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Artist Talk: Regina Agu in conversation with Nora N. Khan

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

FotoFest is pleased to present a conversation between In Place of an Index artist Regina Agu and writer, curator, and Digital + Media professor at RISD, Nora N. Khan. Agu and Khan will focus their conversation on their shared interests in the intersections of critical theory, art, and technology using Regina Agu’s scanned image/alt-text generator artworks as their point of departure.

Each image in Regina Agu’s scanned image/alt-text generator series is composed of gestures, movements, and repetitive actions that are performed while moving with the scanner beam. Some of these gestures are spontaneous, while others mimic gestures from historic photos and found images of Black figures in motion and in community. Each scan is fed into an alt-text generator to produce the title of each image. The alt-text generator, an artificial-intelligence tool meant to produce texts that increase accessibility in digital space, relies on computer vision that replicates the same biases against bodies of color inherited from the photographic and cinematic technologies of the past. Agu’s body inhabits each image as a site of resistance against being read, recognized, surveilled, translated, and interpreted. 

About the artists

Regina Agu was born in Houston, TX. She relocated to Chicago at the beginning of 2020, where she now lives and works. Her work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, publications, and performances internationally. She has exhibited most recently in the 2021 Atlanta Biennial: Of Care and Destruction, and the 2021 Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon. Her first solo museum show, Passage, was presented at the New Orleans Museum of Art (2019-2020). Her work has been supported by an Artadia Houston award, grants from Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, and the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research project A Psychogeography of Emancipation Park. She has attended residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms, A Studio in the Woods, Open Sessions at The Drawing Center in NYC, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Lawndale Artist Studio Program, among others. From 2014-2017, Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park and the Houston-based independent small press paratext. Agu holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.


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Nora N. Khan is an editor, curator, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research focuses on art, music, and literature made with and about software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Her practice extends to a wide span of artistic collaborations, producing things like scripts, librettos, and a tiny house. Her short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019) on the logic of machine vision, and co-written with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information). Forthcoming are The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole) on simulation and semantic mapping, and a book on the stakes posed by AI Art for art criticism, through Lund Humphries. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed (NY) in 2020, she worked closely with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions, in an exhibition that also featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. She frequently publishes prose and criticism, in essays for publications like Artforum and Art in America. She is currently editor of both Topical Cream, focusing on supporting GNC and BIPOC critics, and HOLO magazine, and has been a longtime editor (2014- ) at Rhizome. From 2018-2021, she was a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media, teaching critical theory and artistic research, experimental writing for artists and designers, and technological criticism.

Image: Installation view of Regina Agu's photographs for the exhibition In Place of an Index at FotoFest. September 2–November 13, 2021. Presented in conjunction with the Texas Biennial 2021, A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon. Photo courtesy of FotoFest.

Photo courtesy of Nora Khan. Photo: Lyndsy Welgos.