This iteration of Talking Peers, Tea as Vessel, was presented as a lightly facilitated activation where tea functioned as both medium and method. As part of Damask Rose: a woven textile installation and public gathering by Bahar Behbahani, commissioned by Governors Island, the session opened with ACAF curator Leeza Ahmady offering a grounding meditation to attune participants to the installation’s Persian garden–inspired environment, establishing a shared field of presence, attention, and relation.

 

At the center of the activation was the vessel—primarily thermoses—brought and shared by participants filled with preferred teas, extending relational space through personal histories of taste, migration, and ritual. Within this assemblage, the thermos emerged as a resonant object, carrying warmth across movement, labor, and displacement while reflecting contemporary conditions of individualized consumption. ACAF’s diasporic artist network—including Roya Ghiasy, Zolaykha Sherzad, Emilio Rojas, Dara Hartley, ACAF curator Leeza Ahmady, and ACAF Fellow Tanasia LaBrew—prepared and served tea while contributing offerings, storytelling, and subtle performance, where tea became a shared language of care, pause, and relational awareness.

 

Emilio Rojas drew from Mexican traditions of limpia (spiritual cleansing), inviting reflection on migration and the body through the release of accumulated emotional and embodied weight, enacted through the gesture of pouring herbal tea onto the artist’s dress as a collective act of letting go. Roya Ghiasy extended the sensorial field through rose water, transforming participants’ bodies into vessels of scent and memory. Zolaykha Sherzad was seen restitching a deconstructed ikat jacket while sharing glimpses from her Kabul atelier, situating tea within everyday networks of craftsmanship, hospitality, and belonging. Dara Hartley offered an embodied narrative rooted in Mongolian tea traditions through 3D-printed teacups of suutei tsai and a handmade zine, linking ritual, travel, and memory. Together, these gestures formed an ephemeral field of shared practice where hospitality itself became a method of artistic inquiry and transformation.