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Tara Asgar is a Brooklyn-based Bangladeshi Transgender (she/her) artist, educator, and activist. Tara’s hybrid practice utilizes archive, History, and personal narrative to create political and community-engaged collaborations around LGBTQIA+ liberation, Immigrant stories, and community organizing. Through public performances, texts, and videos, Tara explores themes of gender, desire, displacement, trauma, and migration. Tara's work has garnered attention from critic Hans Ulrich Obrist and has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Le Arte, Frieze Magazine, Emergency Index, and The Daily Star. Her visual art and durational performances have been showcased globally, including at the Dhaka Art Summits, Asian Art Biennale, Queens Museum, Pen World Voice Festival, Asian Art initiative, and Shrine Empire gallery. Tara has been awarded residencies and fellowships at the University of Maine, Montalvo Arts Center, University of Connecticut, and Oxbow School of Art. Actively involved in grassroots activism, Tara founded the Bangladesh Trans, Hijra, and Koti Rights Coalition, focusing on the economic and social well-being of these communities in Bangladesh. With a BFA from the University of Dhaka and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tara has held visiting artist positions at various educational institutions and is currently a 2024 NYSCA interdisciplinary/moving image awardee and a visiting fellow at Stony Brook University's future histories studio. 

Wooden Room_Wedding Room is a socially engaged, multimedia installation project that addresses the traumatic impact of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). It sheds light on this violent practice, which involves the non-medical, ritual removal of external female genitalia, often without consent, and is widely seen as a patriarchal instrument to dominate girls' sexuality. FGM is prevalent across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, rooted in cultural beliefs about femininity and marriageability. The project aims to raise awareness about the physical and emotional pain inflicted by FGM and advocate for its end, emphasizing the importance of protecting girls' bodily autonomy. 

Wooden Room_Wedding Room installation reimagines the colonialized interiors of Egyptian middle-class living rooms in a gallery setting, where narrators share their experiences of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) that occurred in such spaces. The ambiance includes serving Traditional Egyptian tea and tropical fruits.

The LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative was launched in 2022 with the goal of supporting the most groundbreaking artists working with technology today. As part of the initiative, the newly created LG Guggenheim Award honors one artist each year for their achievements in technology-based art with an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000.

The recipient of the first LG Guggenheim Award is Stephanie Dinkins, a visionary artist and educator whose career spans over twenty years of artistic inquiry. Stephanie’s pioneering work in artificial intelligence centers equity, transparency, and social engagement through an ethics of participation, dialogue, and care.

AI is a massive topic today. It is already impacting our environment, our jobs, our education and healthcare systems, and even our understanding of reality. Dinkins envisions models for AI repair that grows from local engagement with marginalized communities that are most impacted by big data AI.

Her works inspire us to imagine better futures through the intersection of art and technology on a global scale.

Ancestral Archives is a collection of chatbots trained on the work of Black thought leaders. By building a collection of chatbots trained on the work of Black leaders like Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, we hope to recontextualize and reintroduce their work to a new generation of critical thinkers, activists, and creators. The project primarily takes three manifestations: actively engaging in 1:1 conversations with the bots, passively observing conversations or performances between the bots, and data archiving which is the collection and preservation of Black thought. Basing our ideas on afrocentric principles of space and time, we’re creating moments that simultaneously exist in the past, present, and future by having AI contextually repurpose these bodies of work.

All Over Again features work by four first year MFA students in the Stony Brook Studio Art program who engage themes of reinvention, remembrance, oscillation, and cycles (of life, nature, or otherwise). Working in painting, video, performance, fiber, embroidery, digital rendering, and installation; Emma Fiona Jones, Sehee Kim, Josie Williams, Diana Mulan Zhu utilize these diverse mediums to bring to light to various non-linear, non-chronological, and yet ever-present cyclical patterns.

“All over again” implies the frustration of repeating a process already thought to be completed. But for these artists, it also refers to second chances, to returning to places of healing, to restarting something afresh, and to the natural cycles of ebb and flow. 

Josie Williams’s LifeDeathLife is a digital rendering artist’s imagined mushroom wonderland that takes the form of a lush forest scene. The viewer engages with the scene from the perspective of a small creature on the ground floor of the forest, below several towering mushrooms, and is joined alongside several anthropomorphized insect creatures and a disembodied humanoid head. For its properties of growth from death and detritus, Williams uses the mushroom to represent various cyclical patterns including the processes of life and death; the repetitive nature of breathing practices in meditation, with one exhale as the beginning of the next exhale; and the ephemeral emotional states of rage, anxiety, and fear.

Diana Zhu’s installation, Consumed, consists of several mixed media elements including a bed with bedsheets covered in stains from Chinese takeout, a video work made up of vintage pornography clips projected onto the bed, and a recorded performance work by the artist displayed on a laptop. Having experienced the traumatizing experience of being exposed to and subsequently obsessively watching porn as a young child, the artist revisits this trauma in this absurd and cheeky installation as a means of rewriting her painful childhood experience. In the video work, Zhu visually and sonically overlays porn scenes from 1990s-2000s that feature Asian women, recalling that pornography was the only form of media where Zhu saw Asian women on the screen. In the recorded performance that plays on the laptop, Zhu sits on the bed while watching her video work and devours American-style Chinese takeout. This frenzied binging refers to cycles of shame and the body as well as stands as a metaphor for the obligatory force-feeding of Americanized images of Asian culture through her childhood.