Taking a Stand

With micha cárdenas, Oliver Husain, Elizabeth LaPensée, Meryl McMaster, and Syrus Marcus Ware. Curated by Srimoyee Mitra.

Taking a Stand is a group exhibition that brings together lively and energetic work that highlights the ways in which artists build solidarity and shape contemporary culture as active participants in our society. The works in the exhibition encompass photography, interactive drawings, augmented reality, and 3‑D film installation. The collectivist impulse of the projects recast the gallery as a catalyst, a site of action and possibility for urgent and meaningful dialogue on culture and politics. The immersive and interactive installations don’t just represent social concerns from our cosmopolitan present, they delve into playful and poetic exchanges with public audiences on empathy and decoloniality to imagine just and equitable futures. Drawing on the themes of science fiction, artists in the exhibition invite audiences to time travel, blurring fact with fiction, weaving fantastical narratives and desires with ancestral knowledge, collective memories, and stories from their natural and urban environments. They acknowledge the vitality of recuperating Indigenous, migrant, and LGBTQI subjectivities and practices to better understand how to heal our damaged planet. Even though these installations are temporary and ephemeral, they foster vibrant liminal spaces for the public to explore what could be done during this time of ever-present ecological and political change. 

This program is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.