Ensemble for Non Linear Time | In-gallery performance

Ensemble for Non Linear Time
In-gallery performances related to Ranu Mukherjee: Dear Future
Airport Campus | 3026 Airport Ave.
Thursday, February 16th: 2 PM and 4 PM
Friday, February 17th: 3 PM and 6 PM
Saturday, February 18th: 4 PM

This event coincides with Frieze Los Angeles. Please see here for full details about our Frieze programming, including adjusted hours and parking information. 

18th Street Arts Center is pleased to present Ensemble for Non Linear Time, a series of special, in-gallery performances coinciding with Frieze Los Angeles. Created in collaboration by visual artist Ranu Mukherjee and choreographer Hope Mohr. Performed by co-creators Beatriz Escobar, Belinda He, Sunroop Kaur,  Irene Hsi, Karla Quintero, and Claudia Soares.

Featuring an unique cross-disciplinary ensemble of dancers and visual artists, Ensemble for Non-Linear Time responds to rupture within the imagination–putting dance, visual art, and social practice into conversation. An imaginary forest was mapped onto the gallery—a collective landscape of possibility—where dancers move to the rhythms of extinct birdsong. Using imaginary forests as protagonists, the performances adapt the original material in response to the exhibition and continue to explore concepts of rupture and resilience. The core image of an imaginary forest connects visions of an ecological future and histories of colonization with the artists’ lush internal spaces. 

Produced over a three month residency at 836M Gallery in San Francisco, this material is the basis for Mukherjee’s film installation of the same name, installed as part of Dear Future.

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ABOUT

Over a series of residencies the past three years at 18th Street Arts Center, Mukherjee and Mohr have led workshops for immigrant and refugee artists exploring rupture as a starting point for visioning the future.

“For diasporic people, the landscape we create in our imagination connects us with the landscapes we have come from and traveled through. We can explore how the natural world is internalized and how as natural beings, we can heal ourselves through the wisdom of the moving body to imagine new ways into the future. Forests have both universal mythical significance and site specific ecological and cultural significance that are currently on the frontlines – this project taps into this powerful combination to encourage participants to explore their own stories through a speculative framework.” -Ranu Mukherjee

ABOUT THE CO-FACILITATORS

Ranu Mukherjee makes hybrid work in painting, moving image and installation to build new imaginative capacities, drawing on the histories of collage, feminist science fiction and Indian mythological images. She is guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood and transnational feminisms. Ranu has produced commissioned projects for the San Jose Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Asian Art Museum, the de Young Museum, the 2019 Karachi Biennale, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Recent honors include a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2022), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2020) and a residency at 18th Street Arts Center Los Angeles (2022). She is represented by Gallery Wendi Norris. Mukherjee is the Chair of Film at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. www.ranumukherjee.com

Hope Mohr has woven art and activism for decades as a choreographer, curator, community organizer, and writer. She co-directs The Bridge Project, which creates and supports equity-driven live art that centers artists as agents of change. As a dancer, Mohr trained at S.F. Ballet School and performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. She makes dances that “convey emotional and socio-political contents that just ride underneath the surface of a rigorous vocabulary.” (Dance View Times). She has directed performance projects with breast cancer survivors and military veterans. Her work has been presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space (LA), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), SFMOMA, ODC Theater, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and others. She was named to the YBCA 100 in 2015. In 2014, Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron named Mohr as one of the “women leaders” in dance. www.hopemohr.org

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Beatriz Escobar (collaborator/performer)
Beatriz Escobar works with participatory art projects, relational objects, and the body, engaging decolonial imaginaries and investigating the experience of otherness. She is a co-founder of the useless initiatives collective and of Ecotones, a platform for site-specific work in natural landscapes by artists of color.

Her individual and collective works have been shown and performed at Southern Exposure, CounterPulse, BAMPFA, Queens Museum, and Pulitzer Arts Foundation (upcoming). She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and was a 2018 Creative Dissent Fellow at YBCA, a 2019 Community Engagement Fellow at Destiny Arts, and is currently an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts.

Belinda He (collaborator/performer)  
Belinda He is a Singapore-born performance artist who received her MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College. Since relocating to the Bay Area from New York City in 2017, she has performed with Mary Armentrout Dance Theater in addition to being a member of Hope Mohr Dance. She also shares a creative practice with Karla Quintero, and a studio practice with Sara Rudner, Risa Jaroslow and Wendy Rogers, in addition to making her own work. Belinda acknowledges with gratitude teachers Sara Rudner, Barbara Forbes, Janet Panetta, Kira Kirsch, Sandra Chinn and Sara Shelton Mann, and fitness trainer Sebastian Grubb. 

Irene Hsi (collaborator/performer)
Irene Hsi has been making movement-based performance for over 15 years in NYC, New England, and CA. Artists she has had the pleasure of learning from and working with include Barbara Mahler, Jill Sigman/thinkdance, Nerve Tank Media, Michelle Boulé, Anneke Hansen, Emily Beattie, and Allyson Green. Her choreographic work puts questions about identity and politics in dialogue with the body, and has been shown in places such as Joe Goode Annex, LEVYStudio, Dance Complex, Third Life Studio, and the Trident Gallery. Irene was a 2019 Dancers’ Group CA$H Grant recipient, and an Artist Resident at SAFEhouseArts.

Sunroop Kaur (collaborator/performer)
Sunroop Kaur is an interdisciplinary artist currently working in between Vancouver and Central Valley California. Using cultural hybridity as a lens, Kaur is able to translate the struggles of a lived experience while allowing for the synthesis of critical spaces and generative dialogue within the Punjabi Sikh Diaspora. Her practice is a distillation of familial  and community history– through which she counteracts the legacies of colonial violence and theft. Kaur has worked on a number of notable site-specific commissions including a mural project for The State of California’s “Your Actions Save Lives” campaign titled Basant (Spring); Stockton (2021), “Immaterial Triad; Lapis Lazuli” public art installation, Cedar Street Gallery; Berkeley (2021) “Platforms 2020: Public Works” public art campaign; work was installed at bus shelters around Vancouver (2020), and a collaborative mural project “Taike-Sye’ye’ for Vancouver Mural Festival, which centered around the tragic Komagata Maru Episode, Vancouver (2019).

Karla Quintero (collaborator/performer)
Karla Quintero is a Latin-American, NYC-bred, Oakland-based female artist whose work explores intimacy, consumption, and biculturalism. Dance improvisation is her primary tool, but her creative work orients beyond dance. Recent highlights include the dance film Flavedoom, which screened at the 2021 SF Dance Film Festival (co-created with Shareen DeRyan) and the bilingual media series Danzacuentos: Voz, Cuerpo, Y Raíces (danzacuentos.org; co-curated with David Herrera & Mario Ismael Espinoza for the Bridge Project’s Anti-Racism in Dance Series). Karla also performs in the works of other artists, including Gerald Casel, Catherine Galasso (NYC), Hope Mohr, and Maxe Crandall. Off-stage, she co-directs The Bridge Project, an equity-driven presenting platform.

Claudia Soares (collaborator/performer)
Claudia Soares is a multidisciplinary professional with over 15 years of experience in different fields. She is proud of being an artist and entrepreneur from Brazil who came to the United States to leave some of her emotional wounds behind. She makes art to heal and delve deeply into her own emotions. She also created the Art Lab Experience to provide wellness to immigrants and is currently working full-time as a volunteer coordinator for a national non-profit organization that supports skilled immigrants and builds their networks and improves their interviewing skills,  all while exploring the opportunities of becoming a full-time artist and entrepreneur again.