Curated by Thamyres VM
With works by Noam Youngrak Son, Meii Soh, and Elif Cadoux
Opening Reception: Friday, May 2, 6-8pm
NARS Main Gallery
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Speculative Reflexive, a group exhibition curated by Thamyres VM, featuring works by Noam Youngrak Son, Meii Soh, and Elif Cadoux.
What if speculation could speculate upon itself? Speculative Reflex brings together works by Noam Youngrak Son, Meii Soh, and Elif Cadoux to explore technologies, fictions, and feelings that blur the line between reality and futurity. The exhibition opens space for shared dreaming, critical reflection, and nonhuman alliances. By turning speculation inward, it deepens and weaves together theoretical frameworks, symbolic references, and aesthetic gestures that trace—and retrace—the very notion of speculation.
Public Programs:
Friday, May 2 2025
6:30 PM - Video Performance
Taiz: WebCome Greetings
12 min 22 sec
Taiz, born under hyper-surveillance grounds, fractured identities, and the relentless velocity of TikTok, longs to defy the limits imposed on her identity. She welcomes you to the show in her own way.
Performed by Meii Soh
7:00 PM - Performance
FEELERS
In a duet of extrasensorial contact, the performers move to the choreographies and possibilities present in Cadoux’s sculptural works Pheroform and pheroline. What can you feel without touching, notice without noting?
Performed by Bel McLaughlin and Elif Cadoux
Wednesday, May 21st 2025
6:00 PM - Video Performance
From Ontological Modeling to Diagrammatic Science Fiction
In this tutorial, design theorist Noam Youngrak Son introduces their step-by-step method of fiction writing. They demonstrate how a simple ontological model can fabulate itself into a complex, non-linear, rhizomatic narrative. The process ultimately results in adiagrammatic science fiction: a map of relations not guided by a singular protagonist.
Performed by Noam Youngrak Son
6:45 PM - Conversation
which future?
Oscar Salguero, critical designer behind Interspecies Library,and Meghana Karnik, curator and exhibitions director at Flux Factory, will join the conversation to unpack the artworks and delve into the core themes of the show.
*Oscar Salguero’s Interspecies Library will be on view at the closing, May 21st, from 6-8PM.
About the curator:
Thamyres VM (Brazil, 1987) is a curator and cultural manager based between São Paulo and Barcelona. With a background in art, cinema, and cultural studies, her practice emerges from critical ways of engaging with locations, often manifesting as site-oriented interventions, exhibitions, and practices deeply embedded in social engagement. She holds a BA in Cinema (FAAP - São Paulo), an MA in Cultural Industry (Goldsmiths - London), and a CAS in Curating (ZHdK - Zürich). Currently, she is completing an MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. Traversing various curatorial formats, Thamyres crafts spaces that invite reflection, interaction, and a deeper understanding of the contexts being activated. From 2016-2020, she was the artistic director of VALONGO, a self organised contemporary art festival dedicated to unveiling the diverse narratives shaping visual culture in Brazil. Most recently, she has developed and curated special projects for foodculture days (Vevey, 2022-24) and was part of the curatorial team of Manifesta 15 (Barcelona, 2024).
About the artists:
Noam Youngrak Son is a communication designer, design theorist, and cultural worker. Their design work encompasses small-scale publishing projects, speculative worldbuilding, workshops, lectures, writing, net art, and occasional performative interventions. Son has expanded their focus from design to theory in order to critically engage with the ontology of the design industry, media, and broader material culture. This turn is informed by their observations of cultural assemblages that echo the extractive operations of capitalism on racialized and more-than-human populations. They are particularly attentive to the interconnected notions of speculation—both as an open artistic approach and as a process of value increase in capitalism. They research the tendency of the former in design to be subjugated by the latter and explore alternative methods for speculative design practices to realize their transindividual potential through collective organization and workshop facilitation. In this process, Son utilizes queer publishing as a technology for mobilizing attention beyond the financialized “scarce resource” of the attention economy. In this context, publishing extends beyond mere printed matter to encompass the maintenance of communities and the cultivation of interspecies relationships.
Meii Soh Meii Soh is a performer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of queer identity, non-human narratives, and speculative storytelling. Their
practice examines shapeshifting as a survival strategy, tracing how identity—particularly in its fluid, trans*, and dissociative states—can glitch, dissolve, and reassemble through interspecies entanglements and technological interfaces.
Born within a conservative upbringing of on-land hunters, Meii’s work draws on the figure of the hunting dog as a site of complex relationality—both tool and companion, objectified and deeply sentient. Through video, performance, theoretical writing, and digital media, they engage with fur, thresholds of tech-failure, and video game aesthetics to stage speculative encounters where human and non-human selves flicker in and out of legibility.
Meii’s work defies the stability of recognition and presence to generate immersive and emotionally driven environments where love, desire, and agency are reimagined through affect, sound, and movement. While doing so, they locate colonial narratives and emphasize the complexities of interspecies dependency, mutualism, and parasitism as methods of coexistence. Across mediums, they question the cultural scripting of naturalcultural dances—inviting audiences to confront the violence of visibility and the radical potential of becoming unrecognisable.
Elif Cadoux is a writer, performer, and facilitator based in Marseille. Their creative research uses theatrical, cinematic, literary, and participatory methods to explore alternative approaches to futurity. The resulting texts and experiences attempt to shirk the speculative impulse by practicing the subjunctive, a future tense that embraces desire, contingency, and mysticism. Drawn to collaborative processes, Elif been a collective member of FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, Both/And, and Call Your Mom, their performance collective of ten years. Elif’s recent theatrical works, Say You’re Sorry (with CYM) and Our Blood is Red to Let Us Know, explore how colonial affective regimes and speculative fiction intersect and affect one another. Their current projects, répétition, rehearsal, an ensemble performance, and That You May Have a Good Future, an exploratory dramaturgy and theory text, aim to denature rhythms of capitalist inevitability.
NARS Foundation Galleries are open to the public from 12pm - 5pm, Monday - Friday. Please contact info@narsfoundation.org with any other inquires.
