Phantom Thread | Joni Zhu

is a curator who works at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory and cultural analysis. Her curatorial engagements are concerned with minoritarian discrimination and social injustice, ecologies of care and decolonising nature, machinic conditioning and enslavement, pluralised and diasporic subjectivities, alternative imaginations and inventive methods. Between 2023 and 2025, she was the Head of Programmes, Research and Initiatives at the Rockbund Art Museum. Currently, she is the Director of CHERUBY, a Shanghai-based cultural organisation operating at the intersection of art and fashion. bjonizhu@gmail.com

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Joni Zhu is a curator who works at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory and cultural analysis. Her curatorial engagements are concerned with minoritarian discrimination and social injustice, ecologies of care and decolonising nature, machinic conditioning and enslavement, pluralised and diasporic subjectivities, alternative imaginations and inventive methods. Between 2023 and 2025, she was the Head of Programmes, Research and Initiatives at the Rockbund Art Museum. Currently, she is the Director of CHERUBY, a Shanghai-based cultural organisation operating at the intersection of art and fashion. bjonizhu@gmail.com

08.2025 Alternative pedagogy: Late Summer School 10.2024 Becoming Rehearsal: a process-driven performative exchange and workshops. 07.2024 The Museum summer night party, where you have to earn your entrance for a night of performances. 07.2024 Commissioned three audiovisual performances with Eastern Margins. 03.2024 AUUUUDITORIUM reclaimed the Rockbund Art Museum's historical auditorium with a scenography by Ming Wong. 03.2023 Chated with Xin Liu about her work and intimacy at the Courtauld. 02.2023 Artforum/Bassam Al-Sabah: The seduction of CGI and the limits of the self 06.2022 Silk, Wars, Asias in Viscose Journal. 06.2022 Chaired the conference panel Life after the ruins: Precarity, labour, work infrastructures at UCL. 06.2022 JSC Worldbuilding exhibition catalogue - Lawrence Lek, Nepenthe Zone 06.2022 In dialogue with Lawrence Lek about friendships and futures. 04.2022 I gave a talk on Bassam Al-Sabah's exhibition I AM ERROR at De La Warr Pavilion. 12.2021 A Text on skin-ego, simulation and regenerative futurism for Jinseung Jang's solo show Réalité Simulée at Onsu Gonggan, Seoul. 10.2021 CIRCA: Destination, Circulation, Where Are We Going? 09.2021 I talked about technological optimism in relation to the COVID-19 machine on the panel discussion of Local/Translocal: The Reproduction of Technological Promise at Chinsenhale Gallery, London. 06.2021 Currently on Vdrome 05.2021 Plastic Love / 塑胶爱 02.2021 I talked about how Advanced Practices in the arts explore, invent and restage knowledge formats at Visual Cultures Public Lecture, Goldsmiths, University of London 04.2020 Submitted PhD thesis titled Cyber-Proletariat and the New Subaltern Space. 11.2019 I started a post-doc role, working on the AHRC funded project Bio-Exempt. 09.2019 I responded to Shanzhai Lyric’s "FREEDON (and on and on)" at the Women’s Art Library. 03.2019 I produced a CGI film. 06.2018 Latin America Subaltern Studies Group 10.2017 I took part to organise (X) An Evening of Performances at DRAF. 09.2017 I read Chinese Sci-fi for CAMPerVAN at Jupiter Woods. 03.2017 I organised and presented at the International Curatorial Workshop: Curating and Social Change. 09.2016 I contributed to An Anecdoted Archive of Exhibition Lives that was exhibited at Bergen Assembly, organised by freethought. 11.2015 I started researching a PhD at Curatorial/Knowledge, Goldsmiths. 07.2015 Black Box Formula. 01.2015 Are we working too much? 10.2014 I talked to Valerie Steele about obsessions. 05.2014 Introspections is an artist moving image programme I curated in collaboration with LUX and BFI at London’s Picturehouse. 01.2014 13th Istanbul Biennial: Mom, Am I Barbarian? 05.2012 An exhibition investigating creative resistance was curated and exhibited at the Guardian. 03.2012 Circular Facts 03.2011 I took part in the process of recovering and re-activating a pedagogic experiment: the ‘A’ Course with MayDay Rooms.

07.2024

"Cultural identity is a tapestry, but who weaves its threads?" — Eastern Margins

Between July and November 2024, the Rockbund Art Museum invites Eastern Margins to interrogate themes of cultural displacement, diasporic journeys and temporal (dis)connection through a three-part audiovisual intervention titled Phantom Thread.

London-based music label and collective with roots in both, Eastern Margins' creative practice is attuned to the relationship between the "diaspora" and the "home". Phantom Thread connects cultures we no longer live in, places we no longer inhabit and times that have come to pass. Each intervention threads into each other to re-interpret and reframe the previous one.

In July, Dirty K and Jackson Kaki dive into the excesses of Japan’s early 90s Heisei Era. In September, Post-Trance Cult gov-corp Minna-no-kimochi みんなのきもち expand their operations with a sonic meditation, before the visceral explosion of FITNESSS in November.

Dirty K and Jackson Kaki, Myogi, 2024
Minna-no-kimochi, Sommer Edition, 2024
FITNESSS, Breaking the Waves, 2024