Karimah Ashadu 

Kobby Adi

Sophia Al-Maria

Ryoko Aoki

Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Lutz Bacher

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Dara Birnbaum

Zheng Bo

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Nate Boyce

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Monster Chetwynd

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Chan Hau Chun

Tony Cokes

Stephanie Comilang

Alex Da Corte

AFSAR × DAVRA

Jeremy Deller

Yang Dingliu

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Luke Fowler

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Samia Halaby

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Barbara Hammer

Richard Hawkins

Rei Hayama

Camille Henrot

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Miyu Hosoi

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

AKI INOMATA

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

Sanja Iveković

Arthur Jafa

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Eisa Jocson

Joan Jonas

Corinne de San Jose

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Marc Kokopeli

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Tang Kwok-Hin

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien

Quỳnh Lâm

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Taro Masushio

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Sarah Morris

Takeshi Murata

SAGG Napoli

Bruce Nauman

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

Proxy Conference: In Forest 

Founded in 2021, AFSAR (Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research) is a collective platform connecting feminist perspectives across contemporary art, academia, activism, and community-based practice. Grounded in the diverse localities of Asia, AFSAR creates spaces for dialogue and collaboration with a wide range of partners. The initiative organises hybrid public programmes, including study sessions, reading groups, and screenings while maintaining an online archival platform that functions as a decentralized site for shared research. Through these activities, AFSAR supports collective inquiry and sustainable networks of exchange across artistic, intellectual, and social contexts.

DAVRA is a Central Asian research group founded in 2021 by artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. Emerging from her 

, the collective focuses on studying and reimagining Central Asia through collaborative artistic and intellectual exchange. DAVRA prioritises strengthening connections within the region’s cultural scene by fostering dialogue, shared research, and collective programming. At 

, the group organised a 41-day summer public programme in Kassel alongside a parallel winter sequence in Central Asia. Since its founding, DAVRA has continued to work across the region and internationally, developing projects that expand knowledge-sharing and contemporary artistic discourse.

How strange, now, to remember that it all began with the story of a young man murdering his wife. At the turn of the millennium, the rapper Eminem released the single ‘Stan’, and its music video remains a fascinatingly recursive bit of business about celebrity, fandom and the very fine line between devotion and obsession. The actor Devon Sawa, somewhere near the height of his fame, plays an Eminem devotee named Stan, and because Stan dresses like his idol, what results is a vision of stardom as glimpsed through a cracked funhouse mirror: a celebrity disguised as a fan, who in turn is disguised as another celebrity entirely. Stan sends Eminem letters that begin as declarations of something close to love, and then quickly develop into threats; by the song’s climax, he is drunk, driving his car off a bridge with his screaming, pregnant wife in the boot. ‘Stan’ is notable for putting Eminem, as the object of affection whose failure to respond makes a man turn to violence, into what might be described as a feminized position – stardom arguably being a feminized position by default, with its extreme surveillance, its image-focused judgement, its frequent sexualization and, above all else, its insistence that a person can be public property. (It is, of course, still the only female character in the song who ends up being the victim of the murderer: a girl-proxy for the star.) Even the use of the Dido sample in the chorus, fluttery and insipid, gestures ironically towards the notion of fan admiration as a twisted, unrequited form of romance.

That this music video is the source of the popular contemporary slang word ‘stan’ – a double-duty verb and noun meaning ‘to worship a celebrity’ and ‘one who worships a celebrity’ – is so perverse that it scarcely feels possible, and yet the more one thinks about it, the more perfectly appropriate this perversion is. Consciously or not, those who self-identify as stans are positioning themselves as something beyond mere fans, not simply vis-à-vis their level of devotion, but in the sense that there is something primal, tribal and a little frightening about their passion. To identify with a character like Stan seems like madness, and yet doing so only underscores how genuinely mad it is to love a stranger in the way so many people love distant, dazzling stars they can never hope to meet. The impulse is also in keeping with the general extremity of contemporary language around fandom, and the multifarious forms of desire this language expresses: wanting to be the famous idol, to fuck them, for them to be 

, to be killed by them with a hammer or a car, to slip into their skin. With regard to this last point, the New Jersey-born, Philadelphia-raised artist Alex Da Corte has made the inhabiting of Eminem’s skin, in particular, into a bona fide art form: in the early 2010s, he began to periodically embody Eminem in his practice, for a series of works in which he sought to explore what it might mean to be, as he put it in 

 magazine in 2017, ‘blonde, straight, and this ferocious person with power’, rather than the ‘young, not quite out of the closet, Hispanic man’ he was when the rapper first went mainstream.

 Perhaps this is another of the less common functions of stanning a celebrity: it allows us to imagine ourselves as possessing their ease and their authority, especially if they happen to be hot, rich, heterosexual and white.

Technically, it is not Eminem at all whom Da Corte impersonates, but Eminem’s performed second self, the puckish and politically incorrect Slim Shady: a bleach-blond, foul-mouthed manifestation of America’s id. When un-famous people have split personalities or pretend to be someone they are not, they are judged to be insane or are pilloried for being ‘fake’. When very famous people do the same thing, they are said to be maintaining a persona. Lapses in persona, during which a star briefly drops their public act and appears to be as boring as the rest of us, are thrilling precisely because of their unusual mundanity.

(2013) is a homage to a vignette from the 1982 film 

 by the Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth. In the original clip, Andy Warhol eats a Burger King Whopper in real time, an image so quintessentially Pop and all-American that the fast-food chain repurposed it wholesale as a Superbowl advert in 2019. In Da Corte’s recreation, the artist records himself in costume as Eminem eating Cinnamon Life cereal, the set-up virtually identical but for the fact that the backdrop, in lieu of a featureless grey, is the vivid, 

 green used in green-screen technology – a visual joke, perhaps, about projection, and the way that celebrities invite it simply by virtue of being.

Warhol himself might be said to have been something of a stan, a gossip obsessive who adored those whose fame sprang from qualities which he himself did not possess: beauty, glamour, heteronormative desires, a comfort with themselves that enabled them to move through the world as if walking on air. There were certain things, however, that he recognized as great societal equalizers – popular products, for example, whose ubiquity meant that their consumption transcended the boundaries of class, race, gender and sexuality. ‘What’s great about this country’, he observed in 

(1975), ‘is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.’

 On a message board entitled The Shady Syndicate, a four-page thread is devoted entirely to photographs of Eminem eating fast food, suggesting that his fans have a particular interest in seeing him, in private moments, sharing their habits: 

you can know that the President eats McDonald’s, Eminem eats McDonald’s, and just think, you can eat McDonald’s, too. 

(‘He had that Hermes dinnerware on his jet tho [

],’ one user points out, ‘so who knows, maybe he’s fancy now.’

 Few things mark a president or a pop star out from the common man more readily, it must be said, than the ability to purchase a set of Hermès dinnerware for use on a jet – but perhaps the dishes in question were still being used to consume a Happy Meal.)

‘To watch someone eat’, Da Corte observed in a 2016 panel discussion alongside Leth, ‘is to see someone at their most vulnerable and basic state.’

Eating is, after all, a reminder of the basic functions of the body, and of every body’s status as a biological machine, regardless of their social or financial status in life. Everybody eats; everybody shits; everybody dies. The title of Da Corte’s 

is at once a nod to the public’s prurient interest in the everyday vulnerabilities of pop-culture icons – those instances in which they are, in tabloid parlance, ‘just like us’ – and a wry acknowledgement of the work’s many levels of falsehood, which are every bit as layered as the character play in the video for ‘Stan’: we are watching an artist doing an impersonation of a rapper, in a choreographed version of an act so quotidian that regular people do it somewhere around three times a day.

The initial catalyst for Da Corte’s decision to play Eminem in his work was a photograph of the musician taken at the Louvre: the oft-circulated one, in all likelihood, of him standing in front of the 

, half-scowling and half-pouting in a dark baseball cap.

Two eminently recognizable faces; two inscrutable 

. Da Corte’s friend sent him the image, having mistaken it at first for a photograph of him, in a reversal of the usual dynamic in which a civilian is told, as a bit of flattery, that they bear some vague resemblance to a star. A similar inversion of the typical order of subject and gaze takes place when we watch Da-Corte-as-Eminem eating his cereal, staring straight into the camera as if he is watching television – as if we have become the entertainment, slipping through to the other side of the screen, the formerly one-sided romance between celebrity and fan seeming finally to reach something close to requitement. Warhol once said that to make great art, ‘you need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you’. Funny that this same shift in perspective – until even the way someone eats cereal becomes endlessly fascinating – is equally characteristic of fandom, and of falling in real, true-life love.

Notes

Biographies

Lesson

Pavel tbc

screening

Su-Mei Tse

The Chinese ritual music system (禮樂, 

) of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE) has been established for over three millennia, leaving traces that still reverberate through East Asian cultural practices. In Confucian philosophy, ritual (

) governed the external world – structuring relationships, regulating conduct and sustaining social harmony – while music (

) cultivated the internal world, aligning emotions with a greater cosmic order. Together, they shaped both moral subject and the political community. Yet the modern legacy of 

 is inseparable from the histories of nation-state formation, colonial disruption, feudalism and postcolonial reinscription. As Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), a historian of the early Han dynasty, noted, ‘Ritual, music, punishments, and governance – all ultimately aim toward the same end: to unify people’s minds and thereby bring forth the path of good governance.’

 In this sense, sound was not autonomous but political; it was a means of social alignment, moral cultivation and state legitimacy.

Against this backdrop, I would like to argue that the works included in this screening programme can be read as subtle but incisive counterpoints to that legacy. Each confronts the entanglement of sound and order, yet none do so by monumentalizing ritual. Instead, they employ loops, repetitions, crescendos and estrangements to probe the structural affinities between music and governance. In weaving together the sonic disciplines, they reconfigure sound as a site of critique, suggesting how sonic structure – once an instrument of state control – might be decontextualized into spaces of multiplicity and suspension.

Classical music, with its codified rules and hierarchies, becomes Su-Mei Tse’s metaphor for social construction. 

(2019) begins with a close view of hands pressing into wet clay as it revolves on the wheel. The surface stretches, folds and reforms with each contact, registering even the smallest adjustment of touch. The process feels less like an object being produced than an ongoing exchange – thought slipping into action, action reshaping material, a rhythm where the intangible shapes the tangible in real time. The soundtrack underscores this rotation: a record spins and its needle catches in the flow, releasing faint bursts of static and hiss. Both wheel and turntable trace spirals of repetition, inscribing time into surface. As the sequence continues, the scattered crackle gradually fuses into a low, continuous drone. The sound loops grow louder until they envelop the listener in hypnotic suspension. The experience is seductive yet suffocating: a sonic demonstration of how repetition disciplines desire and moulds obedience, echoing the ancient function of 

. Tse exposes the cost of harmony – identity shaped into hollow regularity, pleasure inseparable from control.

 resonates with Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, where repetition and surveillance mould the body into docility.

 The sonic loop becomes an invisible panopticon: no visible guard, no external enforcement, only the enveloping rhythm of regulation. Harmony here is not merely aesthetic but political, exposing how subjects are shaped by immersion in forms that appear natural yet are deeply ideological.

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s multi-channel video 

 (2018) sharpens this critique by immersing the viewer in three distinct yet intertwined settings: the relentless activity of a termite colony, the quiet labour of a piano repair workshop on the outskirts of Manila, and the stillness of an abandoned concert hall. Threading these worlds together are the voices of three narrators. A musician muses on the tenuous balance between order and chaos that underlies classical composition. A piano repairman speaks of termites eating through the very body of a European instrument, tracing histories of use and decay. A scientist describes the intricate and adaptive logic of termite society, where the death of a monarch merely triggers the elevation of another, a system of succession that destabilizes human notions of hierarchy.

This destabilization acquires sharper political edges when paired with Chopin’s 

. During Chopin’s lifetime, Poland was under the control of Russia, Prussia and Austria, and he often used his music to preserve the Polish national identity and express his grief and profound longing for his homeland. The mazurka, based on the Polish folk dance form, is a national form haunted by exile; in Pastrana’s video, it resounds in tension with the termites’ frenzied activity. The refinement of the piano – emblem of European sonic modernity – collides with the swarm’s decentralized adaptability. Where the mazurka embodies longing for homeland, the termites embody a form of collective resilience in which survival is not premised on hierarchy. Their leaderless communality contrasts sharply with the rigid structures of colonial and postcolonial Philippine society, in which hierarchies of race, class and culture were violently enforced.

The crescendo of piano against the swarm’s restlessness destabilizes binaries: order versus chaos, refinement versus disorder, human versus insect. Pastrana ‘rewilds’ the classical form, unsettling colonial inheritances of hierarchy and suggesting other forms of collective life – forms that are ecological, plural and non-hierarchical. As the historian Achille Mbembe argues, the colonial order was not only a regime of domination but also ‘a regime of separation’,

 producing rigid boundaries between colonizer and colonized, human and non-human. 

 undoes this separation, revealing porous boundaries where termites and piano interpenetrate, creating an assemblage that cannot be reduced to either refinement or ruin.

On the Collinear and Reflected on the Water 

(2018) complicates this trajectory by shifting from discipline and destabilization to estrangement. Over the image of a caged emu, a first-person poem describes the act of observing the same animal in a series of iterative, tautological phrases. Repetition here becomes a sonic cage, entrapping both subject and viewer. Unlike Tse’s sculpting loop, Hayama’s cycle refuses resolution; the projector’s mechanical clatter, combined with the redundancy of the poem, estranges the emu from our empathetic reach.

The refusal of empathy is critical. Where 

 once promised harmony – aligning human hearts through music – Hayama denies the viewer that comfort. The emu resists assimilation into human categories of feeling or meaning. Instead, we are confronted with the limits of identification: what does it mean to encounter a non-human being that cannot be subsumed into our systems of sense-making?

Hayama’s emu cannot ‘speak’ in human terms. The attempt to make it legible results only in tautology and distancing. Yet rather than lamenting this impasse, the work insists on its necessity: estrangement teaches us to respect opacity, to accept that not all relations resolve into harmony. Here, sound becomes a mystical experience – not as transcendence, but as an encounter with what remains irreducibly other.


What emerges through these works is a critique of both colonial and statist appropriations of sound. If 

 once synchronized bodies and calendars under the authority of the state, and if colonial modernity sought to enforce Western harmonics as refinement, then these works reveal other sonic pathways. Their political potential lies not only in sound’s capacity to regulate but also in its ability to open relations across difference – to reclaim it from imperial control as well as to relearn how humans inhabit sound in relation to the non-human. Postcolonial studies have long emphasized how colonialism restructured not only politics and economies but also sensoria – what could be heard, valued or silenced.

 Together, these works reopen the field of possibility, insisting that sound need not serve sovereignty but can reconfigure it to accommodate chaos, estrangement and plurality.

The Chinese ritual music system reveals how deeply sound has been entangled with governance. Its resonances persist in modern nationalist spectacles, where music still functions as a political aesthetic. National anthems, parades and orchestrated displays continue to draw on the legacy of 

, producing unity as an aesthetic of sovereignty. Yet the alternative sonic politics glimpsed in these works resist unity in favour of multiplicity. It invites humans to recognize themselves not as sovereign listeners but as participants in a wider ecology of sound – becoming with termites, estranged by emus, suspended in loops that both discipline and undo. Here, music ceases to be a ritual of obedience and becomes instead a site of becoming: where governance dissolves into the open textures of sound, and where mystical encounters with the non-human teach us how to live otherwise.

Biographies 

To the Sycophants

On the Collinear and Reflected on the Water

Rewilding

Shaping (塑形)

P Staff

Jerking off in the hospital: On aesthetics and violence





This interview was conducted via video call in September 2025, exactly one year since P and Nat had last met. P showed Nat around their work 

 (2023), while Nat presented P with a copy of her latest book of poems, 

(2024), whose cover is adorned with P’s 

 (2022). This time, P was in New York on the eve of opening their show 

at David Zwirner Gallery; Nat in her office at Glasgow School of Art, overlooking a motorway. In the conversation that follows, they discuss P’s current work, their use of imaging, and their deployment of colour, violence and poetry in 

 (2019). The dialogue circles around questions of possession, surveillance, theft, post-punk and trans aesthetics.

P Staff 
All my current work is about possession, the control and autonomy of a body, and the surveillance of a body. It feels pronouncedly made in the context of witnessing, living alongside and opposing military occupation. How do you begin to understand the way you are surveilled, or possessed or dispossessed, both personally and structurally?

The titles of the current works all connect to each other: a show titled 

, a series of numbered sculptures titled 

(all 2025). ‘Distrain’ is the old-fashioned legal word that means seizing property – particularly to pay off a debt. Nowadays, we would say ‘repossess’. I like to trip out on these linguistic cues about possession and possessiveness, being possessed by something, and that tumbling into being penetrated by something and then being repossessed, taken. This could all be linguistic, or affective, or literal.

 is a 20-minute film, a single take, and very little happens. A person is standing there, silhouetted, mostly dark; you can’t tell who they are. A laser is being shot into their stomach. I worked with a laser specialist to use a type of laser where I could essentially touch the organs of the performer – I wanted to get inside him with this beam of light.

Nat Raha
There’s this flip of the penetration – a queer desire – especially when you’re talking about 

; but simultaneously the reverse of that, which is to use that to consider a different kind of receptivity. I’ve been thinking about the relationship between bureaucracy and empire, and the different forms surveillance takes – as in, watching, filming and so on. Glasgow has the same CCTV surveillance technology as they have in Gaza to see where people are going. Then there’s the other aspects of surveillance: bureaucracy as a form of monitoring, and the sense that we think about surveillance in its contemporary form – as CCTV, data, biodata – as being different from in the past.

PS
I’m interested in the dual suggestion of insertion and extraction and the ambiguity of where power is located. I’ve often used types of imaging that are both technologies of the clinic and technologies of warfare: the X-ray image, the thermal image, radiographs, lidar. These different types of image processing – even the neon, the luminous, the radiated – are the moment where chemistry meets nature and the body. The laser really feels like that: you get this sense that he is being operated on. Maybe it’s totally sci-fi, maybe its medical, maybe it’s like a sniper rifle. The touch of it, this searching beam, is of course also incredibly erotic.

NR
Johanna Hedva describes the yellow of 

 as ‘of radioactive piss, corrosive light, the color of jaundice’, and how the film permeated their dreams – that it ‘was awake, breathing, something that held you’.

and the radiating wavelengths of light – which is, physically, what colour is about: where it is on the spectrum of visible light. Do you think of these washes of colour – on film, in installation, as a material – in terms of what the colour is 

?

PS
It’s something that’s evolved in my practice. It has a couple of origins. One is trying to grasp, alter and pervert the most fundamental commodity of the arts space: light.

Second, it’s a desire for total saturation. This constant flat, neon light. As Hedva says in their text, it’s as much inside you as outside you. It colours your skin, irradiates you. And it has an effect that enlivens architecture, seems to fill every crevice. It’s incredibly eerie.

NR
In your Paris show 

 at Galerie Sultana in 2022, you had a red wash on the window. You had to cross this colour threshold from the street, enter this space, with the colour bleeding into it. And with 

at the Serpentine Gallery [London, 2019–20], the install with the reflective flooring …


PS
… that bounced it all back. I think of yellow as sunlight gone wrong, an apocalyptic horizon, but also bile, piss. It’s incredibly physical. I reminds me of these moments in life when you piss neon because of a certain medication; you piss blood because of an infection; you’re injected with a contrast agent to enable an MRI scan to work.

I had been working with this logic for a few years before a friend recommended me Esther Leslie’s book 

(2005). It’s illuminating on the emergence of synthetic colour as it relates to this history of chemistry, warfare, architecture. I was very taken with the way Leslie describes the greyness of postwar Europe and the subsequent emergence of neon punk, like ‘The Day the World Turned Day-Glo’ (1978) by X-Ray Spex. My show in Basel, 

, takes its title from a Nina Hagen record. I like that there’s this deep poeticism to the title, but it’s also this reference to 1980s punk and post-punk.

NR
I’m thinking about that with 

. I think through the form as post-punk. The poet Mendoza invented the niner, the nine-line poem as form. I was deep in Scottish post-punk when working on that book, and listening to loads of Gang of Four. Nine lines, nine syllables per line, feels contained, masochistic, compared to punk’s ‘fuck you’.

As you’re talking, I’m thinking about how there’s no history of colour without the history of the military–industrial complex, and there’s no history of medicine without it, either. Sometimes that’s obvious and at others it’s not. But that sense of its permeation or its saturation in your practice – it’s the thing that is revealed.

There’s also the relation between trans and crip. The medicalization of trans is something that we’re both contesting and contained by. Even with our strategies that exceed psychiatric power – mutual aid, self-medding, liberatory harm reduction – we still get stuck in thinking of one’s body through medicine. If that’s something we’re blowing up – enlarging – artistically, then we can get caught back into it.

PS
Sometimes I think the works I’m making exist in a self-contained mode; that despite my best efforts the work has its own logic, its own internal mechanisms of desire. Something comes out of me in the work that is intuitive or emotional or habitual – and there’s a particular mode that I think of as kind of having the energy of ‘jerking off in the hospital’. 

doesn’t it feel good to be bad? Doesn’t pain feel good sometimes?

Aren’t we having an ecstatic experience when the doctor is searching the inside of our body? 

An essay on my work once said, ‘Staff’s poems read like … the horny stupor of sexting from one’s own sick bed’, 

 which I really loved. Maybe a less dramatic way to frame it is feverishness, when you’re hallucinating from a fever.

NR
Could you speak about your deployment of representations of state or institutional violence? On the one hand, you’re suggesting that, 

Akeroyd Collection

Artists

AFSAR × DAVRA

Exhibitions

2026

Deep in the Sway, The 5th Floor, Tokyo, Japan (group)

2025

Screening, Proxy Conference: In Forest, Bangkok Kunsthalle, Thailand (screening)

2024

How to Hold Your Breath, Asia Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (group)

2024 Saekki-Chigi, Take Me to the Moon, News Musuem, Seoul, South Korea (group)

Hosting, What about China? by Trinh T. Minh-ha, online (screening)

2023

2023 Squish! In the Forest, Insa Art Center, Seoul, South Korea (group)

Green Snake: women-centered ecologies, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (group)

Practise Till We Meet, esea contemporary, Manchester, UK (group)

And the Silence is getting Silent..., Keep in Touch, Seoul, South Korea (group)

How to Become Collective(s), Yellow Pen Club, Seoul, South Korea (group)

2022

Hosting, Community of Parting with Jane Jin Kaisen, Callie’s, Berlin, Germany (screening)