Upcoming
Events
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, Jed Kiang, 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.
About The Artists
Roya Ghiasy is a multidisciplinary visual artist based between Delft and New York, with a foundation in cultural anthropology. In 2001, she entered the 49th Venice Biennale through a side door, not as a visitor, but as a country, creating the first Afghan Pavilion, “Welcome the Minister of Culture of Afghanistan”, without an official invitation. This act became both artwork and inquiry, questioning systems of visibility, legitimacy, and cultural power. Moving across mediums, histories, and social environments, Ghiasy weaves personal memory with collective history, examining the subtle ways power settles into behavior, ritual, memory, and perception, and shapes how we understand the world before we recognize it.
Dara Hartley is a New York City–based multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work blends technology, craft, and storytelling rooted in Afrofuturism. Combining digital tools and traditional craft techniques, she creates travel posters, textiles, and mixed-media works that envision new futures while drawing inspiration from history, literature, and the African diaspora. Her practice centers joy, self-expression, and radical imagination, celebrating Black joy, beauty, and presence across time and imagination. Outside the studio, she can often be found exploring museums, tending her garden, experimenting with microgreens, or geeking out over Star Trek.
Jed Kiang is a chef, educator, and storyteller from Taiwan whose life mission is to connect “different” minority communities through food, culture, and the struggles that people in our communities share - whether political, economic, or human. His areas of research include Taiwanese cuisine, Kurdish society, and the shared history of food and spice across the world.
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. As a queer, Latinx immigrant with Indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth. He holds an M.F.A. in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada.