An Endless Meeting: 變 SLOW BURN
Friday, October 2, 2026 - Sunday, November 15, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 2026 6pm-10pm
變 SLOW BURN
Presented as part of An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together
Friday, October 2, 2026 - Sunday, November 15, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 2026 6pm-10pm
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In 變 SLOW BURN, eight artists and collectives explore memory, belonging, grief, queer kinship, dreaming, and transformation. This exhibition brings together installation, performance, video, sound, and painting in Vox’s Gallery One and Black Box spaces.
Breathing from the mystical creature of fènghuáng – bigender birds that guard the South and Fire – this exhibition centers the slow burning of grief, rage, resistance, and world building. Etymologically, 變 biàn denotes weaving through silk and words with folding hands. Shifting between meanings of movement, chaos, uprising, and change, 變 gathers collective practice into a relational cosmology shaped by tending, where rebirth unfolds not through spectacular sacrifice, but through the act of coming together again and again.
Co-curated laura 嘟嘟 and huiyin zhou 徽音, curators in residence at Vox Populi, as part of An Endless Meeting.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Gallery One: Zainab Zulfiqar, Cynthia Zhou Rah Gerg, Voyo Woo, MengCheng 梦城团 Collective
Black Box: Sarah Trad, Kat Nzingha, Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草
PROGRAMMING:
Sept 24, Thurs 7-8pm, Curator Talk + Social
Oct 2, Fri 6-10pm, First Friday Opening
Nov 6, Fri 6-10pm First Friday with 7pm performance by Phenon Grace Murphy and Annie Peterson, an activation directed by Rah Gerg
About the Artists
Rah Gerg is a mixed-media painter using papermaking, textiles, collage, assemblage, and costume-making to transmute their reality. Bound by temporality and place, their practice emphasizes site specificity, collaboration, and immersive encounters which incorporate found and gifted materials. Biological adaptations such as camouflage, metamorphosis, moulting, and mutation serve as recurrent allegories for transness and as powerful sources of queer kinship. Rah is a member of the artist-powered multidisciplinary project space hall pass, where they engage with events, installations, and curatorial projects. This fall, Rah is curating “Held Together: Multidisciplinary Art Show” at hall pass as part of the Collective Futures Festival. This year, they’ve produced collaborative work for ARx Philly, Dyke+ Art Haus’s “Bridging Dyke and Trans Feminisms”, and BYO-Print’s “Almanac”. In 2025, they were an artist in residence at Byrdcliffe and the Peter Bullough Foundation. Rah received their BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2024.
Voyo Woo is a Chinese American multidisciplinary artist based in NY/NJ. Voyo brings together more than 25 years of traditional Chinese paper cutting with biofeedback technology, light, sound, projection, and participatory installation. At the center of her practice is a question: Can technology help us stay human—or even become more human? Rather than using technology to accelerate, optimize, or distance us from one another, Voyo explores how it might help us slow down, become more present, and deepen our capacity for empathy, connection, and care. Her work has been presented at the Montclair Art Museum, Katzen Arts Center, Shanghai Fengxian Museum, White House Visitor Center, and New York Live Arts.
Cynthia Zhou is an artist, designer, and poet based in Philadelphia. Working primarily in oil paint and printmaking, her current work is concerned with the myth of the American cowboy, the legacy of Chinese railroad workers, and how historical archetypes are deliberately created. She has exhibited at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Arch Enemy Arts in Philadelphia, Euphrat Museum in Cupertino, and has been awarded fellowships to residencies at Vermont Studio Center and the Sable Project. She is a National YoungArts Foundation Winner, an Adobe Creative Jam Finalist, and was recognized at the White House as a 2019 Presidential Scholar in the Arts. She holds a BA in Design from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a member of the Philadelphia artist collective Vox Populi.
Zainab Zulfiqar is a Pakistani multidisciplinary artist, arts educator, and arts administrator. Their practice draws on South Asian manuscript painting traditions and extends across printmaking, fiber arts, photography, and video, camp, and material excess to think through ecology, bio-essentialism, and diasporic identity. They hold an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, where they were a Society of Presidential Fellows fellow, and a BFA with distinction in manuscript painting from the National College of Arts, Lahore. Their work has been shown at The Flag Art Foundation, Dark Lab Matter in collaboration with the Berggruen Institute, and Crème Fraîche Studio in London. They currently live and work in Philadelphia.
MengCheng 梦城团 Collective (pronounced “muh-ng chuh-ng”) is an invitation into intergenerational dialogue, communal healing, and empowerment by sharing the Asian American experience of living in the Mid-South. MengCheng 梦城 “City of Dreams” is inspired by the Chinese phonetic name for Memphis, or 孟菲斯 mèngfēisī. As artists and makers who grew up in Memphis, Thandi Cai, LiLi Nacht, Yidan Zeng and the late Neena Wang formed this collective to challenge the way our cultural histories have been collected, disseminated, or made invisible. Through an art-making process centered around food, ritual, and gathering, they create spaces to involve the Southern Asian American community in their own archive making, healing, and resource building. We aim to create transformative processes that allow the Asian American community to not only see ourselves in the history and future of the Mid-South, but also to claim our agency in enacting change in the region.
Based in Philadelphia, Kat Nzingha is a multidisciplinary artist that explores experimenting with abstruse textures. By combining their sculptural works with heavy low-end frequencies and celebratory tones they create blissfully cryptic sonic materials that are the extended bodies of modified objects that they fabricate. Revealing the spirit within their sculptural entities in the sonic form of convulsing kicks, metallic percussion, and hyper-processed textures.
Sarah Trad is a Lebanese-American filmmaker and curator. Working in fibers, video, and computer art, her practice focuses on Arab American history, queerness, mental health, and alternate realities. She previously managed the artist-run gallery Little Berlin and served as the Director of Programming for the MENA (Middle East North African) Film Festival in Vancouver. Her experience in DIY art environments inspired her to launch the pop-up cinema and gallery, Batikh Batikh (BB), which focuses on bringing SWANA (South West Asian North African) films to Philadelphia and helping local LGBTQ+ and women artists acquire solo exhibitions at rented spaces. Trad has received Syracuse University’s Engagement Fellowship, the PlySpace Residency Fellowship, the Velocity Fund, and the Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant. Her work has been screened at the Antimatter Media Art Festival, Everson Museum of Art, Burlington City Arts, and Currents New Media.
About the Curators
Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 creates art to empower relational community healing, making space for nuanced narratives rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and other experiences from the margins. Their interdisciplinary praxis interweaves collective poetry, performance, food art, clay, photography, sound, video, children’s games, meditation, herbal medicine, and installation to explore systems of discipline, censorship, capitalist extraction, memory, ritual, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship. CAO has received support from organizations including The Luminary, BRIC, Culture Push, Creative West, Asian American Arts Alliance, Queens Art Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Raleigh Arts, and New Breath Foundation. CAO’s work has been featured by Hyperallergic, The Amp, Indyweek, and Sine Theta Magazine.
CAO Collective is co-directed by hú-tu (huiyin zhou & Laura 嘟嘟), an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology.
About An Endless Meeting
An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together is a multi-pronged project taking place this fall at Vox Populi that activates collective process as subject, form, and method. Spanning exhibitions, a curatorial residency, public programs, and a print publication, the project explores the politics of collectivity, inviting broad publics to reflect on their own experiences of collaboration. An Endless Meeting will be presented as part of Collective Futures, a citywide initiative bringing together artist-run and community-based organizations to examine collective cultural production.
An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
About The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and engages in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders.
