Night of Ideas Jersey City: Department of Transformation

Andros Zins-Browne, born in New York in 1981, works at the intersection of performance and dance. His work extends choreographic notions into encounters with dancers, nondancers, singers, objects, and texts. Since 2016, his performance Already Unmade where he de-hearses previous works, ‘unmaking’ them, has been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; and Lafayette Anticipations, Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris. In 2019, Atlas Unlimited, a series of exhibitions in collaboration with artist Karthik Pandian, was featured at the PERFORMA19 Biennial, New York, and as a series of music videos currently presented on the Criterion Channel. In 2020/21, his work was commissioned for online projects by Danspace Project, the Aspen Art Museum, and Triple Canopy. In 2022, Zins-Browne premiered color a body who flees, a collaborative sound installation and performance series at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Performance remixes include The Tony Cokes Remixes, 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), Dia Art Foundation (2023); See-Saw, MoMA, New York (2019) and Asymmetry 222, Getty Museum, Los Angeles by Simone Forti; as well as Jérôme Bel, 1995 (2020) KADIST, Paris, in collaboration with e-flux (2020). In collaboration with Ley, Kris Lee and a host of co-conspirators, Zins-Browne premiered duel c (River-To-River Festival, 2023) a performance that ascended Outlook Hill on Governors’ Island, in a choreography that stirs towards a commingling of care and violence. Zins-Browne is the recipient of awards from the Goethe-Institut; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community; and New York State Council on the Arts.

Asad Raza’s polymathic practice represents an expanded approach to artmaking—encompassing installations, writing, curating, dramaturgy, filmmaking, pedagogy, and organizing. It often takes local ecosystems and planetary ecologies as a focus. Across his work, there is a strong emphasis on the participatory and the performative aspects of art, as well as an engagement with all of the human senses. His recent exhibitions and ambitious public art projects, such as Diversion (2022, Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt), Absorption (2019–, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Ruhrtrienniale, Essen), and Root sequence. Mother tongue (2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; Rockbund Museum, Shanghai; Sifang Museum, Nanjing; TU Gallery, Dresden), all involve both scripted and improvised interactions with natural materials. Raza’s work is intrinsically collaborative, emerging out of multipart interdisciplinary dialogues. For example, each iteration of Absorption involves work with experts including soil scientists, horticulturalists, compost specialists, and organic farmers. Orientation, developed for FRONT International 2022, emerged out of dialogues with astronomers, physicists, architects, and musicians. In Raza’s practice, the artist is a director, a convener, a gatherer of beings who frames unexpected conversations between humans and more-than-humans alike. 

Naoco Wowsugi is a community-engaged artist who lives and works in Washington, DC. Wowsugi’s cross-disciplinary projects range from portrait photography, participatory performance, and sound healing, to horticulture, exploring the nature of belonging and inclusive community building while they highlight and fortify everyday communal and interpersonal identities. Wowsugi’s art practice blurs the lines between being an artist and an engaged citizen.

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, author, and educator. His multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective, and structural level. This manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. He has curated several large-scale exhibitions including FRONT International 2022: Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York.