Thank you to everyone who joined us this weekend for the opening of ‘Javier Téllez: Amerika’ @javiertellezarchivo 🎞️⭐️
📍The exhibition is now open to the public Wednesday-Sunday till August 11! We hope you will come spend time with Téllez’s work, including his newest film ‘AMERIKA,’ produced in collaboration with Andrea Arias, José Díaz, Luisandra Escalona, Leonardo Mesa, Nazareth Merentes, Jesús Ramírez, Omar Ríos, Mariana Vargas—a group of Venezuelan refugees currently living in New York
🔗Learn more about ‘Amerika’ and Téllez’s practice at the link in our bio!
Photos by Kris Graves.
🎞️Opening June 1, CARA’s Summer 2024 exhibition, ‘Javier Téllez: Amerika’ @javiertellezarchivo 🎞️
‘Amerika’ is Javier Téllez’s (b. 1969, Venezuela; lives and works in New York) first institutional solo exhibition in New York City in nearly two decades. Téllez’s practice is centered around the moving image as a medium, and includes extensive research into image creation and storytelling from the early days of cinema to the present. His work often revisits classic films, literary and philosophical texts, and myths to deconstruct familiar archetypes of perceived deviance, marginality, and ungovernability.
🎥This solo exhibition centers around the film installation ‘AMERIKA,’ commissioned by CARA. Drawing from cinema histories and vaudeville, ‘Amerika’ mobilizes reenactment, fiction, and metaphor to respond to the ongoing exodus of millions of Venezuelans from their home, motivated by the state’s repressive policies, continued violence, and socioeconomic collapse.
Téllez produced ‘AMERIKA’ in collaboration with Andreina Arias, José Díaz, Luisandra Escalona, Leonardo Masa, Nazareth Merentes, Jesus Ramirez, Omar Ríos, and Mariana Vargas—a group of Venezuelan refugees currently living in New York. Téllez, himself an immigrant from Venezuela who has been living in New York since 1993, worked with these non-professional actors to produce a short film inspired by the work of Charlie Chaplin. Téllez and his collaborators reenacted scenes from Chaplin films to question power, hegemony, and intolerance toward the other through a collectively developed script that uses narrative to highlight the shared concerns and experiences of migrant communities.
📍Learn more at the link in our bio
Cine Capitol by Javier Téllez 🌐 Now on view at CARA ⭐️
Gathered by Téllez over more than twenty years, Cine Capitol is a selection from an extensive archival project of image cutouts taken from illustrated magazines and books. The atlas offers a panorama of visual culture from the mid-twentieth century into this century. This library aims to create an alternative collective memory of image production through photographic prints, sourced mainly from a time before the ubiquity of digital images.
Téllez’s rigorous archival practice invokes symbolic associations, metaphors, visual references, and tropes often used in storytelling, illustrating their influence on our perception of the present. The albums on display here represent a breadth of themes including cinema screens, clowns, coins, demonstrations, dollhouses, maps, marionettes, masks, miniatures, mirrors, taxidermy, televisions, and waxworks, among many others.
The series is named after one of Venezuela’s first cinemas, Cine Capitol, founded in 1914 in Turmero, Aragua State, by Téllez’s grandfather, Alfredo Pacheco Miranda.
📌 Javier Téllez: Amerika is on view Wed-Sunday. CARA will be closed tomorrow, Thursday, July 4, and resume regular hours Friday, July 5
Save the date 💫 CARA’s Fall Feast is October 23rd
This year we’re thrilled to honor visionary artists and CARA collaborators Cynthia Hawkkins (@hawkinsc_art ) and Alice Mackler, in memoriam.
Join us to celebrate our ongoing work supporting artists, amplifying legacies, and expanding discourses!
Tickets are now live! Mark your calendars and find more details at the link in our bio 💐
🩵 Graphic design by @therodina
I am humbled by this excellent full page story printed today in the New York Times. Thanks @blake_gopnik AMERIKA is on view @cara_the_org until August 11.
Javier Téllez: Amerika covered in the New York Times 📰⭐️
“Téllez…believes that projects like his stand for the very possibility of radical transformation. Society “needs to be cured,” he said, and its artists can’t afford to give up on the treatment.”— Blake Gopnik
🔗 Read the full article at the link in our bio
📌 Don’t miss Téllez and exhibition curator Rahul Gudipudi in conversation tonight at 7pm!
This Thursday, June 20 at 7pm! Javier Téllez will be in conversation with CARA’s Senior Curator Rahul Gudipudi to discuss the process of making the exhibition Amerika (now on view through August 11). 🔗 RSVP via link in our bio!
Today, we continue to feature a selection of titles available in our bookstore, inspired and informed by Téllez’s body of work surrounding psychiatric treatment, mental illness, and normalcy.
♟️Javier Téllez: Games Are Forbidden In The Labyrinth (Roma Publications, 2015) is an artist’s book composed of a visual essay interwoven with texts by philosophers, literary figures, sociologists, and others. The artist gives answers to 64 questions on 'How Do You Play Chess?' linking them to fragments and images that explore psychiatric confinement, surveillance architecture, and the game of chess as interrelated systems.
🏰 I, Little Asylum by Emmanuelle Guattari (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, 2014) is a lyrical account of a childhood spent in a castle disguised as a psychiatric clinic, written by the daughter of Félix Guattari. I, Little Asylum is among the titles selected for CARA’s bookstore by Javier Téllez who himself was exposed to ideas and concepts about mental illness while growing up as a child of psychiatrists in Venezuela.
📖 Learning From Madness (University of Chicago Press, 2018) by Kaira M. Cabañas looks at how the “art of the insane” flourished within Brazil modernist movements from the 1920s to the 1960s, with prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism encouraging the creation of art by the mentally ill. Cabañas includes Téllez’s film Caligari and the Sleepwalker, 2008—created in collaboration with mental-health patients—as an example of a critical alternative to the presentation of ‘outsider art’ in global exhibitions.
Other related titles available in the CARA shop: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason; Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry, and Resistance (Archive Books, 2021); and Normality: A Critical Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
⭐️Come spend time with these books and join us this Thursday!
💫 Next Thursday, June 20 at 7pm! Javier Téllez and Rahul Gudipudi in conversation 💫
Join us for a dialogue between artist Javier Téllez and CARA’s Senior Curator Rahul Gudipudi. Téllez and Gudipudi will discuss the process of making the exhibition Amerika (now on view at CARA through August 11), exploring aspects of Téllez’s practice including historical and political references and collaborative forms of filmmaking.
🔗RSVP for the event at the link in our bio!
📍Javier Téllez, Amerika is on view at CARA Wednesday-Sunday!
Image: Javier Téllez, AMERIKA. Production still by Pablo Monsalve.
CARA Fellow highlight: Napoleon Jones-Henderson ⭐️🪻
Napoleon Jones-Henderson (b. 1943, Chicago, Illinois, lives and works in Roxbury, Massachusetts) is a renowned artist known for his long-term commitment to cultural representation and community engagement. A key figure in AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), founded in 1968, as well as other intergenerational networks of Black artists, his work creates images inspired by the lived experiences and cultures of communities in the African diaspora.
Often using the medium of public art, Jones-Henderson’s work is rooted in a desire for community connection through what he calls “visual music,” a rhapsody of colors, materials, and symbols. Beyond his artistic creations, he has been an influential educator and mentor, holding various academic positions and engaging in community-building through art.
💫 The support of CARA’s Fellowship has encouraged the multimedia expansion of Jones-Henderson’s practice. He’s currently working on his ongoing series Requiem for Our Ancestors and the creation of portraits of his family, which he calls a visual memoir.
📌 Learn more about Napoleon Jones-Hendrson and the CARA Fellowship at the link in our bio
#napoleonjoneshenderson#carafellowship
CARA is pleased to host a part of ‘Ancient Futures’ by Craftwork!
DEMO, a festival created by our friends at NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator for art, design, and technology, is open to the public starting today. DEMO2024 will take place over three days at WSA and Water Street Projects and feature talks, showcases, performances, and a broadcast hub.
‘Inherit, Yield, Regenerate’ is an exhibition at WSA bringing together the work of artists and collectives who have been in community with one another for the past nine months as members in NEW INC’s Creative Science track. As a part of this exhibition, Craftwork created a multi-layered woven textile whose surface visually fluctuates based on the sentiment analysis of visitors’ shared stories. A participatory media installation capturing sonic textures and creating an evolving fabric of soundscape, this textile captures a sense of what it is like to be a human in different communities, using the ancient wisdom of textile coding and the futuristic potential of digital technology.
On view in the CARA bookstore until June 20, is a satellite panel of this textile (lovingly nicknamed “The Bug”) which vividly depicts the emotional and communal atmosphere of the NEW INC DEMO2024 site, through the light of ‘Ancient Futures’ bringing the stories from the financial district location to the West Village.
For more info: demofestival.org
@craftwork_collective@messinicole@victoriamanganiello@oddlygoodstudio@wsanyc@waterstreetprojectsnyc@newinc
Craftwork is a multidisciplinary design and art studio exploring the nature of textiles and technology through installations, storytelling, and material-based research. Their broad-based skill set focuses on creative technologies, textile fabrication, and novel materials explored through historical and cultural contexts. Embracing collaboration, Craftwork intentionally engages in experimental techniques in both the physical and digital realms, frequently intertwined. Victoria Manganiello and Nicole Yi Messier founded Craftwork in 2022.
#demo2024
‘Javier Téllez: Amerika’ opens this Saturday from 4-7pm! 🎞️⭐️
The title for the exhibition, and its central film commission, is drawn from Franz Kafka’s posthumously published novel ‘Amerika’ (1927), available in our bookstore in a new translation by Mark Harman, published in the Schocken Kafka Library Series.
Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ is a story of exile that casts a dark light on the American Dream and critiques the rhetoric of liberty that accompanies the production of the false promise of paradise or the promised land. In Kafka, as in some of actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin’s films which Téllez references, the protagonists, in pursuit of a better future, arrive in a nation that is hostile to them—a situation not unlike what many immigrants unfortunately continue to face today.
📖Copies of ‘Amerika’ are available in our bookstore, as well as a growing selection of titles related to Téllez’s practice! Come spend time with these books and get excited for the show’s opening.
🌀CARA is open Wednesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, Sunday 12pm-6pm
🔗Learn more about the exhibition and RSVP for the opening at the link in our bio!
