Ensemble For Non-Linear Time At 836M Gallery Comes To A Close With Two Performances

836M Gallery presents the finale to Ensemble for Nonlinear Time@836M, the multidisciplinary residency project led by choreographer Hope Mohr and visual artist Ranu Mukherjee. Within the three-month residency the cast of professional dancers and immigrant women artists collaborated to build a performance that draws on the notion of using rupture and using it as a catalyst for imagining different futures.

Over the course of the 3-month residency Mohr, Mukherjee and the ensemble focused on translating workshop material into a weave of performance, visual art & video installations.

Ensemble for Non-Linear Time is the second of two sequential exhibitions that saw 836M 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 muralist/street artist Apexer ran from October 2021 through January 2022.

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

Created in response to acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh's suggestion that the climate crisis is also a cultural crisis as well as one of the imagination, Ensemble for Nonlinear Time centers on the expertise of displaced voices and pairs them with the wisdom of the moving body.

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.

The cast consists of: Irene Hsi, Karla Quintero and Belinda He who all are professional dancers along with Claudia Soares, Sunny Kaur and Beatriz Escobar.

Please note: the public performances will take place within the gallery and can be viewed either from the street through the gallery's floor to ceiling windows, or observed while inside the gallery itself.

What: Ensemble for Non-Linear Time@836M
When: April 27 & 28
Time: Opening reception at 6pm; performances at 6:30pm followed by post performance reception.
Where: 836 M located at 836 Montgomery Street, San Francisco
Admission: FREE

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 San Francisco Ballet School and on scholarship at the Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown Studios in New York City. She performed in the companies of dance pioneers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. Hope makes dances that "convey emotional and socio-political contexts 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 in such venues as the Baltimore Museum of Art, Highways Performance Space (L.A.), Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), SFMOMA, ODC Theater, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She was named to the YBCA 100 in 2015 and was a 2016 YBCA Fellow. In 2014, Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron named Mohr one of the "women leaders" in the dance field. Her new book, Shifting Cultural Power: Case Studies and Questions in Performance, is forthcoming from the National Center for Choreography. www.hopemohr.org www.bridgeproject.art

Ranu Mukherjee makes hybrid work with painting, moving images, and installation to build new imaginative capacities, drawing on 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, the 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). Her first monograph, 'Shadowtime,' was published in September 2021, with Gallery Wendi Norris representing her work. Mukherjee is the Chair of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. www.ranumukherjee.com

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