Land Bodies, Liquid Skins

A program of:
Dwelling Under Distant Suns

Wednesday, November 19
11am–12:30pm    
On Zoom

This virtual panel brings artist Alvin Luong in close dialogue with critic Tausif Noor, discussing Luong’s consistent methodologies behind his new commission, Cyanide Debt (2025), in dialogue with another body of work, Before I was Coral, I was Refugee (2024-ongoing).  

Land Bodies, Liquid Skins is the second event of Across Distance from the Sun, a series of virtual panels that position waterways and solar rays as art spaces, focusing on the imaginaries attached to both forces in conversation with the practices of the exhibiting artists of Dwelling Under Distant Suns.

Registration is required to receive the Zoom link for this event.

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About the Panelists

Alvin Luong (b. Toronto) works with stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from diasporic and working class communities to create artworks that reflect on historical development and its intimate effects on the lives of people. Luong has exhibited and screened artworks in institutions including Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing), Gudskul (Jakarta), The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver), and Guangdong Times Art Museum (Guangzhou). He has held research and resident artist appointments at the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), HB Station Contemporary Art Research Center (Guangzhou), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). His works are held in the permanent collection of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York City). 

Tausif Noor studies global modern and contemporary art with a focus on South Asia and its histories of decolonization. His research interests broadly concern modernism’s imbrication with nationalism and internationalism, postcolonialism, and Marxist thought. He is at work on a dissertation that charts a critical history of modernist visual practices and their entanglements with humanist philosophy and humanitarianism during East Pakistan’s transition to independent Bangladesh, between the 1947 Partition of India and the aftermath of the 1971 Liberation War.  

Noor holds a BA in Art History with a minor in Government from Dartmouth College, and an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a 2014-15 Fulbright Student Fellow in India, where he worked at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. His criticism and essays, for which he received a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the 2023 Grace Dudley Arts Writers Prize from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, appear in journals and periodicals including Art History, Art Margins, Artforum, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, as well as in various exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. Having previously worked as the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the ICA Philadelphia, as well as at the Whitney Museum and the Imperial War Museum, Noor currently serves as Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where he helps organize collection exhibitions and monographic survey shows.