Art Licks | Joni Zhu

is a curator who works at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, cultural analysis. Her ongoing curatorial engagements are concerned with questions surrounding minoritarian discrimination and social injustice, opacity and the illusion of diversity, ecologies of care and decolonising nature, machinic conditioning and enslavement, pluralised and diasporic subjectivities, speculative fiction and inventive methods, multiple futures and the collapse of monoculture, decentralisation and alternative imaginations, organisational collaboration and cooperation. bjonizhu@gmail.com

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Joni Zhu is a curator who works at the intersection of contemporary art, critical theory, cultural analysis. Her ongoing curatorial engagements are concerned with questions surrounding minoritarian discrimination and social injustice, opacity and the illusion of diversity, ecologies of care and decolonising nature, machinic conditioning and enslavement, pluralised and diasporic subjectivities, speculative fiction and inventive methods, multiple futures and the collapse of monoculture, decentralisation and alternative imaginations, organisational collaboration and cooperation. bjonizhu@gmail.com

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.

09.2017

Curated by CAMPerVAN, THE SCI-FI POWERVERSE investigates how our sexual desires give power to the construction of other communities and other universes, or powerverses. I read an expert of my translation of Zhongguo2185, a sci-fi novel by Hugo Award (2015) winner Liu Cixin, written between the year of 1985 and 1989. The novel envisions a ‘high tech, low life’, democratic society that is set in the year of 2185, with the advanced cybernetic connectedness embedded within imaginary China, which is led by a young female leader. The country is confronted with issues of population explosion, with a larger proportion of centenarians who are trying to hold onto old traditions; kids are rebelling from a very young age due to machine learning which has allowed them to absorb a huge amount of knowledge within a small space of time.