Conjurings is a free event open to the public that runs over three weekends in July and August 2022 and is presented by the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA). Conjurings will weave invocation, incantation, questioning, un-earthing, and ritual to create space for future (un)doings. It will be influenced by academics, artists, musicians, authors, machines, aural technologies, and many more life-forms and undefinable disciplines. To build a solid foundation for our work in a space that bears the imprints of bodily presences as well as inside a material infrastructure, we aim to fill CARA with practices.
Together with Emmy Catedral, Curator of Public Programs, and Manuela Moscoso, Director, curator Erika Sprey and artists Lamin Fofana and Sky Hopinka have been influencing our thinking and weaving voices from their individual practices and research throughout the program and beyond. We are pleased to introduce an excellent set of people who will exhibit emerging kinds of live and located experimentings as a result of this process of forming new collaborations and broadening our networks.
How do we fantasize about things other than ourselves is our central concern. In other words, to dream about not just ourselves but also about others, about creatures of the forest, of the sea, of animals, structures, and shelters—of physical or invisible beings, as permeable interdependent organisms dependent on one another and everything around us. Such collaborative dreamwork necessitates an in-depth comprehension of racial capitalism’s realities as well as the ever-evolving oppression mechanisms. It demands the dismantling of Western categories and conceptual divisions, as well as the conceptions of linear time and space, organic and rational, nature and civilization, and dreaming and waking. Each conjurer who has been invited will speak to and through these conditions for a communal and liberatory dream practice, carefully observing what emerges from these future ancestries and caring for their rich and enigmatic transmissions.
The invited artists think on the power of dreams and how they may be used to promote somatic social justice, healing, and restitution. Conjurings investigates how else dreaming might be applied in targeted, materially based narratives and paths for reparation and transcendence by tuning into vitality, ecology, musical lineages, technopoetics, and the many still-unknown capacities of elemental transformation.
Conjuring #1
July 8–10, 2022
Lamin Fofana, Jace Clayton, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robin D.G. Kelley, Wanda Phipps, Miatta Kawinzi, JJJJJerome Ellis, ray ferreira, DeForrest Brown, Jr., Marilyn Nance, RaFia, Neema Githere, Grandma Baby Apothecary
Conjuring #2
July 22–24, 2022
Humeysha, Amal Alhaag with Kwame Coleman, Negarra Kudumu, Louis Chude-Sokei, Johann Diedrick, The Otolith Group with Ed Halter, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Brandon Lopez, Miya Masakoa, and Zeena Parkins, Azikiwe Mohammed/DJ Black Helmet, The Black School, Cy X, Pedro Neves Marques, Amanda Piña
Conjuring #3
August 5–7, 2022
Sugar Vendil, Aldrin Valdez, Les The DJ, Social Dreaming Mesh: Erika Sprey and Peter Aers, Lavender Suarez, Emerson Uýra, Charles Theonia, Wo Chan, Nicole Wallace, Maria Hupfield with Electric Djinn, Suzanne Kite and Robbie Wing, Kemi Alabi, Camille Barton and Annika Izora, Social Dreaming Mesh: Erika Sprey and Peter Aers, Cousin Collective, Gavilán Rayna Russom
Blue CHiLD. & iris yirei hu will produce a commissioned installation in CARA’s main gallery, accompanying the program of performances, talks, and presentations. The second floor will also host an ongoing exhibition by Amanda Piña, Betty Tchomanga, Emerson Uyra, Grandma Baby Apothecary, June Jordan, Khari-Johnson Ricks, Marilyn Nance, and Sky Hopinka. Presented in the ground floor gallery and CARA bookstore are works by Neema Githere, Juan Alvear, and the late Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi poet Diane Burns.
For more information on bookings, visit cara-nyc.org
225 West 13th Street
10011 New York NY