This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times.
Perhaps nothing captures the joy and pathos of an after-party more than glitter on the loose. In “Puff Out,” a playful installation by the artist duo known as :mentalKLINIK, a crew of specially retrofitted Roombas endlessly scatter fuchsia glitter around, instead of Hoovering it up.
As I watched the eight robot vacuums take turns spinning blindly around the room — diligently pushing and puffing the pink glitter in swirling patterns, occasionally bumping into berms and one another — the whirring white noise and sparkling debris trails brought on a kind of meditative state. The sensory experience conjured up the fun and fabulousness of a rave, the shapes created by dance, the inevitable comedown. The effect was strangely moving, equal parts disco and drudgery.
Glitter is anathema to a museum, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who has ever observed small children crafting. And if the mess feels galvanizingly naughty, that is precisely the point.
“Puff Out” represents the exuberance of “Rave into the Future: Art in Motion,” a new exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco opening Oct. 24, which runs through Jan. 12. Spotlighting 20 works from women and queer artists in the West Asian diaspora, the show is the brainchild of Naz Cuguoglu, the museum’s assistant curator of contemporary art. Tapping into the youthful energy of a rave, the exhibition explores how underground music and dance can create space for imagination and possibility.
Cuguoglu grew up in Istanbul and moved to the Bay Area seven years ago; we spoke several times in person and via video. She told me this exhibition was “a love letter to the dance floor.”
“For me, the dance floor is a place of joy and resilience and community building, and that’s the feeling I want the audience to get out of the show,” she said. “It’s always been a refuge for those pushed to the margins, and in West Asia and its diasporas, women and queer communities have found a space to imagine freedom and belonging.” The exhibition includes video, photography, sculpture, sound work — including live and recorded music — and dynamic, interactive spaces.
The centerpiece is a 100-square-foot copper-tiled dance floor that visitors can actually dance on: “Disguise as Dancefloor,” a piece by the artist and musician Joe Namy, who collaborates with other multimedia artists to explore sound, vibration and movement. Installed at the center of the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion — the 1916 Beaux-Arts building’s newest and largest gallery, on the first floor — Namy’s copper floor turns the gallery itself into an instrument. The soft, conductive metal picks up physical marks from museumgoers and reverberates with the shifting sounds around it, which will include, at various times, harp compositions, archival tracks and new mixes from local D.J.s, as part of an affiliated performance series throughout the galleries. The rest of the show unfolds in stages that are both physical and temporal: the D.J. podium, the lounge and, of course, the after-party.
What excites Cuguoglu most about “Rave” is the way it invites people to see the museum as a living, breathing space for gathering, not just a static monument to the past.
“I mean, we’ve all been on the dance floor,” she said. “This is an intergenerational exhibition — we’ve all been at a wedding, a birthday, together with loved ones.” A notable part of the museum’s public programming will be the Free First Sunday “baby rave,” an all-ages dance party in which young children (and their adults) are explicitly welcome. It takes place Dec. 7.
The 10 artists featured in “Rave” are of West Asian heritage — with roots in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Qatar — and currently live in the United States and Europe. “West Asia” as a geographic framing may not be familiar to many, but the choice to situate the artists this way is deliberate.
“‘Middle East’ is such a loaded term, and centered around stereotypes, prejudices, and so much Orientalization,” Cuguoglu said, pointing out that the name is based on a Eurocentric and colonial point of reference. “‘West Asia’ gives you a more neutral starting place to look at these artists from the region, especially as women artists and queer artists, on their own terms.”
The label “West Asia” is considered more geographically accurate because it is based on continental location and has been in use for decades by organizations such as the United Nations.
In the last few years, the Asian Art Museum’s mission expanded beyond its focus on traditional and historical art to include work from the Asian diaspora as well as contemporary art. In April, Soyoung Lee became the new director and chief executive of the museum; she had previously been chief curator for the Harvard Art Museums and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of Korean art.
“‘Rave’ is an example of the direction we’re going,” Lee said in a video interview. “It’s risk-taking and opening doors, with the museum and its culture as well as art. These are all visual artists, but it’s also music and dance and performance, and creating community. The experience of a museum is movement through space. We’re going to try to amplify that.”
Lee also emphasized the intention of continuing to expand what Asia means for people. “It’s a physical entity, but it’s also a construct,” she said. “Our main exhibition last fall was K-pop — the thing about K-pop and K-culture right now is that the fan base is so much outside of Korea. ‘Rave’ is analogous to this — the specificity but also the universality. It’s introducing a region that may be less familiar to many, and yet finding the universal joy and depth in music and dance.”
In its most ideal form, the dance floor is a borderless place to come together creatively, but it can also be a space for holding grief and loss, said Sahar Khoury, an artist who lives and works in Oakland, Calif. A 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellow, Khoury is known for sculptures that make use of found objects and integrate personal and political symbols. Her untitled commissioned installation for “Rave” uses stacked animal cages as building material for a stage and D.J. booth; on opening night, her longtime collaborators Lara Sarkissian and Esra Canogullari (the founders of the event series and record label Club Chai) will be performing an original set from the booth inside the structure.
“You hear the sounds through a confined space,” Khoury said of the way a structure of containment has been alchemized into something new. “It is a celebration that also comes from a place of inequity and vulnerability — we can still sing and gather together and be.”
The artist Morehshin Allahyari — who was recently named a recipient of the 2025 Gold Art Prize, a biennial award for artists in the Asian diaspora — spent five years researching and gathering old Islamic manuscripts and creating archives of those materials. In her installation, “The Queer Withdrawings,” visitors are invited to enter a dimly lit space that features drawings and sculptures of gods and mythological figures selected from those manuscripts. The figures are “mirrored,” in two senses: drawn in reflective material, they are presented in twinned pairs or as reversed companions of one another. They also work as a visual allusion to mirrored dance halls and disco balls.
That reflective material makes the figures visible or invisible depending on the viewer’s angle, Allahyari said in an interview at her studio at Stanford University, where she is an assistant professor of digital media art.
“The figures of the djinn — they can reveal themselves to you, or not,” she said, referring to demons of good and evil that persist across the region’s religious traditions. “They can be your friend and grant you powers to possess, or you can be possessed by them. You have to move your body through the space in order to see what is revealed.” Often what is revealed in the mirrors are different angles of your own self.
The figures selected from the manuscripts are nonbinary, queer and from other worlds. “The piece is playing with the norms in the context of West Asian and Muslim countries, which are very heteronormative in culture,” Allahyari said. Bringing different body movements into the experience is a way to encourage constant movement and rethinking, she added, as well as of incorporating pleasure in that physicality and play.
Some figures are also talismans that offer protection. “Looking at the walls, the protection becomes part of the feeling — of community, gathering, safety,” she said. “This is how I feel with my friends on the dance floor. In the diaspora, in a community of immigrants, this is an alternative way of feeling at home.”
Large-scale dance practices have been common in cultures of West Asia for thousands of years, especially in the wedding context, said Roshanak Kheshti, an associate professor of theater, dance and performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley; her work focuses on sound and performance, rooted in diasporic contexts. She explained that in the 1990s, the intersection of queer culture with these dance traditions, along with a confluence of political and historical events, led to the emergence of a robust rave culture globally.
“You have cultures from the region that expect spaces of joy-making, dance and celebration, and you have queer culture similarly doing this, and they meet in the underground in raves and club nights,” Kheshti said in a phone interview. “This is because of an emergence of L.G.B.T. politics we didn’t see before, and also because of the diasporic communities we are talking about being resettled at that time.”
This happened in many cities, including New York, Paris and London, she said, and especially post-9/11: “This moment of crisis and vilification really solidified the need for community.”
She added that while the show was commemorating an at least 30-year phenomenon of the underground club space, the art practice component of it — the inclusion of West Asian queer and women artists in participatory performance art in a museum setting — was a much more recent phenomenon, and notable for it.
At the end of my visit to the museum, I circled back to the glitter Roombas. The artists behind “Puff Out,” Yasemin Baydar and Birol Demir, told me that they met and fell in love at a celebrated club in Istanbul — in fact, their collaborative art practice as :mentalKLINIK was birthed there. They have become known for seductive, ever-evolving projects that explore this relationship with the dance floor and how technology enters the human sphere (and vice versa).
“This is our genre — the techno, the high-energy intensity — and it’s very much a therapy session,” Baydar said in a video interview from Brussels. “You live it, leave it and can’t forget it.”
Like glitter, the experience follows you home.
Bonnie Tsui is the author of “On Muscle” and “Why We Swim.”
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