Photo of Lotte Kjoeller. 2025:
Se more here: Virginia museum of fine arts 2026 / Black | lottekjoeller-photo.com
Workshop and exhibition in Flux Factory
Events for August 2026 – Flux Factory
“I plot dark sousveillance as an imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices.”
– Simone Brown, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
Flux Factory is pleased to present the Dark Matters Symposium at Flux IV, featuring the work of Sherese Francis and Tom Tsai. Francis and Tsai were selected from a pool of over 50 applicants responding to the themes of surveillance, anti-surveillance, countersurveillance, and the lived or inherited experience of “being watched.”
Francis’s Oracle of Opacity (A Kwantum Performance) is a ritual sonic poetry performance and experimental reading inspired by Edouard Glissant’s concept of opacity (Poetics of Relation) and Octavia Butler’s practice of primitive hypertext. Tsai’s contemporary dance work, A Fantasy of Having Home, informed by hip hop battle sensibilities, was created a decade ago to honor Taiwanese resilience in the face of unceasing threats of war. To meet the moment in 2026, Tsai revives this performance and reframes it around Taiwan’s martial law period, a time of political persecution enforced through extrajudicial arrests and killings, secret police surveillance, and imprisonment.
In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses.
Symposium Program
6:30 PM: Doors open – light refreshments served
7:00 PM: Sherese Francis performs
7:30 PM: Tom Tsai performs
8:00 PM: 10-minute break
8:10 PM: Talkback with artists, moderated by Kamari Carter (Artist/Organizer) and Kennedy Hollins Jones (Curator/Writer)
8:45 PM: Audience Q&A
9:00 PM: End of event
Address:
Flux Factory Art Academy
Long Island City,
New York
NY 11101-3707
USA