On Display at Think!Chinatown's Studio (1 Pike St, NYC) from October 15th – December 20th 2026.
Gallery hours are Thursday and Fridays, 3-6pm (except holidays)

Speaking in Shadows: An Invocation of Migrant Presence is an intimate gathering and communal installation that keeps presence across distance and time. 

Migration is lived in ordinary days. Across generations, we are the ones who heirloom memories, improvisations of dreams, designs for making possible, and recipes for ordinary beauty. The work is built to keep company with Chinatown communities, the ones who share this knowing. It is a garden of intricately cut paper, amber light, and sculptural shadow — the specific poetry of immigrant lives, cast onto the wall. Knowledges of people: held in a room, in bodies, in remembering, in ongoing practices of being together.

We are three immigrant artists —Daniel Arturo Almeida, Nyssa Chow, and Jennifer Wen Ma—Venezuelan, Trinidadian, and Chinese. When we first began our collaboration, we did not know that before we could finish building the work, two of us would be drawn into the currents of migration again, making a work we would not see. Let it be enough to say that we are present elsewhere. 

The work unfolds in two movements. The first is an intimacy.

The First Movement:

It begins with a private invitation to Chinatown residents. As they enter a space built to host them, Jennifer pours them tea in the lightfall of the paper forms. Nyssa and Daniel are present, live on screens, hosting the gathering alongside her from their own geographies. 

The room is an embrace, a shelter. A canopy and cascade of paper—black, white, deep green, and pastels — cast shadows that fall over everyone in the room. The artists' memories are figured on the walls as shadows thrown by individual laser-cut cards, each an invocation of a person the artists have known in the midst of living: The one who deserved a gentle life, the one whose hands held home every Saturday, the one whose song I sing. Jennifer's hands carry each of these cards into the light for the ones who cannot be there to do it.

Each guest finds, among the named lives, the ones that are also, somehow, their own. They place these cards in the lightboxes and the shadows bloom onto the walls—their own knowing, authored in light and shadow, transforming the room around us. Each speaks  to what their arrangement holds, and the others answer: I feel that too; I know that differently.The solidarity between us is disclosed through the shared recognition of what is named. Each guest creates a new card of their own in the same vocabulary, and mounts it on the wall. The deck grows and the walls fill with the shadows of the named.

This is a ritual in the lineage of making dumplings together; backyard dominoes; neighbors holding court on the stoop — ordinary gatherings that host our dignity; that seek no permission to belong except to each other. The disobedience of beauty as shelter, refusal, and abundance.

The Second Movement: 

The gallery opens to the public. Visitors stand in the embrace of light and shadow, co-authored by the gatherings: the deck grown, the walls lit with named lives, the canopy overhead and its shadow enfolding everyone who enters. The participants, their friends and families gather to stand inside the landscape of light and shadow they have built.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Daniel Arturo Almeida is an artist working through photography, installation, painting, and digital media. His practice chronicles intimate and collective stories in the Americas. Marked by inter-generational migrations, Almeida weaves fragmented stories through archival materials, melodies, documents, and footage to resignify historical manipulation, nostalgia, collective amnesia, and longing. Selected exhibitions include “The Elephant Never Forgets” (2024, Locust Projects, Miami, FL), “Glow in The Dark” (2021, A.I.R Gallery, Brooklyn, NY). Almeida received a curatorial fellowship at The Latinx Project at NYU (2021), and a membership at NEW INC, New Museum, New York (2022). www.danielarturoalmeida.com 

Nyssa Chow is a memory worker, oral historian, artist, and writer from Trinidad whose work draws on the memory practices of the Caribbean and the Global South. Her work attends to the poetry of ordinary lives: ways of being and knowing held by those who live on the margins of agency. Through installation, social practice, and documentary art, she builds otherwise architectures for remembering: place-based, communal, embodied, relational. She is faculty at the Oral History Master's Program (OHMA) at Columbia University. She has received national commendations for her civic artwork Trace: A Memorial, and was awarded the PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History for The Story of Her Skin. www.tellinghistories.com

Jennifer Wen Ma is an interdisciplinary visual artist working across installation, painting, video, public art, performance, and social practice. Ma’s work brings together unexpected elements, narratives, and traditions, merging philosophical inquiry with contemporary materials to create poetic, emotionally resonant, multi-sensorial experiences. She is currently working on two major public artworks for NYC Cultural Affairs Percent for Art program: the renovation of 70 Mulberry Street and Chinatown Welcome Gateway. www.littlemeat.net