Community Curation

For MoMI’s Community Curation initiative, a committee of ten curators and collectors nominated a shortlist of boundary-pushing artists for display on the Museum’s Herbert S. Schlosser Media Wall. These artists’ works reflect how personal and cultural histories shape artistic practice. From these nominees, the public cast their votes, selecting three international artists: Anna Malina Zemlianski, Rodell Warner, and Ceren Su Çelik. This process shifts traditional curatorial authority by inviting the public to play an active role.

Nov. 22–Dec. 26: Anna Malina Zemlianski
Dec. 27–Feb. 2: Rodell Warner
Feb. 6–March 2: Ceren Su Çelik

Part of Museum without Walls: MoMI x Tezos

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ON VIEW THROUGH MARCH 2, 2025

Ceren Su Çelik (b. Turkey, 1993) 
Inhabiting the Threshold, 2024 [pictured above]
Video 

Ceren Su Çelik is inspired by thresholds as spaces of transition, where inside and outside blur. Here, she centers on three forms: Istanbul’s underground cisterns, the circular communal spaces of the Fujian Tulou in southeastern China, and Cappadocia’s underground cities. Each represents a liminal space where time flows differently, dissolving boundaries between history and imagination, embodying a material form of memory.

Guided by the common narrative of the “hero’s journey,” Su Çelik documents Istanbul’s Roman and Byzantine cisterns—hidden beneath unexpected locations like hotels, parking garages, and mosques—through 3D photogrammetry. She then transforms and splices each scan into layered, surreal landscapes, adjoining each passageway figuratively and literally to one another. Other imagery echoes the artist’s dreams, such as the Fujian Tulou, which she vividly envisioned while asleep before learning of their existence. The journey culminates in Cappadocia, whose underground cities were carved by early Christians fleeing persecution in the 2nd century. Concealed behind obscured entrances, these vast subterranean communities sustained life for extended periods, with storage rooms, ventilation shafts, wineries, churches, and monasteries. 

Mint your very own fragment of Ceren Su Çelik’s Inhabiting the Threshold from February 6 through March 2.

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ON VIEW DECEMBER 26, 2024–FEBRUARY 2, 2025

Rodell Warner (b. Trinidad, 1986) 
World Is Turning, 2024
Webpage, GIFs, 3D Volumetric Fan 

In World Is Turning, Warner brings together his most cherished moving image works, spanning 2013 to the present, to serve as both personal memoir and living archive. He transforms his signature terraria into a dynamic collage of transparent GIFs as part of his ongoing meditation on cultural memory.  Boundaries are dissolved and individual works are homogenized, as each of the objects is reduced to a single color, while they continuously overlap and interact through incidental scaling and sequencing in real time.

Central to Warner’s practice is his commitment to addressing historical omissions, particularly how colonial-era photography documented Caribbean lives and environments without capturing the subjects’ perspectives. Through his ongoing TERRARIA ⚘ series, Warner fills these gaps by photographing local plant species and encasing them in translucent digital vessels. In the installation, these unified works form a constellation of luminous silhouettes that endlessly merge and transform, embodying themes of growth and metamorphosis. 

As though pulling the revolving vessels in, a volumetric fan isolates individual pieces and displays them in full color, revealing their three-dimensional complexity. This sculptural focal point fosters a dialogue about the evolution of moving image technologies—from projectors to advanced volumetric cinema—positioning Warner’s work within a lineage of experimental formats while exploring future possibilities. World Is Turning underscores preservation and memory as dynamic, social processes, inviting viewers to witness a decade of artistic exploration and imagine future iterations of Warner’s evolving archive.

Mint your very own fragment of Rodell Warner’s World Is Turning from December 27 through January 30.

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ON VIEW NOVEMBER 22–DECEMBER 26, 2024
Anna Malina Zemlianski (b. 1984, German/Ukrainian)
By the Rivers of Shadows and Matter, 2024 
Digital video
3 mins, 25 secs, loop

Anna Malina Zemlianski presents a series of three vignettes examining the multilayered relationships between cinema, history, and fragmented cultural memory. The Ukraine-born artist draws on film history, including Soviet film artifacts, to explore how overlooked remnants—on film and in life—preserve traces of lived experience. Her work reflects on the fragility of archives and the ways that images, analog and digital, shape our understanding of the past.  

The first vignette, Flow, depicts the artist’s process of working with footage atop a debris-covered desk, exploring the relationship between intention and chance, taking inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky’s depiction of a decaying world in his 1979 film Stalker. Through the inclusion of layered, hand-painted, and manipulated imagery, Zemlianski likens the movement of water to the transient flow of images across time. In Hysterie, she presents a selection of films, including home movies, as a palimpsest of history. Through material interventions, she highlights how state-regulated fiction can capture historical turmoil, inadvertently documenting the realities of oppression. The final vignette, Memories, uses machine learning–generated sequences and paper collage to reflect on the brittleness of memory, exploring dissociation, the fleeting nature of recollection, and the tactile qualities of early cinema.

 

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