Undercurrents by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Undercurrents
This immersive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer explores communication across time, space, and relationships through voices, light, and memory.
Echoes in Light: Experience Undercurrents
Step into a resonant landscape of voices and light with Undercurrents, a new interactive art installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. This immersive experience transforms the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern into an echoing chamber of sound, illumination, and memory, revealing how communication travels across time, space, and human relationships.
Undercurrents invites visitors to speak, listen, and reflect as voices are carried through a glowing network of light, creating a living, ever-changing environment shaped by those who enter.
On view April 24, 2026 – January 24, 2027
About the Artist
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a world-recognized multimedia artist whose work transforms architecture into living systems of light, sound, and human presence.
Working at the intersection of art and technology, Lozano-Hemmer creates immersive environments that respond to visitors in real time, inviting participation, reflection, and connection. His installations make the invisible visible, revealing how voices, memories, and movement shape the spaces we share.
Meet the Poets
Original works by Houston poets shape Undercurrents, their language forming a resonant soundscape that moves in sync with pulses of light across a mile-long network of LED lines. As words echo through the space, these readings create a reflective, immersive experience rooted in rhythm, memory, and voice.
Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. His most recent book is Low (Graywolf, 2023). His book Stay (Ze Books, 2020) chronicles his work with other artists (filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, etc) over the past twenty-five years. His bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro (Focus Features, 2012) and has been translated into fifteen languages.
Aris Kian
Aris Kian (she/her) is a Houston enthusiast and student of abolition. Her poems are published with Button Poetry, West Branch, Obsidian Lit, and elsewhere. As an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of Houston. Her team Smoke Slam coached by Ebony Stewart ranked #1 at the 2025 Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam and #1 at the 2024 Southern Fried Poetry Slam. She previously served as the 2023-2025 Houston Poet Laureate and was chosen as a 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.
Martha Serpas
Martha Serpas, a native of Galliano, Louisiana, produced the documentary Veins in the Gulf, which addresses the state’s land loss and coastal erosion crisis. Her four volumes of poetry include Côte Blanche, The Dirty Side of the Storm, The Diener, and Double Effect. Her poems appear in anthologies focused on ecological, religious, formal, or Southern poetry. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, she has worked as a hospital chaplain, most recently as part of a psilocybin trial for patients at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. At the Tilman J. Fertitta College of Medicine, she co-directs the Scripts program, an initiative to bring creative writers and medical students together around literature and medicine. She teaches poetry writing, consciousness studies, theology, and ecopoetry in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Jennifer Teets
Jennifer Teets is a Houston, Texas born curator, writer, and researcher based in Paris whose work explores intersections between contemporary art, science, philosophy, and ecological thought. Her curatorial practice develops research-driven exhibitions that bring artists into dialogue with scientific ideas, materials, and systems of knowledge. She has curated numerous international exhibitions including Intimate confession is a project at Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Houston, Texas, Carbonate of Copper at Artpace, San Antonio, Elusive Earths at Établissement d’en Face, and Pharmacokinetics of an Element at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, among many others. Alongside curating, Teets writes and edits publications and develops research initiatives examining artistic inquiry in relation to environmental systems, material histories, and the philosophy of science. She currently serves as Artistic Director of PAC Art Houston.
Roberto Tejada
Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections that include Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), and Carbonate of Copper (Fordham, 2025), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. His writings on art and media history include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), his work on the groundbreaking Mexican American artist Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; Minnesota, 2009) and essay collections on Latin American and Latinx art and culture Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), and the forthcoming Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América (Fordham, 2026). Awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Poetry (2021) he is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston where he teaches Creative Writing and Art History.
This project is organized by Buffalo Bayou Partnership with lead underwriting generously provided by The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation.
Major support provided by John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation; VIA Art Fund; Paola and Arturo Creixell; and Judy and Scott Nyquist with additional support provided by an Anonymous Donor; Mara and Erick Calderon; Jereann Chaney; Bari and David Fishel; Marie Roberts Glover; Hobby Family Foundation; Lisa Young and Matt Assiff; Adrienne and Matt Moeller; Québec Government Delegation in Houston; and Jennifer and Benjamin Fink. Buffalo Bayou Partnership is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
Project management and curatorial collaboration provided by Weingarten Art Group.
