SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now

SLIPSTREAM - Angeline Meitzler, Josèfa Ntjam, Natalie Paneng, Rebeca Romero, Kinnari Saraiya, Skawennati and Wendi Yan explore cultural heritage as a lens for imagining alternative, beyond-Western futures through video, sculptural and interactive installations. About arebyte is thrilled to present SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now , a group exhibition bringing together seven international artists — Angeline Meitzler, Josèfa Ntjam, Natalie Paneng, Rebeca Romero, Kinnari Saraiya, Skawennati and Wendi Yan — who explore cultural heritage as a lens for unlocking alternative, beyond-Western futures. Curated by Pita Arreola, the exhibition reclaims the decolonial potential of sci-fi and speculative fiction, exploring what possibilities might emerge by repositioning other systems of knowledge at the centre. SLIPSTREAM opens arebyte’s new 2026–2028 programme, REBOOT: Recoding Reality , dedicated to imagining more equitable technological futures. The exhibition takes its departure from ‘slipstream’, a term with a contested history within science fiction and whose Native origins are rarely acknowledged. Indigenous writer Gerald Vizenor first used the term in his short story Custer on the Slipstream (1978), as a metaphor for the ways colonialism continues to shape contemporary life. Seemingly unaware of Vizenor’s use of the term, cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling popularised it in the late eighties as a more speculative mode of science fiction, distinct from the increasingly diluted mainstream of the genre. In 2012, Anishinaabe scholar Grace L. Dillon reclaimed ‘slipstream’ in her anthology Walking the Clouds , foregrounding Indigenous and non-Western perspectives and positioning Native protagonists as active agents rather than colonised subjects. SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now takes this framework off the page and into contemporary digital art, inviting audiences to drift between geographies, temporalities and imaginaries of what could otherwise be. SLIPSTREAM presents video, sculptural and interactive works that centralise othered cultures and express the realities of living in the slip-space. In the first gallery, set within a dreamlike meadow, Meitzler, Romero and Saraiya traverse ancestral connections to the land, colonial systems and the role of cultural heritage in identity formation. In Angeline Meitzler’s The Bird, the Girl and the Typhoon (2025), memories of migration and separation move between a daughter’s bedroom and the landscapes of the past. An installation presents Rebeca Romero’s The Sower and Signal Array (2025/26), which transform ancestral instruments into speculative technologies, sending signals between the Andean highlands and the cosmos. Kinnari Saraiya’s In the Eye of a Dream (2025 onwards) invites visitors to navigate a dream recorded within the colonial archive. The second gallery opens into a surreal cosmos. Skawennati’s Welcome to the Garden (2024) brings the Three Sisters — corn, beans and squash — to life as superheroes dispensing Haudenosaunee agricultural knowledge, while Natalie Paneng’s Energy Is Everything (2023/26) conjures a South African mountain utopia shaped by Indigenous technologies and spiritual energy. Josèfa Ntjam’s Matter Gone Wild (2023) draws visitors deeper into a microscopic world of fungal flora, her ritual performance channeling revolutionary figures of the African Diaspora. Wendi Yan’s Dream of Walnut Palaces (2025) brings the journey back to the history of knowledge exchange, imagining a meeting between Daoist philosophy and European science. Read more Toggle Film / Video Installation Digital Audio / Sound