BADS_Lab: Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Jared broadcasted audio and text based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM), in live DJ sets, and on social media.

Ladipo Famodu is an artist, designer, chemist, and capoeirista. He is interested in kinaesthetic learning, where knowledge is exchanged through the manipulation of objects, or by moving one's body. Much of his work employs playfulness and surrealism in an attempt to undo the tethered logics of anti-blackness and modernity. He is currently working with wire sculpture, performance, and fine jewelry.

Letaru Dralega is a Ugandan Jamaican British artist and researcher interested in the material/immaterial dichotomy, particularly in African and Afrodiasporic ontologies. She experiments with collage, painting, installation, and sound to examine themes of memory, belonging, and the postcolonial condition.

Nimrod Astarhan is an artist, technologist, and educator. Their practice is based on a post-conceptual approach toward sculpture, installation, and media art, utilizing collaborations, digital technology, and electronic mechanisms. Their research-creation involves activating non-visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum contextualized through material, diasporic, historical, and philosophical lenses.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a performance artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. He is the author of six books of experimental poetry and prose.

Hyperion Çacatzin Yvaire lo Saga (ha/li/he) is a detribalized Indigenous (Atakapa Ishak) and Louisianan Kréyòl father, researching post-studio artist and kinmaker investigating alternative sovereignties and new territories emerging from climate chaos. Li practice is aimed at the eradication of Indigenous-settler divisions, White Supremacy, and Christian personhood’s grip over humans and nonhumans alike. Li artwork explores the afterlives and aftershocks of collision through investigating administrative, legislative, technological, and wave phenomena.

Ylfa Lund Muindi is a naturalist and theatre practitioner living and working in Seattle Washington (occupied Duwamish land). Through her work, an intertwining of advocacy, performance and ecological research, Ylfa acts as both an archivist of and an agitator for empathic and ethical relations between humans and nonhuman others.

Juan Flores is an artist and technologist interested in motion and sound as a way of exploring the relationship between control and entropy. He is interested in stress testing systems, whether minimal or complex, investigating the transformations that happen during the process of getting from point A to point B.

Kim Nucci is a Chicago-based media artist, composer, and technologist. As a musician, they perform on electronics, modular synthesizer, and saxophone and create interactive installations using architectural interventions, sculpture, arduino and other microcontrollers as a visual and sound artist.

Garrett Laroy Johnson is a Chicago-based sound and media artist, researcher, and theorist. His transdisciplinary work engages Guattarian process theory, politics and the production of subjectivity, computation and materialism, and post-psychoanalysis.