Curatorial Statement - Nora Khan — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Curatorial Statement - Nora Khan

A bright light clicks on and intensifies. The eye tries to focus on the light through prolonged exposure past the point of pain, then closes. Afterimages dance inside eyelids. This visual sensation lingers long after the source has been removed, taking form as shadows, traces, and psychedelic blur. The afterimage holds the imprint of people and presence. Recently, science has found afterimages are more than surface retinal play. These apparitions are deeply linked to memory and
central visual processing, influenced as much by imagination as by light. Sometimes, afterimages are produced by pure mental images of structures that never existed.

Afterimages, both as a metonym and metaphor, fill this exhibition. Welcome mats point to uncertain destinations. Studding the highways, sun faded billboards feature shadows of stock photographs for jobs in border patrol. Grooves in concrete slabs carry imprints of Dynasty Center, persisting under developer-driven threat of evacuation. We peer across infrared thresholds of houses in villages that are the last of their kind. Communal spaces, homes, and safe havens may seem nearly vacant, but as epigenetic memory shows us, any sudden evacuation has effects lasting through generations. Before the afterimage has faded, new structures are built atop, creating contemporary ghost stories.

The 34 artists in Proxy, Chimera, Oracle understand that the wake is best approached obliquely—through scores, assemblage, and rituals. Art seeds at the edges, an attempt to control the fallout of the wake. Each work functions as both diagnostic tool and survival manual, revealing how we live in multiple wakes simultaneously: in the aftermath of empire, in structures that persist through perceptual shifts, in the continued catastrophe of the present. They respond to psychic debts induced by loss, theft and enclosure with imaginal strategies towards alternative exits.

First, they build proxies to buy time and stretch sensation and remembrance. One finds body doubles, mother doubles, tongue diaries, hair stitched through skin, speculative scripts, neural networks, branded limbs, rehearsal architectures, and scores made in ash and smoke. Therapy mats, cement rags, and carbonated water stand in for invisible maintenance work and performance. Proxies, whether technological or literal, allow for provisional testing in search of a direction.

Second, they stage chimeric transmutation through alien embryos, molted snakeskin braids, meteor showers, and invented mythological creatures. Icons are pulled apart and put back together again. Transmutation is not a metaphor but a metabolic fact. Through fermentation, evolution, or engineering, systems hybridize, creating a host of chimeric intelligences in the place of one master.

Finally, and most optimistically, they invent oracles: predictive models, risk assessors, forecasts of future chaos, prophecies of performances that should be, divination through algorithmic augury, and games without ends in sight.

Nora N. Khan is an independent curator, writer, and editor whose work investigates the cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic implications of emerging technologies. With a background in literature and digital media, her curatorial practice bridges critical theory and contemporary art to explore how software, algorithms, and artificial intelligence shape human perception and creative production. She has curated exhibitions at institutions such as The Shed (New York) and the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Geneva), and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Mousse, and The Brooklyn Rail. Khan previously served as Executive Director of the Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design.

https://noranahidkhan.com/

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025