Our Words Don’t Suit Prophecies Anymore

Currently based in Taipei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist working across exhibition making, performance, writing, publishing and education. Wang’s research-based practice is concerned with ethics and political aesthetics of listening in relation to politics of missing knowledge and memory. Her work seeks to examine divergent modes of attention and to conceive of emergent time-spaces that critically interweave histories of labor, economies of co-habitation, formations of knowledge, and production of desire. 

Bopha Chhay is a writer and curator of contemporary art. Her research and writing interests are guided by transnational and diasporic histories, artistic labour, and artists publishing. Influenced by a long-standing involvement in artist-run culture, her curatorial work aims to broaden an understanding of artistic practice and cultural production within a wider social and economic context. She is the Associate Curator at Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. She graduated with an MA in Art History from the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Haytham el-Wardany is a writer and translator, living and working in Berlin. He spent the last year listening to talking animals, in fables and elsewhere, and learned from them how to speak in moments of danger. His latest book, Jackals and The Missing Letters (Al-Karma 2023), considers forgotten expressions of hope within Arabic fables, where animals speak and humans listen, in a moment of post “Arab Spring” speechlessness. In previous publications, including The Book of Sleep and How to Disappear, el-Wardany has examined the potential of passivity, through regimes of listening and the dialectics of sleep and vigilance. He is the recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism 2022/2023.

Phoebe Giannisi is a poet born in Athens, Greece. Giannisi works as a Professor at the University of Thessaly in the Department of Architecture in Volos, Thessaly. Her hybrid poetic work frequently slips between writing, performance, and media. Working with animal poetics and land songs, she engages various methodologies including land-based field recording, and performance to create a polyphony of voices and texts into what she calls chimeric poetics. She has curated exhibitions, poetic installations, and presented poetry through expanded multimedia and performance formats. Her books have been translated in various languages, and, recently, Cicada (2022) and Chimera (2024), published by New Directions and translated by Brian Sneeden have been shortlisted for the National Award for Translation in Poetry in the United States. Her next book Goatsong will be published by Fitzcarraldo in November 2025.

Gavin Steingo is a South African musician, scholar, and activist. He is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the programs in Media & Modernity, Film Studies, Jazz Studies, and African Studies. Gavin is the author of two books, Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (2024), and Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (2016), and co-editor of the book series “Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound.” He co-directs The Animal Song Collective, a research initiative bringing together scientists and humanists to explore the idea of animal song from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

Matariki Williams, with tribal affiliations to Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Hauiti, Taranaki, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, is a curator, writer and editor in the arts and cultural sector. In 2024-2025, Matariki held the Oroya Day Fellowship in New Zealand Art History in the Art History programme at Victoria University focusing on the continuum of Māori art practice, and is currently teaching the Tohu Tiaki Taonga pilot programme at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Previous roles include as Senior Historian, Mātauranga Māori at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and Curator Mātauranga Māori at Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand. She is a committee member for Te Hā o Ngā Pou Kaituhi Māori – National Māori Writers Network. Matariki lives and works in Whakatāne, Aotearoa New Zealand.