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.
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.
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