EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Telematic Media Arts is pleased to present Interspecies, a two-artist exhibition of work by the Los Angeles – based performance artist hamsa fae and the international artist avatar 0rphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts), interrogating the limits of the human, by deconstructing the binary distinctions between male and female, mind and body, human and animal, nature and technology.  These artists foreground the entanglement of self-identity with that which appears to be different: an alien other.  And they cultivate novel, more fluid ways of being in-between. 

In their multi-media project, If AI were Cephalopod, 0rphan Drift speculatively imagines an AI consciousness coded with the somatic tendencies of an octopus.  What paradigm of “intelligence” do we presuppose in the development of Artificial Intelligence? Is it not perhaps better to imagine the intelligence of large language models and other digital technologies in light of what we now recognize as the remarkably sophisticated cognition of other creatures? What alternative forms of experience and perception are revealed in so doing? And if intelligence is so conceived, is human cognition not perhaps already more of a distributed, embodied consciousness than commonly understood?

In her performance video, X-POLLINATION, hamsa fae presents the animated .gifs of two ritual, eco-performances of genital tucking, exploring embodiment, trans identity, intermediacy, and metamorphosis. The piece juxtaposes the sites of Hawaii’s Big Island and Mt. Shasta, California, meditating on gender expression in light of the relationship between the body and the land.  Limning the boundaries between the subject and its surroundings, the artist playfully employs natural objects as artificial prostheses while simultaneously presenting nature itself as in need of creative supplementation. The installation complicates science and spirituality, the inorganic and the organic, artifice and authenticity, questioning our attachment to purported biological certainty, while cultivating new and forgotten forms of agency, rooted in the power and mystery of transwomanhood.

In this way, both artists reach beyond the limits of the human – understood since the Renaissance as the “measure of all things” – conjuring figures of the interspecies that not only lie between conventional oppositions, but exceed them, evoking the embodied consciousness of something more-than-human: a mythical creature, both monstrous and beautiful, subhuman and divine, beyond the hegemony of binary regimes.

INSTALLATION DOCUMENTATION

ARTIST BIOS

hamsa fae is a LA-based Vietnamese-French contemporary artist who works across expanded performance, technology, and social engagement. 

With a decade of practice in land-based animism, she positions the body as a site of re-matriation. Her work as an artist is directly influenced by the political and spiritual mundane of trans womanhood. Through embodied actions in her recent performances, she cams with strangers online, walks a nude runway, plucks leg hair for three hours, and loops spectator voices to re-myth ancestral expression. She invites audiences to participate in her site-specific interventions, archiving collective ritual to confront the cultural erasure of third gender peoples. 

In 2026, she continues her research in feminine desire economies, especially within digital intimacy, sex work, and the loneliness epidemic: What new imaginaries or absurdities emerge when erotic labor meets durational performance on the internet? How does the cyber-body renegotiate power and agency within such networks? And if we are all cam girls in the surveillance state of algorithmic media, what are the expectations of online and IRL femininity? 

In 2025, she was awarded the CE Artist & Creative Grant (CA), AHL Women Artist Fellowship (NY), and founded the AAPI Emerging Artist Fellowship (CA). Her performances have been shown at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, AHL Foundation, Bread + Salt, Athenaeum Art Center, and The Front. She carries publications in diaCritics, Vănguard, Transgender Law Center, the Yale School of Environment, alongside her poetry collection, Blood Frequency (2022).

For more information, see:  https://hamsafae.com/about

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0rphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts) has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time.

Their contemporary work manifests as video projections, installations, texts and site-specific projects. Carrying the signal into a moment organized much more thoroughly by time travel. Considering current narratives around climate change, bio-capital and related migratory patterns we re-imagine the urban as porous, interspecies and terraformed. We are researching the sentience and sensory intelligence of the octopus in an attempt to imagine the alien distributed consciousness of algorithm systems, and continue to work with moving images and ancient predictive technologies such as I-Ching and the shamanic technique of Interspecies Communication to create non-linear narratives and installations.

Recently Orphan Drift’s work has been included in the exhibitions Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms, Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary and De La Warr Pavilion UK; Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon; Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or; Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen Germany; Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY; Like a Ray in Search of its Mirror, Mixed Reality exhibition, Donau Festival, Austria; Radical Matter: When Materialism is No Longer Enough, Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab, Viennal Monitor: Surveillance, Data and the New Panoptic, ICA MECA, Maine; May the Other Live in Me, Laboratoria Art Science, Moscow; and in the book Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

For more information, see:  https://www.c0da.org/contributions/0rphan-drift

ADDITIONAL IMAGES