Wendi Yan, still from Dream of Walnut Palaces (2025)
An afternoon of performances and talks with Kinnari Saraiya, Skawennati and Wendi Yan, exploring how digital tools can enable us to reimagine cultural heritage, identity and alternative futures.
Taking place as part of the exhibition SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now, this afternoon offers an opportunity to discover the ideas and creative processes behind the works of Kinnari Saraiya and Wendi Yan, alongside a live performance by Skawennati. The afternoon is hosted by Pita Arreola, arebyte's Head of Programmes and curator of the exhibition.
PROGRAMME
Kinnari Saraiya, a London-based interdisciplinary artist and dancer whose practice draws on South Asian embodied knowledge and colonial archives, will share the research and creative process behind In the Eye of a Dream (2025-present). This interactive installation brings to life a dream recorded in India in 1921 as part of a British colonial anthropological project. Through digital storytelling, sound and an embroidered controller, the work invites visitors to explore alternative understandings of memory, history and time.
Wendi Yan, an artist whose practice combines CGI, game engines and scientific research to explore how knowledge is constructed, will discuss the development of Dream of Walnut Palaces (2025). The film follows a fictional Daoist scholar travelling from Beijing to Paris in the eighteenth century, imagining how European science might have developed differently through an encounter with Daoist philosophy. Using archival material and AI-assisted 3D modelling, the work reimagines historical exchanges between China and Europe.
Skawennati, an internationally exhibiting artist who has spent this millennium imagining utopic futures, will present Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace Island, a destination she co-created within the 3D online virtual world Second Life. Drawing on her dual perspectives as an urban Mohawk woman and a cyberpunk avatar, her practice spans speculative fiction machinima, costumes and quilts, gradually coalescing into an alternate universe.
We encourage visitors to explore the exhibition before the event. Allow approximately 40 minutes for your visit. The exhibition opens at 12pm, and the event begins at 3pm.