Upcoming
Events

ACAF Talking Peers | Tea as Vessel

Damask Rose: A Gathering by Bahar Behbahani

Call for Participation: Tea as Vessel

Saturday, May 16, 2026 (Rain date May 17, 2026)

Tea As Vessel 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT

Full Event 1:00 – 5:00 PM EDT

Liggett Terrace, Governors Island

Set within Damask Rose, a living garden of shared practices, sensory encounters, and diasporic knowledge—Asia Contemporary Art Forum invites you to join a tea-sharing activation "Talking Peers: Tea as Vessel” rooted in traditions of hospitality and creative exchange. Bring your beloved thermos filled with your favorite tea, and take part in serving and sharing with fellow storytellers, poets, and musicians. Together, these vessels gather into a living assemblage—where tea circulates hand to hand as a gesture of care, connection, and transmission.

This tea-sharing activation unfolds as a lightly facilitated, drop-in encounter with tea as 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 ACAF curator, Leeza Ahmady and ACAF fellow 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.

To sign up and participate in this activation, please email us Here

For full Damask Rose program details: Here

To attend Damask Rose, RSVP Here

Poster on left designed by The Trust for Governors Island Digital Community Partner Nimruz for Damask Rose: A Gathering by Bahar Behbahani

Talking Peers | A Reading Salon

An intimate evening launch of Talking Peers — A Reading Salon

May 28, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM EDT

Organized by Leeza Ahmady & Amie Hollmann

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.