Isabella Thorpe-Woods & Zhangxinan Wu 吴张心安

Isabella Thorpe-Woods (she/they) is a British curator, interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Brooklyn. Her practice encompasses cultures-of-public, contemporary performance and visual art across mediums, often responding to the codes of behaviour and regimes of visibility specific to institutionalised spaces. They prefer to create small and together, encouraging relational ontologies, new modes of collectivity and alternative systems of value. Bella’s work explores the social, architectural, physical, psychological and theoretical modalities of corners, using them as starting points for reimagining the implications of centre spaces, and figures central to those spaces. She proposes corners as an alternative social centre, queering normative perspectives and orientations in the process.

Bella is the co-founder of Little by little Brooklyn (Lxl), where she directs a performance residency programme situated at Brooklyn Peace Center and an art gallery inside a café’s mop closet, most recently exhibiting In the Offing, an installation by Thorpe-Woods and Zhangxinan Wu integrating a looped experimental film, creative writing, performance ephemera and everyday objects from a six-hour durational improvisation set in a basement. She was awarded a creative grant from Community Engagement in recognition of her work for Lxl. Bella holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU and a BA in English and Drama from Sussex University. They currently serve as the executive director of Artemis, a non-profit in Bed-Stuy dedicated to promoting ecological literacy through accessible educational and experimental arts programming.

Zhangxinan Wu 吴张⼼安 (she/her) is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work spans dance improvisation, vocalization, videography, and performance poetry. Her practice explores art as a distillation of existence, often engaging performance as daily ritual to create spaces for conscious and subconscious depth, while fostering contemplation, recycling, and community connection.

Wu is the co-founder of Thursday Afternoon Lab, a performance collective comprising artist-researchers, performance-makers, actors, and somatic practitioners based in Beijing, New York and London. Their work has been showcased at venues such as the Danish Culture Center (Beijing), Yuan Museum, and the abC Art Book Fair. Since 2023, she has collaborated with the Untitled Group as dramaturg and writer. In 2024, she was a resident artist at the Amerta Residency Program in Hawaii.

Wu serves as the research director and instructor for Beijing Contact Improvisation and is the program curator for Body-Time Contact Improv Festival 2024 & 2025. She previously worked as a Programs & Events Intern at Movement Research in Spring/Summer 2024. Together with collaborator Isabella Thorpe-Woods, Wu presented the exhibition In the Offing at Little by little Brooklyn’s Alcove gallery in Winter 2024-2025.

make.shift
make.shift delves into dynamics of remote intimacy. Isabella Thorpe-Woods and Zhangxinan Wu have been devising work across the 12-hour time difference between New York and Beijing. The work focuses on subconscious undercurrents of connection and the fleeting spaces between duets. Absurdity emerges in the mundane, as the piece navigates the tension between visibility and obscurity, memory and anticipation, lagging presence and complete absence, filling in each other’s gaps.

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