Exhibitions at The Arts Center at Governors Island

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) is pleased to announce that The Arts Center at Governors Island will reopen for a new public season of dynamic exhibitions and programs beginning Saturday, May 28, 2022 through October 30, 2022.

Exhibitions center around ideas of healing, offering perspectives on managing our collective and individual experiences, and finding paths of recovery. This season features Sun Seekers, Amy Khoshbin and Jennifer Khoshbin's immersive installation, sculptural, and performance work that promotes healing through disconnecting with technology and reconnecting with the natural world; Back and Song, a four-channel video installation by Elissa Blount-Moorhead and Bradford Young that meditates on health, life, joy, and pain and the ways they manifest in the Black experience, and Pillars, an interactive video installation by Simon Benjamin that considers the intricate relationship between Caribbean migrants and the sea. 

Exhibitions and public programs are free and all are welcome. For regular opening hours and exhibition information, visit lmcc.net/artscenter.

Amy Khoshbin and Jennifer Khoshbin: Sun Seekers
Sun Seekers, created by sisters Amy Khoshbin and Jennifer Khoshbin, is a body of immersive installation, sculptural and performance work meant to promote healing through disconnecting with technology and reconnecting with the natural world. Central to it is a sci-fi narrative about an alternate world that maintains a direct correlation to our current experience of constant indoor on-screen life—the Wreck-tangle. The Sun Seekers pursue outdoor spaces filled with light while consuming botanicals to escape the Wreck-tangle, to collectively create a sense of empathy with the environment and to get back in touch with our bodies as a critical act of self-care. Gathering temporary communities together in physical space, the Sun Seekers engage with somatic analog sculptures that awaken senses left untapped in the Wreck-tangle. 

Elissa Blount-Moorhead and Bradford Young: Back and Song
Curated by Nanette Nelms
Back and Song is a meditative four-channel film and art installation that reflects on how the pursuit of health is at the root of how life, breath, joy and pain manifest in black experience from cradle to grave. The kaleidoscopic installation considers the labor and care provided by generations of Black healers—doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists and health aides—and their histories of contribution to and resistance from the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine. Working with archivists from around the world—including Elijah Maja of Future Together Lab, Rianna Jade Parker and Hudda Khaireh—Moorhead and Young synthesized images of quotidian Black family life into a time-based archive of expression. Paired with new footage, the archival compilations from across the African diaspora show how music, movement, sound therapy, ritual dance, rest and meditation are brought together as a spectrum of individual and communal pursuits of well-being.

Simon Benjamin: Pillars
LMCC proudly presents the first U.S.-based installation of Pillars by Jamaican-born artist Simon Benjamin. The new work at Governors Island focuses on migration, labor and forms of disembodied care between immigrants and their loved ones in their home countries. Benjamin takes shipping barrels traditionally filled with goods that family members back home depend on and transforms them into viewing portals or dioramas. Glimpsing through these portals, viewers encounter sightlines of U.S. seascapes—as their horizons face the direction of islands in the Caribbean, the vessels become thresholds between disparate localities.

About The Arts Center at Governors Island
Conceived by LMCC as an incubator for creative exploration and a gathering space to engage in dialogue, The Arts Center at Governors Island is the first permanent home for artists and audiences on Governors Island. Artist residency programs are featured alongside a broad range of exhibitions and public events that promote the exchange of ideas and creative practices.

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