Nan Xi is a curator, writer, and since 2026 PhD candidate at eikones. She holds a BA (2018) and an MA (2022) in Art and Visual History from Humboldt University of Berlin, and studied Contemporary Art Theory (Visual Cultures) at Goldsmiths, University of London (2019–20). From 2023–24, she taught two seminars, “Was ist Kritik” and “Poetics of Opacity” for BA Cultural History and Theory at HU. Prior to joining eikones, she was Assistant Curator at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts (2023–26), co-producing over a dozen projects, including solo exhibitions by Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Nazanin Noori, Rene Matić, and Éric Baudelaire.

My research investigates the possibilities and limits of racial critique in contemporary art. Building on my MA thesis, Toward a New Institutional Critique: Cameron Rowland’s Contract Art, I seek to contextualize critical art practices of the past decade (ca. 2015–present) beyond canonical institutional critique, thinking alongside Marina Vishmidt’s notion of infrastructural critique, which attends to the material conditions of social reproduction. The dissertation will foreground divergent practices of artists including Cameron Rowland, Candice Lin, and Sondra Perry, tracing a common thread: how they apprehend race through a historical-materialist lens and reappropriate racialized matter—via legal, biological, or digital processes—toward other ends. This critical approach displaces representation as the primary register through which race is addressed in contemporary art, refiguring it as a structuring force of colonialism and capitalism, operative in matter, infrastructures, and bodies over time. The horizon of this research is an infrastructural critique of racial capitalism; its theoretical footing, a deliberate return to the differential category of the Human—its persistence and contestations. At stake is what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “difference without separability,” a mode of relationality art renders legible, and with it, an emerging theory of the image through the matter of race.