Artist Talk: World-Building in the Margins

Join Counterpublic curators Nora N. Khan and Raphael Fonseca as they engage in conversation with Counterpublic 2026 artists Alice Bucknell, Tromarama, and LI Yi-Fan. The panel will discuss their commissions and artistic and curatorial practice.

Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Bucknell’s Coyote Time is a text-based adventure game from which Counterpublic 2026 takes its name. Players take on the role of a gig worker. What begins as a simple package delivery to City Museum spirals into an elaborate “infinite night” sci-fi story. Players leap across possible pasts and futures of St. Louis in order to prevent an eco-corporate takeover of the city and reckon with their own disjointed timeline. Blending speculative fiction and situated research, the game features well-known and much-loved locations across St. Louis, including the Gateway Arch, the National Building Arts Center, Kenny’s Upstairs, a now-defunct computer store, a riverboat casino, and the mysterious nonhuman residents of Mosenthein Island.

Founded twenty years ago in Bandung, Indonesia, Tromarama is a collaborative project by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena. Living Room is an installation built from furniture combined with musical instruments, such as flutes and toy keyboards, and integrated with AI systems. These components are connected through a responsive lighting system activated in cycles of sound and silence, illumination and pause. The installation is linked to an app that generates phrases and verses, functioning as a large-scale karaoke system. Visitors are invited to participate directly, making meaning through music, lyrics, movement, and dance. The work transforms the exhibition space into a temporary stage. Here, the group creates an environment in which memory, play, automation, and performance meet, inviting audiences to consider how creativity is shaped by human and nonhuman systems.

At the heart of LI Yi-Fan’s work is a singular question: Who are we becoming, newly, through our screens? LI grew up in a time when phones, video games, and computers not only changed how people experience the world, but their relationships to themselves. The artist creates animations, sculptures, and videos that continually probe our lives as mediated by screens, platforms, and software. Scanning and filming his own body many times over, he moves virtual and digital models much like a puppet master, creating wild, roiling set pieces driven by strange, hilarious, and unsettling narratives. In Cheap Mirror, a continuation of work presented at the 2026 Venice Biennale, a single character speaks directly to the viewer in a quiet monologue, much like the host of an online tutorial video. His first commission for a US exhibition, this new film also responds to the architecture of the venue and speaks to the triennial’s broader reflections on how time can, and perhaps should, be cheated—not only by humans, but also by machines.