Conjurings

Soft opening at CARA
The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) presents Conjurings, a public program unfolding over three weekends in July and August 2022. Shaped by scholars, artists, musicians, writers, machines, sonic technologies, and many other life-forms and undefinable disciplines, Conjurings will braid invocation, incantation, questioning, un-earthing, and ceremony, to open space for future (un)doings. We want to fill CARA with practices: to secure a foundation for our work not only within a material infrastructure, but in a space bearing the imprints of physical presences.

Curator Erika Sprey and artists Lamin Fofana and Sky Hopinka have been working together with Emmy Catedral, Curator of Public Programs, and Manuela Moscoso, Director, permeating our thinking and weaving voices inspired by each of their own practices and research throughout the program and beyond. Out of this process of forging new collaborations and expanding our networks, we are happy to present an outstanding group of people who will present evolving forms of live and situated experimentings.

Our guiding question is: How do we dream not only about ourselves? That is to say, to dream not only about ourselves, but about each other, about beings of the forest, of water, of animals, buildings, shelters—of concrete or invisible beings, as porous interdependent entities reliant on each other and everything around us. Such collective dreamwork requires a deep and thorough understanding of the shifting mechanisms of oppression and the realities of racial capitalism. It demands the undoing of Western categories and demarcations of thought; linear and quantifiable time-space notions, and inadequate dichotomies of body and spirit, rational and organic, nature and culture, dreaming and waking. Each invited conjurer will speak to and through these conditions for collective and liberatory dream practice; listening with care to what emerges from these future ancestries, and tending to their rich and opaque transmissions.

The invited artists consider the potency of dreams, and its possibilities for mobilizing healing, reparation, and somatic social justice. Through attuning to vitality, ecology, sonic lineages, technopoetics, and the many still-unknown capacities of elemental transformation, Conjurings asks how else dreaming might be utilized in focused, materially rooted narratives and pathways for reparation and transcendence. 

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 

Media contact
Judy Reissmann