Inaugural Show

Mystic Hyperstitians in the Heart of Empire

Curated by Joey Cannizzaro

“I’m not the same person I was before I went to the moon. Several people have explained to me that nobody else on Earth is either. Someone told me once that I have begun to heal the great wound inflicted on the human soul by Galileo when he let slip the Earth was not the center of the Universe.”

-Astronaut Captain Kamp in Samuel R. Delany’s Dahlgren

Mystic Hyperstitians in the Heart of Empire questions the role artists have played in the present apocalypse as missionaries for the cult of self-expression. For this show, artists and collaborative teams contributed work that responds to this question: if extolling the virtues of self-expression and individual genius actually empowers capitalist ideology, than how can artists make work that is anti-conformist without promoting the values of individualism and its attendant isolation? The title of the show is a call for artists to make astronomical proposals that threaten those in power and to envision radical future worlds that could really be worked towards, rather than ceding the future to Silicone Valley techno-utopians and cynical corporate politicians. If we’re willing to attempt it, we can imagine a society that does not collapse with capitalism, and art that doesn’t act as a lifeline for the leviathan.