There will be a special performance by the international superstar PUPPETKABOB on Thursday, December 20th at 9pm.
Image: Joelle Jensen, Untitled (high school portrait), 2006 C-print
"Memory Minister" includes artists that project an uncanny, dream-like, or strange reality by conjuring up personal and/or collective images from their memory. In the late 18th century, France had invented the Phantasmagoria, a precinema projection ghost show which was a modified type of magic lantern, used to project images on walls, smoke, or semi-transparent screens. This lantern- sorcery conjured up images of the dead and began to develop into a kind of art-form.
The artists in "Memory Minister" summon up fragmented memories of their past as they remember them, sometimes intermingling elements of the present to decipher what they may not understand. The works in "Memory Minister" are haunting and dream-like, and evoke notions of romantic poetry, engaging in an energetic imaginative commitment to the restorative powers of memory, especially of childhood and adolescence.
Memory Minister is supported by chashama, a NYC arts organization whose mission is to support artists of all genres. chashama adopts vacant properties that are donated by their owners and converts them into theaters, galleries, studios, and window performance sites; chashama then regrants this space for free or at heavily subsidized rates. Since 1995, chashama has transformed more than 20 vacant properties and has given more than 5,000 artists access to space.
chashama/Explosivo is a temporary platform for contemporary art which follows an interdisciplinary exhibition program curated by Tracy Candido in partnership with chashama. The chashama/Explosivo art space is donated to chashama by the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board. UHAB supports self-help housing and community building in low-income neighborhoods by training, organizing, developing and assisting resident-controlled limited-equity housing cooperatives.