Rites for a New World brings together four early-career artists, Brutus Labiche & Ayomide Tejuoso, MARIA, and Xueting Chen, whose works offer compelling visions for how we might live, heal, and relate in a time of transformation.
Each gallery is an immersive installation grounded in distinct lived experience and mythology, yet they intersect on shared themes of digital intimacy, climate precarity, migratory imaginaries, and ancestral resonance. These rites pay tribute to the cultural, and communal work of imagining and creating new ways of being.
Developed through a 198CAL open call, the exhibition responds to urgent social, political, and ecological questions. From speculative futures and sacred rites to collective memory and lived experience of the body, the featured works propose new vocabularies for care, resistance, and becoming.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Brutus Labiche & Ayomide Tejuoso, MINA
Sandra Habiyambere (Brutus Labiche) and Ayomide Tejuoso are visual artists, writers, and researchers based in Vevey and London, respectively. Their collaborative methodology is grounded in Black diasporic feminist frameworks, material experimentation, and recursive dialogue.
Together, they have created MINA: a long-term, research-driven mythology composed of photographs, films, sculptures, essays, performances, and installations. Through sociological and conceptual art systems, they construct mythologies that affirm and archive Black feminine epistemologies.
They understand research as art and art as the manifestation of belief. Their collaborative process values experimentation, rigor, and intimacy, privileging the speculative, the emotional, and the symbolic. Through recursive image-making, they generate culture, belief, and cosmology.
MARIA (Maria Joranko), I FEEL LOVE
MARIA (b. Pierre, SD, USA) is a high-femme Latine/American writer, performer and artist who moonlights as a karaoke host. She builds and writes sculptural installations, performances, video and sound that eviscerate and reassemble the intersections of solidarity, chronic illness, race and their respective cosmologies in relation to speculative worlds. By using herself and the body with its endless potentials and failures as a conduit and muse she shatters through mediums to reflect the shifting nature of self-growth and conceptions of reality. She combines and oscillates between natural and digital materials to engineer and imagine radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks as sites for liberatory seeds. MARIA nurtures these by diving headfirst into exploring pain (bodily, emotional, communal, spiritual) and its possibilities as a grounding for transformation and transmutation.
Xueting Chen, YOU! Where Do You Seek Medical Care?
Xueting Chen (China) is a London-based interdisciplinary artist. Her practice inhabits the fragile boundary between structure and collapse, between the spiritual and the industrial. Drawing from a background in both civil engineering and fine art, she creates sculptural installations that mimic, interrupt, or mourn systems of construction, decay, and transformation.
At the heart of her work is a refusal of material expectation. Xueting often works with what she calls “fragile concrete”: a hybrid substance born from interrupted chemical reactions and broken structural logic. Appearing solid yet inherently brittle, concrete becomes both industrial and intimate, a site of memory, failure, and quiet resistance. Through pouring, molding, imprinting, and erosion, she embeds traces of flora, animal footprints, terrain, and imagined relics—a speculative fossil record of the technological age. Her installations often manifest as fictional ruins landscapes as spaces of mourning, belief, and soft rebellion. Xueting approaches making as both ritual and as a quiet defiance. Her works open space for ambiguity, where materials are allowed to remain in flux: pure, slow, and undone. She continually returns to the question: What does it mean to build with care? To construct gently? To let structures fail with dignity?
