Angeline Meitzler, Josèfa Ntjam, Natalie Paneng, Rebeca Romero, Kinnari Saraiya, Skawennati and Wendi Yan.
SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now is a dreamlike threshold.
Seven international artists explore cultural heritage as a lens for imagining alternative, beyond-Western, futures through video, sculptural and interactive installations.
Science fiction has long operated as a medium to envision potential futures, yet its alternative realities have often reproduced colonial worldviews, overlooking Indigenous perspectives and other systems of knowledge, or in some cases, casting accounts of colonialism as ‘adventure stories’.
SLIPSTREAM brings together artists who reclaim the decolonial potential of speculative fiction. Central to the exhibition is the concept of ‘slipstream,’ whose origins in Native science fiction literature are rarely acknowledged. Reasserted through this lineage, ‘slipstream’ carries a decolonial charge. It reconfigures the power structures prevalent in mainstream sci-fi, placing Indigenous figures as active agents rather than colonised subjects. To live in the slip-space is to drift between temporalities, where past, present and future flow together like currents in a navigable stream, and between states of consciousness.
Taking ‘slipstream’ off the page and into the gallery space, the exhibition moves one step further. Presenting works by Angeline Meitzler, Josèfa Ntjam, Natalie Paneng, Rebeca Romero, Kinnari Saraiya, Skawennati and Wendi Yan, the exhibition offers audiences new ways to imagine estranged worlds through decolonial lenses, opening onto geographies, temporalities and imaginaries of what could otherwise be.
ARTISTS BIO
Angeline Meitzler is an artist, writer and experimental animator currently based in Berkeley, California. Her work utilizes fiction, cinema, history and natural phenomenon to engage with the complexities of cultural value.
Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer, and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film, and sound. Gathering the raw material for her work from the Internet, natural science books, and photographic archives, Ntjam employs the method of assemblage—of images, words, sounds, and stories—to deconstruct hegemonic discourses on notions of origin, identity, and race.
Natalie Paneng is a Johannesburg-based transmedia artist. Paneng’s work and research are centred around natural phenomena, indigenous technologies, and the act of creating playful speculative methodologies we can relate to. She is interested in developing accessible metaphors for complex systems, often drawing connections to quantum physics, digital mysticism, and the sense of wonder that emerges from these fields.
Rebeca Romero is a London-based artist working across sculpture, installation, and moving image. Her work engages with Indigenous American material cultures to explore how people make sense of the world, and their place within it, through objects, rituals, and stories. Using contemporary digital technologies alongside traditional sculptural processes, she creates speculative artefacts that chart alternative worlds, opening up new ways of seeing the past and imagining the future.
Kinnari Saraiya is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer and curator based in London. Her practice spans interactive installation, film, performance, sound and custom-built interfaces, drawing on South Asian embodied knowledge, colonial archives and speculative worldbuilding to explore how technology, memory and choreography can produce counter-archives and alternative temporalities.
Skawennati is an internationally exhibiting artist who has spent this millennium imagining utopic futures. From her dual perspectives as an urban Mohawk woman and a cyberpunk avatar, she creates speculative fiction machinima, costumes and quilts, among other things. Her practice is gradually coalescing into an alternate universe.
Wendi Yan constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI technology, game engines and sculpture to probe the artifice of knowledge. She collaborates with scientists to explore the frontier between imaging and imagining. Yan was an inaugural Steve Jobs Archive Fellow and the Grand Prix recipient of the 6th VH Award.
Source: arebyte
