bones tan jones TSI Prototype

Asad Raza (born Buffalo, USA) creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary bound-

aries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Diversion, first shown at Kunsthalle Portikus in 2022, diverts a river through the gallery space. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil, was the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), later shown at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020) and Ruhrtriennale (2021). In Untitled (plot for dialogue) (2017), visitors played tennis in a sixteenth-century church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, combines twenty-six trees, care-

takers and objects. Schema for a school was an experimental school at the 2015 Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial. Raza premiered the feature film Minor History at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019. Raza’s works often inhabit intimate settings such as The Bedroom at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. For home show (2015), at his apartment in New York, Raza asked artists, friends, and family to intervene in his life, while Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures featured participatory works and Shaker dance. With Hans Ulrich Obrist, he curates a series of exhibitions inspired by Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité (Villa Empain, Brussels), Trembling Thinking (Americas Society, New York), Where the Oceans

Meet (MDC Museum of Art and Design, Miami), and This language which is every stone (IMA, Brisbane). Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU, where he helped organize a labor strike.

bones tan jones (b.93 Liverpool) is a queer heretic whose work traverses materials, disciplines and time lines. raised in a church choir in the northwest of the UK, on the borderlands of mythical Wales and enchanted England, tan jones’s work has ne’er strayed far from the ecclesiastic rituals of worship, only in tan jones’s world, the church has been burnt, the yew trees thrive in the ashes, and god is trans. bones tan jones presents their living praxis ‘optimystic dystopia’ as a spiritual practice. an eternal storyteller, alternative realities are explored through alter egos, retellings of ancient Chinese and Celtic mythologies through creating; symphonies/operas/psalms/triptychs/sigils/stele/installations/interventions/inter-active workshops. remaining open, so the ancestors can speak through, bones has collaborated with the ghosts of dead artists, unknowingly channelled ancient seal script inscriptions of their families’ clan symbol, and sung many a lullaby in the belly of trees thousands of years on this land.  this, is the work. this, is the way. all tools, souvenirs and tales collected on the way are offered up to you, as an art, of sorts.

A new re-imagining of the opera, Parasites of Pangu, coinciding with the publishing of the written operatic score/novel, which also takes the form of a herbal, plant and magical guide. Parasites of Pangu tells the story of 5 trans nomads, who were reborn onto a wretched earth. Through speculative fiction, sci-fi and queer storytelling, this opera weaves ancient Chinese mythologies, herbal knowledge and magical thinking to paint a tapestry of inspiration and hope of building new worlds in community, to the audience. I envision an installation of brand new paintings and sculptures, which will also lay the foundation for the stage upon which the opera is performed. The paintings will expand on the visual narrative, acting like a traditional woven tapestry, telling the story of the myth. The sculptures will be figurative, also depicting the story of the opera. Echoing war monuments found on plinths around colonial cities, only depicting trans folks, queer folks, disabled folks, all in positions of power, depicting the resilience of their/our struggle.