TECHNE Homecoming @ Onassis ONX

TECHNE Homecoming

Curated by Onassis ONX

Presented by Onassis Culture

Dates: January 9-18, 2025

Location: Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway, New York

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.

Andrew Thomas Huang, The Deer of Nine Colors

Damara Inglês, N’Zinga Mbondo

Miriam Simun, Contact Zone Level 2

Sister Sylvester, Drinking Brecht

Tamiko Thiel, Atmos Sphaerae

Natalia Manta, MEMOS

SCHEDULE:

Friday, January 9 from 1 PM – 7 PM
Saturday, January 10 from 1 PM – 7 PM
Sunday, January 11 from 1 PM – 7 PM
Monday, January 12 from 1 PM – 7 PM
Thursday, January 15 from 1 PM – 7 PM
Friday, January 16 from 1 PM – 7 PM
Saturday, January 17 from 1 PM – 7 PM
Sunday, January 18 from 1 PM – 7 PM

ABOUT THE VENUE:

Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway, Floor 4, New York, NY, 10013.

By Subway: N/Q/R/W to Canal Street; J/Z to Canal Street; 6 to Canal Street.

Visitors can enter the building at 390 Broadway through the street-level entrance. A wheelchair-accessible ramp is available at the entrance for easy access. Once inside, an elevator services all floors, including the third floor where Onassis ONX is located. ADA-compliant restrooms with ramp access are available onsite. Service animals are welcome at Onassis ONX. Please notify an Onassis ONX employee and ensure that service animals are appropriately trained and remain under control at all times. For questions or to request additional accommodations, please contact contact@onx.studio, with subject line ADA Access, at least 72 hours before your visit.

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.

MORE INFO ABOUT THE EXHIBITION CAN BE FOUND AT ONX.STUDIO

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.

N’Zinga Mbondo, Damara Inglês

An installation that 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 Mbondo operates as a ritual that ties individual fate to collective struggle through neoanimist symbology.

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.

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.

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 Sphaeraecombines mythic imagery with the poetic beauty of the “Lewis structures“ scientific notation, to make 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.

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.