Zoénie Liwen Deng curates and writes about art-science events and exhibitions at Waag. Her research interests include critical art with the digital, ethical ways to relate to and matter with more-than-human including machines, planetary imaginaries, feminist and decolonial praxis-theories in arts-science-technology. She graduated with PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2020, and her doctoral research focused on non-oppositional criticality of socially engaged art. She has worked on Horizon Europe projects such as Artsformation (arts in making digital transformation more just and fairer), and Creative Europe projects such as More-than-Planet (arts-science-technology in making concern and care-driven planetary imaginaries).
She taught at Cultural Diversity programme of Social Practice at Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam) in 2021, and she worked as coordinator of Civic Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht) in 2022. She has published her monologue Be Water, My Friend—Non oppositional criticalities of socially engaged art in China (2022), and contributed an essay “A Mother Tree, A Hut for Wolf Art and Curating as Mattering Practices for the More-than-Human” to the book Worlding Ecologies Art, Science and Activism Towards Climate Justice (2024).
She is fond of critical contemporary art, and dance and theatre that challenge the status quo and propose and rehearse how to live together and organise ourselves otherwise. She has been part of radioSlumber, a collective artistic project on diasporic care and friendship, for two editions since 2021. She believes in the connective and prefigurative power of socially engaged art practice in polarised societies we live in that are in the midst of multiple crises such as the climate crisis.
