Category: .
*NEWS*
Upcoming & recent exhibitions, performances, screenings, projects, publications.
(Updated Dec. 2025)
The Polis Project: Astria Suparak on Sports
“I spoke to Suparak about the counter-narratives from artists she’s found through her curation work, the Western fascination for utopian narratives, and how sports and the arts are not mutually exclusive sources of inquiry and criticism of our political and cultural spheres.”
The Game is Not the Thing film & performance series
Spanning pre-cinema to post-internet, this six-part screening & performance series challenges the idea that the worlds of sports and art are mutually exclusive.
Jordan Wept
A video spotlighting the range and utility of the long-running Crying Jordan meme, which re-immortalizes one of the 20th century’s most successful athletes into an avatar of failure; an Everyman for disappointment, angst, and sorrow; a tool for rapid responses to live events; and a demonstration of the increased power of (anonymous, decentralized) fan culture.
Walker Magazine: “No Time for Winners”
“The sports film genre—as it has come to be defined through its codes, scholarship, production and screening contexts, and broadcast platforms—is dominated by two typologies: fictive sports films, which often reinforce dominant attitudes and social and cultural stereotypes while distorting or whitewashing history for storytelling purposes; and commercial documentaries, which typically focus on exceptional players, coaches, or teams.”
White Robot Tears (Cry Me An Ocean)
“A collage of Caucasian actors in roles as emotionally complex robots, AIs and cyborgs. [The installation] questions who is granted the privilege of humanity and emotional depth in these techno-futuristic landscapes.”
Tropical Cats
“A sly, sun-soaked detour into cat video territory, refracted through postcolonial critique and pop collage. This winking essay film uses the feline internet genre to unpack tropical aesthetics, exoticism, and identity politics, purring with layered audio, meme logic, and cultural dissection. As playful as it is pointed.”—Chicago Underground Film Festival
Tropical Fruit in European Still Lifes
What may be broadly viewed as benign paintings from dusty art history books point to still-reverberating and repeating histories of colonialism, trade, and sources of European and American wealth through extraction.
Essay in The Unruly Archive
The Unruly Archive weaves together Stephanie Syjuco’s research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. She also invited nine artists to contribute short essays about their own work with archives.
Carnegie Museum of Art film series
Suparak is the guest curator for the 2024 Film Series, crafting programs around key ideas present in both the museum collection and her own practice, including science fiction and fantasy, architecture, sports, media criticism, diaspora and inheritance.
Art and Knowledge After 1900 includes Asian Futures
“This ground-breaking new history of modern art explores the relationship between art and knowledge from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.”
WHITE ROBOT TEARS
“Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.”
V MAGAZINE: Astria Suparak
“This issue of V ART records Thai-American artist Astria Suparak’s long-term research project ‘Asian futures, without Asians.’ She uses precise language like a scalpel cutting through the ‘human beings’ that Hollywood science fiction films and television are keen to depict.”
Finite Horizon
An amalgamated skyline of Asian futures imagined by white filmmakers. Sourced from sci-fi movies and television shows that depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world overtly marked with elements of East, Southeast, and South Asian architecture.
ASIAN FUTURES, WITHOUT ASIANS multimedia performance
This live cinema work, presented as a taxonomy of tropes, is illustrated with images and clips from futuristic movies and television shows. Accompanied by a live musical soundtrack, Suparak delivers anecdotes, trivia, and documents from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, religion, and weaponry.
ANCIENT SCI-FI
A set of backdrops containing concepts central to present-day sci-fi and fantasy, highlighting a sliver of the brilliance and beauty of Asian imagination and artistry across six centuries.
X-TRA Journal: Softness Is a Power: Astria Suparak in Conversation with Dorothy Santos
“Suparak and the writer and artist Dorothy R. Santos discuss Suparak’s ongoing scholarship, which, in addition to researching historical Asian artifacts that presage contemporary concepts of sci-fi, catalogs the appropriation of Asian objects and tropes in mainstream sci-fi films and television.”
ON THE NEON HORIZON
A short video essay that takes one of the world-building tics of white science fiction — gratuitous signage in Asian languages — to consider its utopian potential and dystopian applications.
DIE D.E.I.
A virtual haunted house of the horrors of D.E.I. in cultural institutions where we examine some of the horrific and harmful practices, while making a case for better ways to approach this necessary work.
Astria Suparak 