TECHNE Homecoming @ Onassis ONX

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 + Aias Kokkalis, 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 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. Damara Inglês, N’Zinga Mbondo 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. Miriam Simun, Contact Zone Level 2 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. Sister Sylvester, Drinking Brecht 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. Tamiko Thiel, Atmos Sphaerae 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. Natalia Manta & Aias Kokkalis, MEMOS 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.