Interview for He Spoke to the Birds: Matter, Memory, and Nonhuman Voices

Diego Azzola, Huang Zhe, Installation view of He Spoke To The Birds

Presented at the AAIE Center for Contemporary Art in Rome, He Spoke to the Birds brings together works by Jeremias Rumpl, Diego Azzola, and Huang Zhe in an exhibition curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Taking its title from Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s reflection on Saint Francis of Assisi and Arte Povera, the exhibition asks what it might mean to listen not only to human voices, but also to birds, ruins, pipes, smoke, and matter itself.

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GODDESSES 3.0: Feminist Ritual and Resistance Across Generations

New York-based artist, curator, and filmmaker D. Kessinger explores feminism across history through oil paint, wax, and Liquitex on linen, alongside her curatorial approach that focuses on collaborative and inclusive practices. Her current curation, GODDESSES 3.0, is on view at the Berrie Center Galleries at Ramapo College of New Jersey. 

The exhibit highlights artists across generations who explore feminism within fine art, film, media, and the digital culture of the post-internet world. Kessinger’s curation not only echoes the past but also exhibits it alongside current feminist contemporary art, emphasizing the interconnected nature of multigenerational feminism. The exhibit meditates on ritual as reclamation, resistance, and resilience, and the body as a medium, message, and monument, a space where feminist ideologies harmonize across generations and set the tone for those to come.

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Spirit in the Flesh at Utopia

Spirit in the Flesh is on view at UTOPIA in Kingston, the gallery, bookstore, and studio space founded in 2025 by Lucia Cote. Curated by Saul Chernick, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, and works on paper by Courtney Puckett, Ben Pederson, and Chernick. The show treats art as a way of being, shaped by imagery rooted in intuition and dreams and carried into physical form through sustained attention to process. In a climate of constant noise and unrest, the works lean toward beauty, curiosity, and play. Curator and artist Saul Chernick tells us more about the exhibition and the venue.

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Qiu Xiaofei: The Theater of Wither and Thrive at Hauser & Wirth

At first glance, Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings appear weightless, washed in vaporous blues and fractured light. They hover between memory and dream, suspended in a luminous haze. But sustained looking alters the experience. The mist does not dissolve — it thickens. What seemed ethereal becomes anatomical. The viewer descends from the sky into the soil, and then further still into the ruptured systems, broken bodies, and unstable architectures that structure human existence. Beneath the atmospheric softness lies something closer to the bowels of what we call life: exposed nerves of paint, skeletal fragments, windows that stare back like watchful eyes. The work stages, narrates, and exposes modes of excavation.

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Kate Teale: Vanishing Points and New Places at Smack Mellon

The space in Smack Mellon’s back gallery welcomes you as Kate Teale’s exhibition, Vanishing Points, fills the room, bringing the history of Dumbo into the space. Teale expands space itself through her studies of edge, architecture, and place. The work is a seamless connection of drawings adhered to the walls using Tyvek, making the illusion of space and the real blur into one. The gallery is transformed into a combination of several places, and as visitors turn, they adjust to each new location, finding details offering hints of the places Teale wants us to wander into. 

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