Radial Minds

Curated by Oorja

Artists: Ashleigh Abbott, Kaldi Moss, Nanna Debois Buhl, Natalia Mejia Murillo, Nikita Shokhov, Albina Mokhryakova & Andrei Kachalian, Poyuan Juan, Raqs Media Collective, Weina Li

April 17 - April 30, 2025

Radial Minds explores the alien not as a distant “other,” but as an entangled presence within human and planetary life. Much like Einstein’s Gedankenexperimente, the exhibition proposes the “alien” as both metaphor and method—a prosthesis of the self that reimagines new temporalities and futures, and reconsiders the past. This thought experiment calls for an alien inversion rather than a subversion. The exhibition becomes a mode of thinking with new lexicons, layering multiple disciplines, and imagining a world where impossibilities are treated as probabilities.

Meteorite dust, nebulae, microbial resistance, invasive moths, lost reindeer, camel bones, a desert, an ancient beach, a censored gaming world, and a five-limbed alien species appear as scattered dots—forming new relational ties with the planetary. Here, the alien acts as a mirror, reflecting back new models of sentience, kinship, and belonging in a more-than-human cosmos.

Radial Minds was exhibited in a 4,500 sq ft space that had served, for the past twelve years, as a counter-terrorism training compound run by the NYPD. The interior still bears traces of that history: paintball splatters on the walls, sand spread across the floor—residues of a pedagogical architecture of control. In this context, the exhibition becomes a counterforce: confronting the alien within, the Other as prosthesis of the self. As Reza Negarestani suggests, the UFO hovers not above us, but over our very consciousness. Who, then, is the real terrorist?

Somewhere beyond the reach of reason,
an alien waits in a black box,
its seal—quantum, ancient, unbreakable,
folded through time like dark matter’s lullaby.
Like the Schrödinger’s cat,
or a tidally locked world clinging to its star,
it is both dead and alive,
invader and savior,
a paradox in fur,
humming with the tremor of a superposed electron—
both particle and wave,
prey and predator,
of this world and not,
an intergalactic seed,
a cat forever purring—
and not.

Performance “New Species” by Guerrilla Theatre, 8pm, April 17 2025, convened by Maxwell Abeles and featuring Crackhead Barney, Smomid, Rabbistravinsky, Max Cohen, Gabriel Hudson Robinson, RING / Yuqi Yang and pompom pirate.