Walking Meditation and closing reception

Viktor Givens, a multimodal performance artist, brings his creative arts initiative project “Coffee//Kool Aid & the Tabernacle of (Re)Memory” to the Community Artists’ Collective March 5 through April 23.

The exhibition opens Saturday, March 5, at noon with a reading reception at The Collective, 4101 San Jacinto, Suite 116.

In the ensuing weeks Givens will conduct semi-public workshops and interventions that explore conceptual and material themes around notions of domestic archive, preservation, genealogy, ecology, reparations and ritual theater. Interventions explored involve collage, photo fiction, intergenerational dialogue, experiential readings, textile arts and canning.

Givens and his Southern Android Productions organization is a research-based creative arts initiative designed to collect and reinterpret cultural data relating to the migration histories, memories and material archives of African American urban settlers and their ancestral rural settlements.

His material archive consists mostly of forgotten and discarded domestic detritus found during excavations of vacant African American residential estates. Givens then takes these fragmented objects, their narratives, their interior poetry and reimagines both form and function to suit an array of aesthetic and spiritual needs. Through the accumulation of these rich cultural artifacts, Givens seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual (re)memory in relation to Africa and its Diaspora.