Now showing at LUMA Arles: David Armstrong, Liu Chuang, Maria Lassnig, Philippe Parreno, and Tony Oursler
Symposium: Tales of Superstition and Magic
Alexis Bard Johnson
Alexis Bard Johnson, PhD is the Curator at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in Los Angeles. She oversees the exhibitions, programs, and art collection at one of the largest repositories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer materials. She most recently curated The Space We Take: Portraits from the Archive and Holding Patterns by Alexandra Juhasz. Her exhibition Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation was named one of the top 50 global exhibitions of 2024 by Hyperallergic. Her previous exhibitions include Robert Andy Coombs: No Content Warning, Looking for Lesbians and Archival Intimacies: Queering South/East Asian Diasporas. Her essay, “Queer Visibility: Photography in American Print Culture, 1945-1980” was recently published in the Getty Museum’s Queer Lens exhibition catalog (Getty, 2025). Before joining ONE Archives, Johnson worked at the Princeton Art Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Carlo A. Célius
Historian and art historian Carlo A. Célius is Director of Research at CNRS, a member of the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF). His research is focused on Saint-Domingue/Haiti and explores three themes: visual arts and culture; the experience, knowledge, and use of the past; and the history of ethnography. Author of Langage plastique et énonciation identitaire: L’invention de l’art haïtien (Quebec City, PUL, 2007), Création plastique d’Haïti: Art culture visuelle en colonie et postcolonie (Paris, Éditions de la MSH, 2023), and Hector Hyppolite: Création plastique et autofiction (Paris, CIDIHCA France, 2023), he has also contributed to a number of journals and anthologies, including “Haïti et l’anthropologie,” Gradhiva, n.s., no. 1 (2005); “Haïti: Face au passé/Confronting the Past,” Ethnologies 28, no. 1 (2006); Situations créoles: Pratiques et représentations (Quebec City, Nota Bene, 2006); and “Création plastique, traites et esclavages,” Cahiers des Anneaux de la mémoire, no. 12 (2009).
Gaëlle Choisne
Gaëlle Choisne’s practice combines a documentary approach (photography and video) with the use of raw materials, addressing socio-political issues related to the over-exploitation of natural resources and colonial history. Born of a Haitian mother and a Breton father, the artist blends oral traditions, Creole mythology and popular cul- ture in works that refer to both Haiti’s history and her own personal narrative. Choisne has been awarded the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2024. Recent solo exhibitions include Temple of Love – Coeur, Scuola Piccola Zattere, Venice (2025), Maât and the tears of god, Espace Croisé, Roubaix (2024); Temple of Love – To Hide, KfW Stiftung, Francfort (2024), and Temple of Love – Atopos, MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (2022). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Le chant des sirènes, Villa Médicis, Roma (2024), PickPocket, Fondazione Zimei, Teatro Michetti, Pescara (2023), and Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World), HKW, Berlin (2022).
Inès Di Folco Jemni
Franco-Tunisian painter Inès Di Folco Jemni’s work explores notions of exile and maternity, highlighting different myths and ritual practices from around the world. Her works invoke past lives, inviting us to revive ancestors and spirits, carefully and gently, through ceremony. Via her representations and references, Inès Di Folco Jemni offers new narratives, both personal and historical, outside of the hegemonic Western gaze. She has had recent solo and group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Magasins Généraux (Pantin), NADA (Miami), Deli Gallery (New York and Mexico), FRAC Lorraine (Metz), Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille), Scheusal (Berlin), and sissi club (Marseille). Her works are in the collections of FRAC Île-de-France (Paris and Romainville), FRAC Sud (Marseille), FCAC (Marseille), and Collezione Taurisano (Naples).
Johanna Hedva
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Hedva is the author of the 2024 essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom. They are also the author of the novel Your Love Is Not Good, and the novel On Hell. Their artwork has been shown internationally, most recently in the Seoul Mediacity Biennial, at the HAU Berlin, and in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles at JOAN and London at TINA; and in group exhibitions at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Performance Space New York, Seoul Museum of Art, the 14th Shanghai Biennial, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Modern Art Oxford, and MASS MoCA. Their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House (2021) and The Sun and the Moon (2019). In 2024, they were a Disability Futures Fellow.
Daniela Jacob Pinto
Daniela Jacob Pinto is a Chilean sociologist and anthropologist who has been living in France for six years. She is currently writing a doctoral thesis in social anthropology and ethnography at EHESS under the supervision of Véronique Bénéï. Her research focuses on political violence and the forms of resistance and reparation that develop in response. In the wake of these insights, she conceived an emancipatory feminist approach to tarot, which aims to disarm authority relationships and collectively create more desirable futures. She cowrote, with Ariane Temkine, Des cartes sans destin: Cartomancie critique, presented at La Tilia in April 2024.
Low Lov
Low Lov is a transdisciplinary Afrofeminist artist and musician. They have developed a polymorphic oeuvre in which their different practices come together through energetic and vibratory rituals. During their performances, concerts, and installations, Low Lov re-engages with ancestral spirituality to ward off the rationalist and productivist norms of the colonial and patriarchal West, opening portals to other worlds, both organic and dreamlike. Their electric, spiritual music is influenced by trip-hop, trap, and sacred chants. On March 21, 2025, the spring equinox, they released their third album, STARS. Recent performances include those in Paris (Centre Pompidou, Fondation Pernod Ricard, Lafayette Anticipations), Brussels (Kiosk Radio), Bordeaux (CAPC), Copenhagen (Christianshavns Beboerhus), New York (Dustofnyc), and Los Angeles (PSLA).
Daniele Morelli
Daniele Morelli was born in Tuscany and began to study piano at the age of 7 and guitar at the age of 11. He listened to and played a lot of blues from a very early age, although improvisation was always his preferred way to approach any style of music. He played with his own quartet — the “Morelli Electric Quartet” — and other projects between France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Mexico. He continues to play in numerous festivals and jazz clubs with his new projects “Daniele Morelli standard trio”, “Dada Beat Orchestra” and “GrupoTsikuaki”. He has recorded three albums under his own name: "Mision azul", "La valigia dei sogni" and "Ars Musica". In 2024 he released 4 albums: Ya Maa Diali, with Liat Bar on bass and Abraham Lopez Calderon on drums; Agua in duo with Mexican vibraphonist Miguel Alzerreka; Consistenza Umana with crystallophonist Robert Tiso dedicated to the Volterra Asylum and Cinema with French drummer Hadrien Santos da Silva.
Kettly Noël
Kettly Noël is a choreographer, dancer and actress. She is a multidisciplinary Haitian artist and a leading figure in contemporary dance. International audiences discovered her in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu (2014), where her performance as Zabou became iconic. For over 25 years, she has been developing artistic platforms across Africa, Haiti, and the Caribbean. She is the founder of the choreographic center Donko Seko in Mali, PAPLAB, and KN Dance Project, and the initiator of the festivals Dense Bamako Danse and Caribbean Dance Platform. Her work combines creation, transmission, and social engagement, providing young artists access to major international stages. Her recent piece, NOIR SERRÉ, presented in June 2024 at Paris Dance Project, examines the historical memory of the debt imposed on Haiti and its contemporary consequences.
Judith Noble
Judith Noble is Professor Emerita of Film and the Occult at Arts University Plymouth (UK). She began her career as an artist filmmaker, then worked for over twenty years as a production executive in the film industry, working with directors including Peter Greenaway and Amma Asante. Her research encompasses artists’ moving image, Surrealism, the occult and work by women artists, and she has published on filmmakers Maya Deren, Derek Jarman and Kenneth Anger. Her most recent publications include: The Dance of Moon and Sun – Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (editor, 2023, Fulgur) and ‘A Convocation of Theurgists – Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and West Coast Occulture’ in Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer LA – Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation (eds Alexis Bard Johnson and Kelly Filreis, One Archive/USC, 2024). She is a board member of RENSEP (the Research Network for Esoteric Practices), co- founder of the Black Mirror Research network and the artists’ collective the Inner Space Exploration Unit. She continues to practice as an artist, making artist’s books and text+image works; her most recent film is Fire Spells (2022), a collaboration with director Tom Chick.
Romain Noël
Writer Romain Noël straddles poetry, magic, philosophy, and theology, producing hybrid texts that seek to abolish the border between reality and fiction—texts he sees as transformative technologies to serve the common world. His third book, La Grande conspiration affective: Un thriller théorique, was published by Éditions du Seuil in October 2024. He also creates art under the name Youri Johnson, a character taken straight out of a yet to be published book: L’Art secret de la guerre secrete.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup : The Kitchen Show” in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows.
Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), Mondialité (2017), Somewhere Totally Else (2018) The Athens Dialogues (2018), Maria Lassnig: Letters (2020), Entrevistas Brasileiras: Volume 2 (2020), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021).
Julien Princesse Didier
A queer environmentalist, Julien Princesse Didier currently lives in the Vosges Saônoises region of France. He works with the Belgian organization Mycélium, who published his essay “Nous sommes la nature qui dérange: Tracer des chemins queer-écologistes” (We Are Disruptive Nature: Tracing Queer Ecology Pathways, 2023). He explores queer ecological concepts as well as rural queer community-organizing practices. He cotranslated and wrote the preface to the French edition of Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (Sorcellerie et contre-culture gay, 2025, Le Passager Clandestin), sparking his interest in the ideas of its author, Arthur Evans, and his contribution to questions of spirituality and magic in the American gay movement.
P. Staff
P. Staff (born 1987, UK) lives and works in Los Angeles and London. P. Staff studied at Goldsmiths College, London (2009), and was part of the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London (2011). Through a varied interdisciplinary body of work, P. Staff interrogates notions of discipline, dissent, labour and queer identity. P. Staff has had solo exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2019); LUMA Westbau, Zürich, Switzerland (2019); Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2016); Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2015); The Showroom Gallery, London, UK (2014); and Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2012).
Stéphanie Seidel
Stephanie Seidel is a curator and researcher. Starting January 2026, Seidel will serve as the Head of Contemporary Art at Kunstmuseum Basel. From 2016 to 2025, she was the Monica and Blake Grossman Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, where she curated numerous exhibitions, including on surveys on Olga de Amaral (in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain), Thomas Bayrle, Judy Chicago, Michel Majerus, Allan McCollum, Diamond Stingily, Betye Saar (in collaboration with 49 Nord 6 Est—Frac Lorraine, Metz, France, and the Kunstmuseum Luzern), and Zilia Sánchez (traveled to Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan). This summer, Seidel curated the public sculpture park Borrowed Scenery for the Kunstkommission Düsseldorf at the Lantz’scher Skulpturenpark, Düsseldorf. Seidel is also a member of the Betye Saar Legacy Group, an international committee of curators and scholars founded in 2025 that is dedicated to preserving, interpreting, and advancing Saar’s oeuvre.
Tai Shani
Tai Shani’s artistic practice, comprising performance, film, photography, and installation, uses experimental writing as a guiding method. Oscillating between theoretical concepts and visceral details, Shani’s texts attempt to create poetic coordinates in order to cultivate, fragmentary cosmologies of marginalized nonsovereignty. Taking cues from both mournful and undead histories of reproductive labour, illness and solidarity, her work is invested in recovering feminised aesthetic modes – such as the floral, the trippy or the gothic – in a register of utopian militancy. In this vein, the epic, in both its literary long-form and excessive affect, often shapes Shani’s approach. Extending into divergent formats and collaborations. Shani’s projects examine desire in its (infra-)structural dimension, exploring a realism that materially fantasises against the patriarchal racial capitalist present. Tai Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. Her work has been shown extensively in Britain and internationally.
Ariane Temkine
Ariane Temkine is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at EHESS under the supervision of Anne Lafont and is a Non-Tenured Teaching and Research Fellow at Aix-Marseille University. Her research critically evaluates Disney’s animated films, with a focus on the intersection of gender and race. She has also been interested in tarot cards (Marseille, Pixie-Rider-Waite, etc.) and cartomancy for several years. With Daniela Jacob-Pinto, she cowrote Des cartes sans destin: Cartomancie critique, presented at La Tilia in April 2024, which expands on the ethos of tarot.