WENDI YAN

worlds

objects

Arebyte: Slipstream

“Seven international artists explore cultural heritage as a lens for imagining alternative, beyond-Western, futures through video, sculptural and interactive installations.

Science fiction has long operated as a medium to envision potential futures, yet its alternative realities have often reproduced colonial worldviews, overlooking Indigenous perspectives and other systems of knowledge, or in some cases, casting accounts of colonialism as ‘adventure stories’.

SLIPSTREAMbrings together artists who reclaim the decolonial potential of speculative fiction. Central to the exhibition is the concept of ‘slipstream,’ whose origins in Native science fiction literature are rarely acknowledged. Reasserted through this lineage, ‘slipstream’ carries a decolonial charge. It reconfigures the power structures prevalent in mainstream sci-fi, placing Indigenous figures as active agents rather than colonised subjects. To live in the slip-space is to drift between temporalities, where past, present and future flow together like currents in a navigable stream, and between states of consciousness.”

Photo credit: Devika Bilimoria.