Upcoming
Events
ACAF Talking Peers | Tea as Vessel | Leeza Ahmady
As part of Baha Behbahani's Damask Rose: A Gathering
Time & Location
May 16, 2026 (Rain date May 17, 2026)
1:30 PM – 2:30 PM EDT
Governors Island
About the event
Presented by Asia Contemporary Art Forum (ACAF) as part of Bahar Behbahani’s Damask Rose: A Gathering, this tea-sharing activation unfolds as a lightly facilitated, drop-in encounter within a living garden of shared practices, exchange, and diasporic knowledge. Tea becomes both medium and method—an embodied form of connection shaped through gesture, presence, and relation.
At the center of this activation is the vessel—thermoses and teacups gathered as a collective assemblage. Participants are invited to bring their own, filled with their favorite tea to share, extending this field of relation. The vessel becomes both a site of transmission—of hospitality, memory, love, and the sacred—and a site of shifting meaning. The thermos, in particular, carries warmth across movement, labor, and migration, while also reflecting contemporary shifts toward individualized consumption, holding a tension between shared care and privatized use.
Within this framework, ACAF’s diasporic artist network—Roya Ghiasy, Zolayzha Sherzad, Emilio Rojas, Dara Hartley, and Tanasia LaBrew—comes together to prepare and serve tea, with reflections emerging organically through quiet exchanges. Knowledge circulates through acts of serving, receiving, and being present within the broader choreography of the gathering.
Within the woven textile environment of Damask Rose, tea becomes another thread—interlacing gestures, stories, and traditions into a temporary fabric of relation. As tea circulates hand to hand, the activation offers a space of care and connection, where diasporic practices are shared, adapted, and recognized as everyday enactments of love and the sacred.
Talking Peers | A Reading Salon
Time & Location
May 28, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM EDT
By Invitation Only
About the event
An intimate evening launch of Talking Peers — A Reading Salon
Bringing together the peer-to-peer ethos of the Asia Contemporary Art Forum’s Talking Peers program with the reflective spirit of Image Journal’s Reading Groups, the salon offers a space where artists, writers, curators, and thinkers gather in mutual presence—engaging texts, lived experience, and the deeper questions that shape our inner and creative lives. Drawing from Image’s quarterly offering of essays, poetry, and reviews spanning visual art, film, music, and more, each session centers on close encounters with texts that open onto questions of meaning, imagination, and belief.
Our inaugural salon on Thursday, May 28, is anchored by Rewilding the Kitchen, an interview with Rachel Yoder, author of the New York Times bestselling Nightbitch, published in Image Journal’s The Kitchen Issue. Through conversation, performance, and shared edible gestures by guest artists: Roya Ghiasy, Dara Hartley, and Emilio Rojas, the evening tends to the kitchen as a site of tension and transformation, where nourishment and rupture, care and instinct, coexist.
By invitation only | space is very limited.
Email curatorial.acaf@gmail.com to be added to the waitlist.