New Formations

The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce New Formations, the 2026 edition of our annual guest-curated exhibition, organized by Yasmin Nurming-Por. 

In Decreation, poet Anne Carson explores the undoing of self and dismantling of form through material transformation and immaterial experience. A human infatuation with solar eclipses, for example, is traced from Greek 6th-century accounts of an occurrence interrupting a battle, Germanic legends of the sun and moon as a quarrelling couple, and Virginia Woolf’s metaphorical description of conjugal relations. Through this lineage, Carson suggests that the experience of the eclipse’s totality—complete darkness to blinding light— “is a phenomenon that can flip one’s ratios inside out.” Where, even a temporary shift in given factors potentially reconfigures worldviews. 

At its core, this exhibition shares how artists see new potential in the objects around us. Quotidian objects are disassembled, reconstituted, and turned inside out. Rooted in a DIY ethos, these works circumvent capitalism’s emphasis on single-usage through strategies of accumulation, appropriation, and erosion. Borrowing from theorist Byung-Chul Han’s theorization of decreation in Chinese Buddhism, these works desubstantialize permanence. In this view, the concept of original form becomes irrelevant and change remains constant. 

Across New Formations, artists Lucas Cook, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Liza Lacroix, Scott Rogers, Silas Rubeck, Unconditional Design, and Haena Yoo take existing materials as invitations for misuse and appropriation. Maggy Hamel-Metsos reincarnates abandoned church organs with air compressors; Liza Lacroix explores music as emotional catharsis for mourning; Scott Rogers forages car parts to create infrastructures for animals; a collaboration between Lucas Cook, Silas Rubeck, and Unconditional Design responds to the idiosyncrasies of BICA’s space with materials found in Buffalo; and Haena Yoo reinterprets the forms of gua shas as weapons and tools. While the prior forms of these materials remain visible, an irreparable rupture with their intended function has occurred and their given permanence is eclipsed. 

About the Curator

Yasmin Nurming-Por is a curator and writer based in Toronto, Canada.  Select curatorial

projects include Sagrada Mercancia (Santiago, Chile), ATLAS ARTS (Isle of Skye, UK), Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art (Rizhao, PRC), Images Festival (Toronto, CA) and the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, CA). In 2023 she co-founded commercial gallery two seven two. Yasmin is a SSHRC-funded doctoral candidate in the department of art history at the University of Toronto where her research examines artist exchanges and exhibitions related to the Non-Aligned Movement in Egypt, India and the former Yugoslavia.