Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas, 2026, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE

_{Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas. Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, January 16 to May 3, 2026. Photo: Colin Conces.}

Exhibition Text [pdf], Gallery Guide
Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas features Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Zainab Aliyu, Rindon Johnson, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald, Rebeca Romero, and Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit—who consider how the formation of collective identities takes place utilizing technology and the internet. How does it feel to encounter the friction and slippage between prevailing ideas of “what your inherited cultural heritage should be,” and the illusion of choice created by interacting with algorithms to access niche communities? These personal and collective experiences, mediated by our relationship to technology, serve as metaphors for how we can store, access, and deploy our memories to process and generate new contexts.

The artists in Close to the Clouds use multiple approaches to expand the idea of “digital diasporas”—their works are invitations to oscillate between the physical and the digital, through durational mediums and a poetic interpretation of time. They consider how media and communications shape our sense of self as we move through various places. Across the exhibition one will encounter various sites from the site-specificity of Omaha, Nebraska to airports, islands, and ruins afar, ranging from real to immaterial spaces. By way of ancestral mythologies, current memories, augmented inner monologues, and imagined futures, the artists bring us closer to understanding how technological clouds affect our interpersonal relationships.

Integral to expanding the ideas around Close to the Clouds, are written contributions focusing on points of overlapping research and deep engagement with the practices of the artists in the exhibition:
“The Network Is a Clearing” by Eileen Isagon Skyers [pdf]
“Notes on Distance and Depth” by Frederike Sperling [pdf]
“Securing the Cloud” by Jacinda Tran [pdf]

kathycho.info

Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas, 2026, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE