Upcoming & recent exhibitions, performances, screenings, projects, publications.
(Updated Dec. 2025)
Tag: Projects
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.
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.
WHITE ROBOT TEARS
“Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.”
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.
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.
ALOHA, BOYS
An installation that collages white men outfitted in Hawaiian shirts while vacationing in future foreign lands.
TANG RAINBOW
The 21-foot long mural Tang Rainbow is an array of non-Asian actors outfitted in Chinese-influenced costumes across 50 years of science fiction cinema and television.
FOR ORNAMENTAL PURPOSES
A 3-channel video work shows us how koi are used to embellish the scenery in Hollywood sci-fi. GIF-ified, they are glitches of techno-Orientalist fantasies
MONDAY Art Journal: Lux Aeterna
MONDAY considers how technological, economic, and cultural forces shape the ways we produce, share, and experience media — and how that media in turn influences our values and aesthetics.
Walker Art Center: Peggy Ahwesh & Astria Suparak
“Peggy Ahwesh and Astria Suparak offer inventive perspectives of Western influences on Asian cinema and and Asian influences on Western cinema.” Two-week run at The Walker.
MoMA: An Evening with Astria Suparak
Two-week run of “Asian futures, without Asians” at MoMA, NY. Followed by a conversation with Xin Wang and Theodore Lau.
SYMPATHETIC WHITE ROBOTS
An installation that “compiles stills from films that marshal empathy for AI agents who are coded as white and humanized through their association with whiteness […] Suparak’s media archaeology interrogates imaginaries of AI”
TROPICOLLAGE
Short looping video that collages footage from 30 years of futuristic sci-fi movies and television shows that employ a fetishized tropics trope.
WHY ARE THEY SO AFRAID OF THE LOTUS?
Published by the Wattis Institute & Sternberg Press, distributed by MIT Press. Newly commissioned texts and an edited selection, taking the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha as its point of departure and driven by the question “What are we learning from artists today?”
Astria Suparak 