TECHNE: Homecoming
Courtesy of Andrew Thomas Huang
EXHIBITION DETAILS: 📍 Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway, New York, NY 🗓️ January 9th - 18th, 1-7PM 🎟️ Open Exhibition, Ticketed Performances
TECHNE Homecoming traces the ways identity and kinship take shape through biological, mythological, and digital bonds. Across six installations and immersive activations, the exhibition opens the new Onassis ONX home in downtown Manhattan as a living network and a space for experimentation, gathering, and shared imagination.
Artists Andrew Thomas Huang, Damara Ingles, Natalia Manta, Miriam Simun, Sister Sylvester, and Tamiko Thiel invite us into speculative worlds where myth becomes a method of making. Each project enacts a transformation—of body, spirit, and material— that evokes both a return to the self and a reaching toward the collective.
Building on TECHNE 2025, TECHNE Homecoming envisions technology as a bridge between worlds old and new. Here, creation becomes an act of remembrance and renewal, inviting us to imagine how we might come home to one another, to our histories, and to the stories still waiting to be told.
The Deer of Nine Colors Andrew Thomas Huang
This multi-channel film and sculpture installation is a modern sci-fi retelling of the Buddhist folktale The Nine-Colored Deer from the Jataka Tales. The narrative follows a Thai trans woman who retraces her past life as a wild deer in order to find her true name. When she finds the courage to name herself, she transforms into the Nine-Colored Deer and attains true bliss.
Contact Zone (Level 2) Miriam Simun
Contact Zone (Level 2) is an infinitely changing computer-generated animation in which two sites of rewilding collide: the Swiss Alps and the artist’s body. In the animation, the camera follows the journey of a lynx through the Alpine forest, and penetrates human intensities, encountering imagined creatures who occupy both ecological and mythical space. All seen through the eyes of an AI itching to intervene and unfolding in infinite permutations, what finally emerges from this machinic ecosystem must be seen to be believed.
Atmos Sphaerae Tamiko Thiel
A deep time meditation on the changing elemental composition of the earth’s atmosphere, from before the big bang to today, Atmos Sphaerae combines mythic imagery with the poetic beauty of the “Lewis structures“ scientific notation by making visible the atomic composition of molecules in the atmosphere over Earth’s lifetime. Ending with a runaway greenhouse gas triggered by human appetite for fossil fuels, the work transforms our atmosphere’s history into a tender story of life now under threat.
N’Zinga Mbondo Damara Inglês
This installation reimagines the afterlife and transfiguration of Queen N’Zinga of Angola through AI-generated video, 3D imagery, and augmented-reality. In this cyber-spiritual fiction, the queen morphs into a spiritual organism that embodies an ancestral network of interconnected souls in the shape of an African Mbondo tree. Merging Bantu cosmologies with immersive technology, N’Zinga Mbondooperates as a ritual that ties individual fate to collective struggle through neoanimist symbology.
Drinking Brecht Sister Sylvester
After stealing a hat from the costume collection of famous communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, multimedia artist Sister Sylvester embarks on a forensic quest to trace the hat’s origins. Part interactive documentary and part biohacking experiment, Drinking Brecht charts the artist’s quest using microbiology to merge past and present. Paying homage to Brecht’s “scientific theater,” which endeavored to spark revolution, the work ingests worn-out scientific narratives and turns them into a marxist-feminist celebration of science for the people.
MEMOS Natalia Manta
MEMOS excavates the crevices of history, bringing to light speculative “others” - Memos - forgotten or cast aside in major historical events. Looping animations and digital tombs paired with sculptures that feel both archaeological and alien commemorate inconsequential creatures present at the death of Julius Caesar, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more. Ultimately, these little “Memos” ask us to reconsider who and what makes history.
UNDER THE RADAR: Under Construction
Courtesy of Graham Sack
We Have No Need of Other Worlds (We Need Mirrors) Graham Sack
A son keeps vigil at his father’s bedside, reading aloud from the old man’s journals—cosmic reflections inspired by voyages across oceans and through jungles. The words feel eerily prescient, as though they were written with foreknowledge of this very moment. Perhaps the lesion in his father’s brain isn’t a disease at all, but a wormhole: a tunnel through space and time connecting different selves, different worlds. We Have No Need of Other Worlds (We Need Mirrors) transforms that vigil into a live theater and immersive media experience exploring the relationship between family, memory, and technology. Part elegy, part biometric séance, the work uses interactive technology, video, and sound to link performers and audience members to a digital phantasm—a distortion in the fabric of the universe—asking whether memory itself might be a signal traveling through time, seeking someone to receive it.
Courtesy of Modesto Flako Jimenez
¡Harken! Modesto Flako Jimenez
¡Harken! is a transfiguration of the flawed and fragmented pieces of history written about Juan Rodriguez, a mixed-race Atlantic Creole who arrived in 1613 from Santo Domingo as a fur trader for the Dutch. In ¡Harken! Juan Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life. The AI responds with hallucinations and distortions based on secondhand accounts written by colonizers and accepted as “history.” Using generative AI, audience prompts, face-swapping, and image generation, ¡Harken! Audiences help Rodriguez re-write his story by ‘feeding’ the AI new information, generating new images and landscapes.
ABOUT ONASSIS ONX Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform dedicated to elevating innovative creators in the development, presentation, and distribution of new media artworks and immersive experiences. It provides artists and teams with capacity-building programs, incubation and applied research initiatives, acceleration services, seed funding, exhibition opportunities, fellowships, and partnership-driven collaborations through its hubs in Athens and New York City. This holistic engagement throughout the creative process enables artists to build worlds at the frontiers of AI, immersive, spatial computing, gaming, and other emergent time-based media. Onassis ONX provides a stage for creatives to imagine new futures by questioning the systems through which culture is produced, circulated, and remembered, actively fostering new forms of creative expression to meaningfully engage with audiences around the world.
ABOUT UNDER THE RADAR For over two decades, the Under the Radar Theater Festival has brought bold, risk-taking work to New York City, celebrating groundbreaking theater and performance from around the world and just down the street. Produced in collaboration with dozens of venues at a selection of historic and emerging theaters across New York City, the festival showcases innovative multidisciplinary artists whose work speaks powerfully to the present moment. Under the Radar’s influence sets a cultural standard that resonates through the artistic landscape far further and beyond our January schedule. In coordination with Festival founder and Director Mark Russell, Producers Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne of ArKtype, and with the addition of this year’s highly-esteemed Co-Creative Directors Meropi Peponides and Kaneza Schaal, UTR is positioned to continue to capitalize on the Festival’s rich history and expand on a tradition of trailblazing new direction. The 21st edition of UTR will run from January 7-25, 2026 presenting over 32 productions at various partner organizations across the city.
Curated by Onassis ONX
Presented by Onassis Culture
FUNDING + SUPPORT Afroditi Panagiotakou, Artistic Director, Onassis Foundation Prodomos Tsiavos, Head of Digital & Innovation, Onassis Foundation Karen Brooks Hopkins, Senior Advisor and Board Member, Onassis Foundation
