera House. and a TEDX talk in Sydney on The Metaverse and Afrofuturism. Serwah’s work is currently featured in the 24th Biennale of Sydney

Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) from what we currently know as eastern nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast. His Yakthung name is Tangsang (Sky).Subash has MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. 

His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Notion of time, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it,  are recurring themes in his works.Subash is the co-founding member of Yakthung Cho Sangjumbho (Yakthung Art Society) and Haatemalo Collective.Based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London.