Book Talks and Screening with Free Speech/Creative Expression Residency Cohort
Book Talks and Screening with Free Speech/Creative Expression Residency Cohort
Join us for an afternoon of book talks and screenings with our current residency cohort.
Saturday, July 18 | 2-5 PM | FREE
Saturday, July 18, 2-3pm
Jadu’i Book talk with Rami George
Rami George, current artist-in-residence and editor/organizer of Jadu’i Book, will be in conversation with St. Louis based artist Kiki Salem.
Jadu’i Book is a 2025 risograph publication, featuring commissioned works from seven Palestinian artists — Basma al-Sharif, Lamia Abukhadra, Saj Issa, rana nazzal hamadeh, Qais Assali, Lama Altakruri, and Amanny Asell Ahmad. This book was organized and edited by Rami George over the course of three years, beginning in April 2022. Printed and published in 2025 by Many Folds Press, amidst an ongoing Nakba and genocide of Palestinian people.
Rami George is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Lenapehoking in what is now called Philadelphia. They have exhibited and screened broadly and remain motivated by political struggles and fractured narratives.
Saturday, July 18, 3-5pm
Behold, Be Held: Screening + Book Talk with CAO Collective
Join us for an intimate sharing of film, photography, and conversation with Laura (嘟嘟) and huiyin zhou, co-parents of CAO Collective, during their residency at The Luminary.
The evening will feature a screening of Just Like Your Tenderness (10 min., 2026) — a single, unbroken long take observing a day of caregiving between Laura and their grandmother in hospice care. Tender, unhurried, and resistant to spectacle, the film attends to small gestures and shared breath as a form of communication across language, generation, and distance.
Following the screening, huiyin will share their recent publication NOSTALGIA IS THE GHOST OF CARE 在未来怀念一片云彩 (Homie House Press / kawan pan, 2026) — a mixed-media photo book that holds nostalgia in the future tense, weaving together archival and newly created images in collaboration with BIPOC and queer friends.
The evening closes with an artist talk and conversation between the two, tracing the threads that connect their practices: diasporic memory, care labor, queer kinship, and the archive as a living thing. Open social time and book signing will follow. Books and merch are available for purchase.
Information on the book: (NOSTALGIA IS THE GHOST OF CARE 在未来怀念一片云彩☁️ (@homiehousepress/kawan pan, 2026) is a mixed-media photo book by China-born, Durham-based multidisciplinary artist and writer huiyin zhou 徽音. Seeing nostalgia in the future tense, this book features newly created and rediscovered images from the artist's archive. NOSTALGIA is inherently a collaborative project with BIPOC and/or Queer friends and the grief and care-laden poetic practice of memory.)
Information on the video:
Captured in a single, unbroken long take, Just Like Your Tenderness observes a mundane yet intimate day of caregiving between the filmmaker and their grandmother in hospice care. The camera lingers on small gestures: arms being gently scratched, bodies resting beside one another, breath shared in silence.
The film traces an emotional journey shaped by care, labor, affect, and the quiet intimacy of an intergenerational and transnational bond. Text serves as a breaking of emotion, a collapse of the fourth wall, and an unspoken translation. Resisting spectacle, the work attends to tenderness as a form of communication—where connection is sustained through time, proximity, and mutual attunement, even as language fall away.
About the Artists:
Laura Dudu is an art worker, community weaver, and social practitioner whose work moves through lens-based media, ancestor-guided movement, and memory-charged writing. Their practice attends to embodied experience and the ephemerality of intimacy, diaspora, and healing.
They are a co-parent of the Chinese Artists and Organizers Collective (CAO Collective) / 离离草 (li li cao), a mycelium-inspired network rooted in relational organizing among Sinophone queer feminists. Through tender, entangled, and time-bending approaches to art-making and world-building, they cultivate spaces for those at the margins—where memory becomes architecture, and community becomes a living archive of care and transformation.
They are a resident curator at NowPlace, an Asian queer/feminist bookstore in San Francisco. Previously, they co-directed BluZoo, an artist collective exploring Covid-19 memory across China, Japan, and the US.
Laura has received residencies from The Luminary (MO), Project for Empty Space: Feminist Incubator (NJ), Pedantic Arts (PA), BRIClab: Contemporary Arts (NY), and grants from En Foco (NY), Creative West (CO), Asian American Arts Alliance (NY), Queens Art Fund (NY), Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NY), New Breath Foundation (CA), and more. Their work has been featured by The Amp, Hyperallergic, Indyweek, and Sine Theta Magazine.
huiyin zhou: Born and raised in China’s industrial hub of Dongguan, huiyin is a bilingual writer, photographer, community organizer and cultural worker currently based in Durham, NC. They flow through life as a diasporic bird and ordinary alien constantly shape-shifting and re-rooting themselves in relation to land, air, water, and community. Their work explores diasporic memory, family archives, queer kinship, and healing.
In 2022, huiyin co-founded the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective and currently co-parent CAO. They’re a co-conspirator/advisory board member at Queen Street Magic Boat, a surrealist artist-led space. They are also a co-curator at NorthStar Church of the Arts, supporting artists' first solo exhibitions. Previously, they were a member of unCoVer Initiative 疫中人 (2020-2022), an editorial and translation collective documenting experiences of the Chinese diaspora during Covid-19; and QueerAsians4Gaza (2023-25), a fundraising collective organizing for material solidarity with Palestinian people. They’ve also collaborated with Chestnut Zine Collective, The Seventh Wave, and NC Chinese Queer Feminist Collective.
huiyin’s work has been published by Massachusetts Review, positions: asia critique, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Sine Theta Magazine, and more. They’ve received grants, residencies and fellowships from South Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, SEEK Raleigh, Culture Push, Durham Art Guild, BRIClab, and beyond.
huiyin holds a degree in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. They teach at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies Continuing Education.