In Open Studio Mode 836M Gallery Presents 'Ensemble For Non-Linear Time'

836M Gallery will present Ensemble for Nonlinear Time@836M, a multidisciplinary residency project to be led by choreographer Hope Mohr and visual artist Ranu Mukherjee. Within the three-month residency, a cast of professional dancers and immigrant and refugee artists will work towards a performance and film work that draws on the experience of rupture as a catalyst for imagining different futures.

The three months of the residency will see Mohr and Mukherjee translating workshop material into performances that will result in a new multidisciplinary work that weaves together performance, visual art, video installations, and a hybrid film that blends two or more genres.

Ensemble for Non-Linear Time is the second of two sequential exhibitions that sees the gallery shift into "open studio mode" as a means of letting the public into the process of creation by noted bay area artists. The first, Piecing featuring Apexer ran from October 2021 through January 2022.

The Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said wrote, "Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, and refugees." And to that end, it is the hope of 836M that through exhibitions like Ensemble for Nonlinear Time refugees will find opportunities to root themselves in the future through art.

Created in response to acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh's suggestion that the climate crisis is also a cultural crisis and a crisis of the imagination, Ensemble for Nonlinear Time centers on the expertise of displaced voices and pairs them with the wisdom of the moving body. The ensemble will create choreography based in an imaginary and emergent forest, setting the stage for culminating performances.

This project began in October 2020, when Mukherjee and Mohr led the project's pilot workshop in partnership with ARTogether, an Oakland-based nonprofit serving immigrant and refugee artists. A complete workshop series ran throughout the fall of 2021 in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles in partnership with 18th Street Art Center. In these workshops, the pair facilitated a creative process that used movement, drawing, and writing to imagine rupture as a character, connect with resilience, and imagine possible futures.

Visitors are invited to return to the gallery over the next three months to see the performances develop.