Day: April 9, 2018

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project by Ingrid LaFleur

Opening Reception:

Saturday  May 5,  2015 

 6-9PM.

Popps Emporium, 2025 Carpenter, Detroit

Guided Meditations on Sunday May 6, 13 and 20 at 2PM 

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project outlines how to attain turiya, pure consciousness, in Hindu philosophy and investigates the theory that de-colonial futures can be created only when all trauma is cleansed from the body.

For this installation, Lafluer created a series of sculptures that utilize over twenty varieties of crystals such as pyrite, black tourmaline, amethyst, and bismuth, which she believes can heal traumas and help us transcend into the cosmos. The sculptural installation is accompanied by a sound essay that brings together the wisdom of Audre Lorde, Eartha Kitt, Octavia Butler, Sun Ra, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

Transcending the human experience is the only safe place where futures can be imagined freely without limitation. LaFleur believes the map for the future can be found within the transcendent music meditations created by jazz musician and Hindu practitioner, Alice Coltrane. Inspired by the composition Galaxy in Turiya, LaFleur finds a kinship with Detroit born Coltrane and regards her as a Patron Saint of their hometown. 

Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project

May 5- May 26, 2018

Popps Emporium

2025 Carpenter, Detroit 

Ingrid LaFleur is a cultural producer, arts advocate, pleasure activist, founder of AFROTOPIA, and former candidate for mayor of Detroit. LaFleur has developed and organized art exhibitions both nationally and internationally with a curatorial focus on
Afrofuturism. In 2013, LaFleur founded AFROTOPIA, an evolving creative research project that investigates the possibilities of using the arts movement Afrofuturism as psychosocial healing. 

Within her artistic practice, using sculpture, sound, site-specific installation and performance, LaFleur further unpacks ideas around trauma, which have arisen as a result of audience engagement through AFROTOPIA. She has exhibited in BOOM City Detroit curated by Dashboard Co-op (2015); the Something Else Off Biennial, Cairo, Egypt curated by Simon Njami (2015); Future Africa-Visions in Time at the Iwalewahaus at University of Bayreuth, Germany (2015-ongoing); Traveling to Turiya: The Future Mapping Project at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College; Take Root Among the Stars at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

LaFleur has presented at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA),
TEDxBrooklyn, TEDxDetroit, Iwalewahaus at the University of Bayreuth (Bayreuth, Germany), Ideas City, New Museum (New York), AfroTech Conference (Dortmund, Germany), and Black in Design at Harvard University, among others.

LaFleur is based in Detroit, Michigan.

Residency exhibition with Eric Magassa.

ONE NIGHT ONLY EVENT!

Saturday April 21,   2018  7-10PM.

 Join us for a special exhibition of works in progress by Artist In Residence , Eric Magassa (Sweden). 

Eric Magassa (1972) is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Magassa has a rich cultural background and was brought up moving back and forth between Gothenburg and Paris with his Swedish mother and French father from Senegalese and Malian descent. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Magassa studied at Central Saint Martins, London and The Art Students League of New York.

“Eric Magassa’s body of work spans a variety of materials and methods ranging from painting, collage, and print to cinematic sequences and performative camera set-ups. His many years as a DJ built an intimate connection between his image creation and music. A brief glimpse into the Eric Magassa studio reveals inspirational material in the form of ethnographic artifacts, textiles, modernist sculptures, colored pieces of paper, spray paint, color tubes, books, music and snap shots of abstract urban environments reduced to structures, surfaces and compositions. Objects and artifacts that have long lost their meaning are captured and given new contexts. Driven by restlessness, but above all, curiosity, the fragments are used to reinterpret the world. Despite the vast range of sources, an unmistakable aesthetic with visual unity is created.
For Eric Magassa, art is not a representation of an objective view, but a way of understanding and connecting with life. He does this through heightened presence and concentration within a world of perpetual motion. Through the constant flow of images and impressions, his work suggests a holistic worldview, and the possibility of a utopia of diversity, and a world without borders.”
-Translated excerpts from an essay written by Angelica Olsson

This residency is made possible through an ongoing partnership with the Region Västra Götaland, Sweden.

Check out the Facebook event