In Conversation: Alena Ahrens & Nina Chkareuli

Join us for an artist talk as part of the Glistening Water solo exhibition by artist Alena Ahrens. This program is a conversation between Ahrens and Nina Chkareuli, and moderated by curator Zhiheng Ashely Zhang. This discussion will reflect on how color, form, and cross-cultural aesthetics shape Ahrens's practice today.

Alena Ahrens’ practice brings together Eastern contemplative ideas and Western modernist approaches, using painting and minimal structures to explore how forms appear, dissolve, and hover at the edge of visibility. Drawing from Buddhist concepts of impermanence and non-self, as well as the histories of Color Field painting, post-minimalism, and phenomenological approaches to perception, she considers how color and form become sites of attention and quiet transformation.

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 Chkarueli is a Tbilisi-born, New York-based curator, writer, and researcher. Informed by her background in international relations, politics, and sociology, Chkarueli’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 in both Europe and the United States, most recently Forsaken with a Side of Pickles at Fou Gallery in New York in 2025.

Please click here to see the transcript of this event.

Coffee for this event is served by Meraki.