The Condition of Being Near: the ecologies of Afro-Asia

A Symposium

Performance Space, New York
Date: May 9, 2025

Location:
Performance Space
150 First Avenue, Fourth Floor
New York, NY 10009

Co-presented by:
ICA UPenn & NYU’s CRACS Co-Lab

Autumn KNIGHT, is a New York based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, video, sound and text. Her work has been on view at various institutions including Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) Shedhalle (Zurich), The Whitney Museum of American Art, PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art) The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Museum Ostwall (Germany) BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Performance Space New York, The Walker Art Center. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired for the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors and fellowships including Artadia Award, Art Matters Grant, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship and most recently the Trellis Art Fund. 

Image Description: The Dixieland Steel Band (1951), Port-of-Spain, Trinidad
Credit info:
Courtesy of Dr. Robert Lee
Photo credit: Ace Studio (Trinidad)

This symposium is part of a series of events leading up to the 2026 exhibition, the Condition of Being Near (CoBN), co-curated by Zairong Xiang and Denise Ryner at ICA UPenn.

 CoBN invites artists, writers and community organizers to consider the wide breadth of political and social solidarities connecting Black, African and Asian diasporas across North America, the Caribbean, and Asian and African regions. What can historical and contemporary visual cultures tell us about transracial and trans-regional Afro-Asian ‘stand-ins;’ or networked exchanges built on astute pragmatism, community proximity, or survival economies under colonial and post-colonial re-ordering, marginalization, and erasure?

 The exhibition will examine the nuanced conditions and operations of south-south solidarity through the lens of a series of global acupuncture points of Afro-Asian culture, history and relationships. This symposium draws together the perspectives of a range of writers, curators and artists to think broadly about known and lesser-known south-south, community and regional ecologies, influences and networks across industry, mass culture, the arts and political thought.

Schedule
12:50 Brief Opening Remarks:
Denise Ryner (ICA UPenn) and Denise Ferreira Da Silva (NYU CRACS)

1:00-2:00pm Conversation 1:
Open Research Session with Zifeng Liu (HKBU, Hong Kong), Christian Nyampeta (artist, NY), Lee Xie (NYU)

Nyampeta’s artistic research for his new work in the upcoming exhibition ‘The Condition of Being Near’ will be the entry point into a conversation that will explore Liu’s work on the connections between Black Radical Feminism and the Non-aligned movement, and Xie’s work on Chinese diasporas and feminist aesthetic.

2:15-3:50pm Roundtable 1:
Afro-Asian political economy and artistic ecologies across the Americas and the Caribbean
Discussant/Moderator: Denise Ferreira Da Silva (CRACS NYU)
Michealine Crichlow (Duke University, Durham)
Richard Drayton (Kings College London)
Aaron Kamuguisha (Smith College, Massachusetts/UWI)

4:00-5:30pm Roundtable 2:
Curating Afro-Asia
Discussant/Moderator: Denise Ryner (ICA UPenn/CRACS Curatorial Fellow)
Nikita Choi (Times Museum, Guangzhou)
Michelle Hyun (ICA Shanghai)
Tao Leigh Goffe (CUNY, Afro Asia Research Group)

6:00-7:00pm *Note Program Change due to María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ schedule conflict
Conversation and Open Discussion:
Joan Kee (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), Lee Xie (NYU CRACS) and Denise Ryner (ICA Philadelphia) on the work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons and responses to the symposium
7:15-8:00pm Performance:
Autumn Knight: Nothing #9: Yes + No
AUTUMN
Light refreshments available in the symposium hall throughout. Dinner for Symposium participants to be held in the neighborhood at 8:00pm.

Joan Kee is the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director; Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She examines modern and contemporary art through an interdisciplinary and multiregional scope. This includes exhibitions and publications such as Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (2019), and The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity (2023).

Also on view during the event:
The Memory Vortex Inn, a year-long installation in the Performance Space’s community space Open Room. The Inn organized for Performance Space by Rasheedah Phillips and Camae Ayewa of Black Quantum Futurism transforms Open Room into a sanctuary prioritizing community-based work that uplifts temporal autonomy, play, experimentation, spatial reclamation, and collective visioning.
https://performancespacenewyork.org/series/memoryvortexinn/