Alex Maceda, Ana Won, Ang Ziqi Zhang, César López, Danni Huang, Fiona von Fürstenberg, Jess Vieira, Keb Cerda, Leah Ying Lin, Lena Becerra, María-Elena Pombo, Rithika Merchant

Taking place six years after our own brush with pandemic upheaval, The cataclysm of binary star systems arrives at a moment when environmental, geopolitical, and cultural instability lends new urgency to questions of survival and renewal. In a binary star system, two stars gradually transform one another through reciprocal gravitational exchange. The putative premise imagines humanity abandoning an uninhabitable Earth in search of another beginning and asking what would survive such a journey. The twelve artists represented here make work that suggests every new realm is assembled from inherited matter: stories carried across borders, materials shaped by histories of migration, and technologies that preserve as much as they disrupt. The future imagined here is neither utopian nor dystopian. Instead, it is relational. And, contra to Western modes of thinking, which tend to dominate cultural discussion, the show highlights artists whose practices are rooted in Asia, Latin America, and their diasporas. The decolonial approach allows space for more global perspectives, shaped not only by geographical movement but also by cultural translation, with multiple histories coexisting within a single experience.

Across these works, matter carries antecedent, stories evolve, bodies adapt, and meaning is reshaped. Catastrophe is never understood as an endpoint in The cataclysm of binary star systems but as the condition from which new relationships emerge. Ultimately, the exhibition is less concerned with worldbuilding than with worldmaking. Worldbuilding suggests the creation of a self-contained universe; worldmaking acknowledges that worlds are never finished. If The cataclysm of binary star systems begins by asking what survives catastrophe, its artists reply with a different question: How do we move forward?

by Jessica Holmes