Beyond All Polarities, We Are _____

Surabhi Saraf and Laura Hyunjhee Kim of the Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM) invite you to a multisensorial experience, Beyond All Polarities, We Are _____.

“Feeling-through-sensing into your body, we invite you to slow down. Make your emotions tangible into a blobby sense of interbeing. In this feelosophical journey, we will melt into a vibrant portrait of togetherness. We explore our collective identities as peoples living in uncertain times. We ask ‘who we are’ beyond what we (dis)like, beyond categories of on/offline affinities, and beyond our fears and anxieties.”

In collaboration with Bay Area artist Ashwini Bhat, Saraf and Kim invite you to a special immersive interactive performance installation spoken through presence, embodied through practice, and experienced through participation.

Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM) is a collective of multidisciplinary artists and researchers who examine the algorithmic conditioning of emotions and its effects on our bodies and beliefs. We devise strategies in the form of workshops, study circles, toolkits, rituals for holistic thinking, feeling, and acting in the digital era. CEM embraces the Blob and its fluid potential as an organizing principle. We morph, shift, and adopt as needed. CEM is organized by Surabhi Saraf, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Caroline Sinders, Marcus Fleming, and Mariah Hill.

Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer, and founder of Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology using embodiment as a tool and the body as a site for transformation.

Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a multimedia artist who reimagines on/offline (non)human interactions and feelosophical experiences of the body. Kim is an Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts in Global Performance Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Ashwini Bhat is an artist who works at the intersection of sculpture, ceramics, installation, and performance. She often introduces radical but somehow familiar forms to suggest complex interplay between the landscape, the human, and the non-human.

Major support for First Thursdays is provided by the Hearst Foundations.

Generous support is provided by Nancy and Alan Schatzberg and Kay Harrigan Woods.

Additional support is provided by the Kelson Foundation and Yerba Buena Community Benefit District.