Thor's Day 雷电之夜 I Poetry & Sound Evening - Led by Ayesha Raees
Thor’s Night, Poetry/Sound/Film night. Featuring new works by Lilan Yang, Jinjin Xu, and Ayesha Raees, this event is a raw exploration of migration, memory, and identity through film, poetry, and sound. Lilan Yang, an experimental filmmaker known for their tactile, 16mm work, will take you through the decay of time and the complexities of migration. Jinjin Xu, poet and artist, brings her sharp, witness-driven poetry to the stage, navigating the space between the personal and the political. Ayesha Raees blends poetry with multimedia, creating hybrid forms that unravel the conventional and disrupt linear narratives. Expect intensity, complexity, and a whole lot of soul. Plus, we’re opening up the mic—so if you’ve got something to say, come through and sign up.
Artist bio:
Growing up in Chongqing, China, Lilan Yang is an artist and experimental filmmaker currently based in Boston. Their practice, rooted in the materiality of 16mm film, delves into the flux of migration, the decay of memory and the intricacies of perception. Their films and installations have been exhibited across the United States, including the RISD Museum, the Brattle Theater, Northwest Film Forum, Foxy Production, Ann Arbor Film Festival and MONO NO AWARE film festival. Yang’s work has been featured in Boston Art Review and Little White Lies, among others. Yang’s innovative approach to filmmaking has earned them the Award for Excellence at Japan's Image Forum Film Festival. They have been an artist-in-residence at Millay Arts, Gallery 263 and I-Park Foundation, and have received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Interbay Cinema Society, and Interlace Grant Fund. Yang holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught at RISD and Parsons School of Design.
JinJin Xu is a poet and artist based in Shanghai and New York. Xu’s work is birthed from a poetics of witness. Xu's work has shown at the 14th Shanghai Biennial, the Harun Farocki Institute, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, and has been recognized by honors from the Poetry Society of American and the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Most recently, How Art Museum Shanghai presented her first solo exhibition. Xu's debut poetry collection, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, won the Own Voices Chapbook Prize. Xu received her MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon fellow. In 2023, she was named one of the “100 Most Influential Chinese” by Forbes China.
Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس is a poet and artist identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her interdisciplinary work places poetry at its center and delves into paint, film, sound, theater, performance, and collaboration with the intention of breaking conventional ideas of linear language, form, and genre to materialize a space of belonging for marginalia and their narratives.Her work strongly revolves around issues of belonging and dislocation, G/god and spirituality, and beauty::cruelty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices. She edits poetry at the Whiting Award Winning Magazine The Margins and has received endorsements from Asian American Writers Workshop, Kundiman, Brooklyn Poets, UNESCO, Millay Colony For The Arts and elsewhere. Her work has been published extensively, including Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The Nation, Poets.org and others. Her first book of poems Coining A Wishing Tower won the Broken River Prize and was published by Radix in 2024. She is based in New York City and Lahore, Pakistan (and many other unsettled spaces).