Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas

Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas features Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Zainab Aliyu, Rindon Johnson, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, Rebeca Romero, and Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit—who consider how the formation of collective identities takes place utilizing technology and the internet. How does it feel to encounter the friction and slippage between prevailing ideas of “what your inherited cultural heritage should be,” and the illusion of choice created by interacting with algorithms to access niche communities? These personal and collective experiences, mediated by our relationship to technology, serve as metaphors for how we can store, access, and deploy our memories to process and generate new contexts.

The artists in Close to the Clouds use multiple approaches to expand the idea of “digital diasporas.” Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s collaborative installation is a counter-mythology to existing ruins, connecting speculative futures with the recent past. Their work is a similar exploration of time and the imaginary to Rebeca Romero’s sculpture, which alludes to a constructed alternative future where a fictional revolutionary civilization thrives. Zainab Aliyu’s video is complemented by a physical landing pad within the gallery, with sculptural elements positioned in the room as functional compasses—”quiet meditations on the (im)possibility of using the master's tools.”

Aliyu’s aerial work echoes Rindon Johnson’s simultaneous live streams of airports worldwide, which implicates the viewer in the everyday surveillance of displacement and relocation. Johnson’s additional site-specific work is a deep exploration reflecting Nebraska’s current relationship to the global exchange of information, material, and goods. Bringing the site-specificity home to Bemis Center, Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit’s performance traces the various temporalities of generative technologies—activating a live, site, and audience-responsive installation. Then, looking inwards to our individual selves, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald’s software-based performance asks visitors to opt into replacing your inner monologue with AI, calling into question “how natural versus synthetic each person’s thoughts actually are.”

Close to the Clouds is an invitation to oscillate between the physical and the digital, through durational mediums and a poetic interpretation of time. The artists consider how media and communications shape our sense of self as we move through various places. Across the exhibition one will encounter various sites, both real and immaterial. From the site-specificity of Omaha, Nebraska to airports, islands, and ruins afar, the artists bring us closer to understanding how technological clouds affect our interpersonal relationships, by way of ancestral mythologies, current memories, augmented inner monologues, and imagined futures.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

​​Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. 1983) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation, and performance practices. Their practice, largely research based, is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body, and virtuality.

Solo presentations include Copenhagen Contemporary and Glyptotek Museum (Copenhagen), Astrup Fearnley Museum (Oslo), Migros Museum (Zurich), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Art Institute of Chicago, Alt Bomonti (Istanbul), ICA (Philadelphia), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), and Delfina Foundation (London). Selected group exhibitions include Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Museum Of Modern Art (Warsaw), ICA (London), the 12th Sharjah Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennial, the 10th Gwangju Biennale, the 13th Istanbul Biennial, the 6th Jerusalem Show, HomeWorks 5 (Beirut), and Palestine c/o Venice at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

They are recipients of the New York Artadia Prize in 2021, the Sharjah Biennale Prize in 2015, and The Abraaj Prize in 2016. Their most recent publication, Being the Negative, is published by Bilna’es.

Zainab Aliyu

Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, and cultural worker living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores the cybernetic and temporal entanglements within societal dynamics to understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. Aliyu is a 2025–28 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, and former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation. Her work has been presented internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Vienna Design Week (Vienna, Austria), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY), Film at Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh, PA), and Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong, China), among others. She has been awarded residencies at Pioneer Works (New York, NY), MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), The Luminary (St. Louis, MI), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico), among others.

Rindon Johnson

Rindon Johnson is an artist and poet. He was born on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people, San Francisco. He has based his work in language. Johnson has presented solo exhibitions at Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), CC Strombeek (Brussels), Chisenhale Gallery (London), The Albertinum (Dresden), The Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf), and the SculptureCenter (Long Island City), among others. Johnson has participated in group exhibitions internationally. In 2024 he was invited by Adriano Pedrosa to participate in the 60th Venice Biennale, "Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere." He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient, 2016), the VR book Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017), Shade the King (Capricious, 2017), and The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss (Chisenhale, Inpatient, SculptureCenter 2021).

Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald

Lauren Lee is an artist exploring social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She creates performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. Lee is the creator of p5.js, an open-source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access with over 5 million users worldwide. She is also Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. Lee’s work has been recognized by Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA Art+Tech Lab, Sundance, Eyebeam, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, and Ars Electronica, among others.

Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He crafts interactive and immersive audiovisual installations, performances, and new tools for creative exploration—building new communities and collaborations along the way. He uses techniques from computer vision and machine learning to ask questions about how we connect—and to imagine a shared future. Previously adjunct professor at NYU's ITP, member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, he also consults for corporate clients and leads workshops on new technologies. Work commissioned, collected, and shown internationally, including: the V&A, NTT ICC, Ars Electronica, Sonar, and Eyebeam.

Rebeca Romero

Rebeca Romero is an interdisciplinary artist born in Peru and based in London. Through a range of media that includes sculpture, ceramics, textiles, sound, performance, and video, she explores concepts of diasporic identity, truth, fiction, and their relationship to the digital age. Selected exhibitions include: After the Sun (Copperfield, London, 2025), Cosmotechnics (FACT, Liverpool, 2024), Holding Cosmic Dust (Corinium Museum, Circenster, 2024), Trinta/Treinta/Thirty years of the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (Art Exchange, Essex, 2023), Semilla SAGRADA (OGR Award, OGR Torino, 2023), Oracles and Algorithms (Copperfield, London, 2022), and so on (Das Weisse Haus, Vienna, 2022), Bloomberg New Contemporaries (Firstsite Colchester & South London Gallery, UK, 2021), The Obsolete in Reverse (Springseason Gallery, UK, 2020), and London Grads Now (Saatchi Gallery, UK, 2020).

Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit

Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit's collaborative artist practice examines the ways in which sound, time, and narrative function as material and metaphor for their simulated present. Central to their work is the utilization and questioning of generative technologies that act as both an illusory expansion and extension of the human mind but also as a medium through which labour and violence are disguised and intensified. Their investigative approach manifests as multimodal performances, moving images, and installations that blur disciplinary and formal boundaries. By interweaving traditional and speculative philosophies, histories, and practices, they compose systems that amalgamate, confront, and question the temporalities and dominant narratives of contemporary technological advancements.

Sun and Guhit have performed and exhibited at Artist’s Space, New York; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; and Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Basel, Switzerland; among others. They both received their MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons, The New School, and were artists-in-residence at 99 Canal, New York, and Eyebeam, New York.

Kathy Cho, Curator

Kathy Cho is a curator who supports the practices of living artists by producing exhibitions, events, images, and writing to collectively archive loose narratives of lived experiences. Ongoing research includes expanding the visual and dialogic lexicon of diaspora artists, and exploring the physical and digital architectures of affect. Her accumulation of experiences in artist-run spaces, event production, studio management, and archives continues to inform how she approaches working with artists and cultural producers with care.

She received an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London and was previously a Curatorial Fellow at The Kitchen. She is currently the Curator-in-Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Exhibitions Manager at Counterpublic, and has previously contributed to art ecosystems in New York, London, Philadelphia, Chicago, and online.