Connie Bakshi
BETWEEN THESE BLACK WATERS
April 21 – July 21, 2025
Opening Reception and Talk: April 21 at Catalyst LA, 7-10pm
An abandoned world. A presence left unaccounted.
You awaken. There is nothing before this moment. No memory of arrival, of origin, of who – or what – you are.
Move through a world assembling itself in response to you. Every choice leads to something: a path, a doorway, a silent question. You press against the edges of this place, searching for something that feels like memory.
Your search has its own consequences. What you find depends on how you choose. The world has its own conclusions.
EPOCH proudly presents Between These Black Waters, a web-based interactive film by Connie Bakshi set within a procedurally generated world.
As EPOCH’s inaugural solo presentation and Bakshi’s first solo exhibition, the work follows an unknown entity awakening without memory and moving through a series of choices toward multiple possible endings. The piece unfolds through a tension of resolution and refusal: between the world system’s drive to stabilize and the entity’s determination to remain in motion – and what takes form in the blind spot between.
Between These Black Waters begins with an incantation.
A single phrase whispered into AI throughout the creation of the work: black water. Not as description or query, but as summoning. The phrase carries more weight than the system can account for, invoking the Black Water Ditch (黑水溝) – a dangerous crossing of the Taiwan Strait historically associated with the perils and fears of diasporic migration, the corridor through which colonial histories layered and displaced one another, and the same passage whose waters now carry the semiconductor bones of the machine – made on the island, consumed by the world that runs on them. Bones that are Taiwanese, assembled from the labor and geopolitical condition of a postcolonial state navigating between empires across time. The machine carries this without knowing it carries it. Black water calls to what the system holds but does not recognize.
Between These Black Waters is a walkabout through the debris field of AI-processed history – through the foreclosures, the fragmentary survivals, the silences where erasure was most thorough. The narrator of the work is birthed from that debris: a null entity moving through a world that has continued without it, carrying what the system cannot classify, present in ways the system has no language for – not as error, but as condition.
The work documents neither retrieval nor invention. The machine is already inhabited: ghosts moving through its bones, present in the coordinates of what it cannot see, echoing through every output it produces without knowing why. What remains unrecognized is not absent. It is where the lived history resides – and from that ground, something continues to move, to generate form the system cannot account for, and has not yet finished becoming.
Between These Black Waters (2026)
Interactive Film | 4K Video with Audio | Variable Duration
Connie Bakshi is a Taiwanese-American artist whose practice moves through diasporic memory, mythos of power, and autonomous choice. Working at the intersection of ancestral knowing and machine intelligence, Bakshi often questions what becomes legible when dominant codes break down. She has exhibited internationally, including at HeK Basel, bitforms, Feral File, and the Knight Foundation and has been covered by publications such as Right Click Save, Outland, Forbes, and SPIKE Art Magazine. Regularly invited to speak on the state of art and AI, she has featured in talks and panels at ICA London, EYEBEAM, BMW, Proof of People x Refraction, and Bright Moments. Her art is in the collections of HeK Basel, MAD Arts Museum, and the Medici Collection.
Louis Jebb, “New Shows to See Around the World,” Right Click Save, January 9, 2026.
Brian Droitcour, “Context Creator,” Outlander, November 12, 2025.
Doreen Rios, “The Generative Museum,” Anti Materia, November 3, 2025.