About the Talk:
In this artist talk, Nancy Lee and Kiran Bhumber discuss the worldbuilding process behind UNION, a speculative sci-fi project that uses immersive media and technology to explore themes of ritual, intimacy, and surveillance. The work follows two beings who uncover ancestral memories through touch and a post-apocalyptic wedding ritual, drawing on the artists’ diasporic identities to reimagine cultural memory as embodied resistance.
About Nancy Lee and Kiran Bhumber:
Nancy Lee 李南屏 is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist, DJ, curator, and cultural producer whose work spans XR, installation, A/V performance, and documentary. A Sundance New Frontier alum, their projects, such as Tidal Traces, UNION, and Woven Memory: Copper Bodies, explore embodiment, memory, technology and ethics through expanded and immersive media. Their work has been shown at Cannes, SXSW, MUTEK, VIFF, Berlinale, and PHI. They co-founded Chapel Sound and CURRENT, supporting underrepresented artists through performance and mentorship opportunities, and teaches media art at IM4 Lab and Festival of Recorded Movement. They serve as a board director for Love Intersections and Normie Corp, uplifting queer voices in media arts and music. They are committed to equity in the arts, supporting queer and underrepresented artists through mentorship, community consultation, and cross-genre programming in Vancouver’s Chinatown studio Atelier254.
Kiran Bhumber is an Indo-Canadian media artist, composer, sound designer, performer and educator based in Vancouver. Her interdisciplinary practice explores movement, touch, performativity and cultural memory through emerging technologies, interactive installations and performance systems. Working with multichannel and spatial audio, she examines how choreographed sound shapes listeners’ perceptions of space and narrative. Her projects include Telepresence, a networked 8.2 virtual-reality performance presented by Western Front; sound design for the National Film Board of Canada’s Tidal Traces; and a SAT Montreal Dome residency adapting UNION for a 93.5-speaker environment. Her work Phulkari translated Punjabi embroidery traditions into sound, movement and visuals through performance technology.Bhumber is co-founder and co-director of INTER/MEDIATE, supporting accessible media-art education and mentorship. Her work has been presented internationally at IRCAM Paris, VIFF, SXSW, MUTEK, ISEA and. She holds an MA from the University of Michigan and a BMus from UBC and is currently developing her debut sonic release.
About the Exhibition:
UNION is a speculative sci-fi narrative about two beings discovering their ancestral memories through the longing for touch and the embodied rituals practiced in their post-apocalyptic wedding ceremony.
The story is told through a two-channel film. Two large screens hang from the ceiling facing each other, each telling one side of the story, creating a dialogue between the two characters, who live in isolation under close surveillance until they meet in the cyberworld. Enveloped by the glow emanating from the screens and awash in a carefully choreographed quadraphonic soundscape, the viewer is drawn into the dystopian future of UNION, where GAEA is both the name of the cyberworld and the corporation that runs it. In this world, memory has become the final frontier for extraction, and simulated pleasure the only currency.
As the story unfolds, the two characters join the rebellion, and come to discover their ancestral memories through touch and ritual. At times a distant witness, at times seemingly one of the characters, the immersive installation implicates the viewer by firmly placing us in the world of UNION, making it impossible to unsee parallels between our world and the speculative future.
Yet between the two screens sits a 3D-printed sculpture of the two characters locked in intimate embrace, its fine lines evoking vulnerability and the longing for intimacy. The only physical object in this exhibition, the sculpture strikes a hopeful note, gesturing beyond its critique of surveillance capitalism towards the generative possibilities of intimacy, performativity, and presence.