• Dreaming South
  • Artist Statement
  • THE INBETWEEN SPACES
  • MEDIA ARCHIVE
  • MEMORY MATTER(S)
  • Collaborative Explorations
  • Performance Index
  • Artist Fellowship with the Crossroads Project at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion Portfolio
  • Heritage Settlement Retreat
  • Southern Android Heritage House
  • quantum-ecology
  • Coffee//Koolaid & the tabernacle of rememory
  • Smithsonian Artist research fellowship
  • Dreaming South
  • Artist Statement
  • THE INBETWEEN SPACES
  • MEDIA ARCHIVE
  • MEMORY MATTER(S)
  • Collaborative Explorations
  • Performance Index
  • Artist Fellowship with the Crossroads Project at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion Portfolio
  • Heritage Settlement Retreat
  • Southern Android Heritage House
  • quantum-ecology
  • Coffee//Koolaid & the tabernacle of rememory
  • Smithsonian Artist research fellowship
  My Site

Artist Fellowship with the Crossroads Project at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion Portfolio

Viktor le. Givens is a found object installation performance artist whose practice centers around the gathering and arrangement of
ancestral totems for site specific performance activation's .  His material archive is comprised of  forgotten and discarded household items such as clothing,  fragmented furniture, cupboard-ware,quilts, photographs, dolls, all collected during excavations of his families estate and surrounding communities.   Through the accumulation and arrangement of these rich cultural artifacts  Givens seeks to create spaces that inspire the activation of cultural and spiritual memory . The artist is currently applying for the Artist Fellowship with the Crossroads Project at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion to secure resource support for  the continuation of his Mo'lasses: Ancestral Integrated Technologies Project, a research studio exploration Initiated in 2017 after the completion of his MFA at Columbia College Chicago in Interdisciplinary arts. Part social research , part material performance lab this experimental investigation is designed to collect and reinterpret cultural data relating to the memories and material archives of rural southern Black settlements and their urban descendants. While the investigation highlights the archive as a site for data collection,  the project does not rely solely on the institutional record of the objects for meaning making,  instead the research explores more eclectic methods of engagement and reinterpretation for the cultural objects, such as improvisational performance workshops , inter-generational scavenger hunts and wine making sessions.


In Search of my Familiar: Dreaming South:  SSCAC Chicago IL 2016
Connect Engage found object Installation: Ancestors Wake 2016,
Picture
Picture
Picture

Location

I excite when I hear read watch once lived story poems of emancipation's Jubilation--cotton picking plucked in burlap sacs full of weevils wobbling 'bout the treacherous bulb-- drifted on the shores of the Atlantic in the bosom of Osun where cakes were offerings of meal tilled and readied by han-- the stars and mathematics--rituals and villages filled with shoes made for walking the nomadic tribes --the drifters the seeds--  it all reminds me of my reason, gives possibility on as to how life was simplicity tightly wove sewn crocheted into complexity, cause those living then considered what life living would be fore me in the now."

Contact Us

Subscribe

Join our mailing list today!
Join Now