RSVP — Conversation between Alena Ahrens and Nina Mdivani

November 22, 2025, 2 p.m.

Sojourner Gallery

178 Bleecker Street 2nd Floor

Join us November 22nd at 2 p.m. for a conversation between Alena Ahrens, whose work is on display in our current show Glistening Water, and curator/writer/researcher Nina Mdivani.

Alena Ahrens is an Asian-American artist whose practice focuses on color field paintings as sites of possibility and exploration. Drawing from her simultaneous roots in the American Midwest and Southeast Asia, Ahrens conceptualizes the form and material of her color field paintings as intersections of ritual, time, and culture.

Ahrens has exhibited in solo and group shows at the Zhou B. Art Center (Chicago, IL), Tipi Project (Brooklyn, NY), MoMA PS1 (New York, NY), DAMU Theatre (Prague, CZ), and ARTROOM (Lisbon, PT). She has participated in international residencies at Residency Unlimited (New York), Château Orquevaux (France), and Hangar Arts (Lisbon). In 2025 a selection of her Satori paintings were acquired by the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection.

Nina Mdivani is a Tbilisi-born, New York-based curator, writer, and researcher. Informed by her background in international relations, politics, and sociology, Mdivani's work is an interdisciplinary study of alternative narratives within dominant cultures.

She is the author of King Is Female (Wienand Verlag, 2018), and her writing has been published in Artforum, e-flux, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and others. She has curated internationally, including a curatorial residency culminating in the exhibition New York Meets Tbilisi: Defining Otherness at Kunstraum, Brooklyn from 2019-2020.