Temple Contemporary is Tyler's visionary center for exhibitions and public programs.

Gallery Hours:
Currently closed for installation.

Join us when we reopen on Friday December 2, 2022 at 5 pm for Beyond the Words of Earth. The show will be on view December 2 - March 3, 2023, hours:

Wednesday-Thursday 12 pm-8 pm
Friday-Saturday 11 am-6 pm
 

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Exhibition:

Beyond the Words of Earth

A solo exhibition by Rajni Perera
December 2 - March 3, 2023
Opening Reception
Friday, December 2, 2022 5-8 pm

This exhibition invites viewers into the commemoration of a future where borders, imperialist capitalism and ecological collapse have birthed the survival of Travellers – a humanoid species whose multi-ancestral technologies have allowed them to recreate planetary and interplanetary relations.  

Beyond the Words of Earth is a story in three dimensions—and demonstrates how mutation, adaptation, and reimagining technology impact our future while untangling metaphors of space-travel within immigrant life. The exhibition features a new major work by Perera titled A Starry-eyed Subspecies, a sculptural piece featuring a life-size Traveller and Post-Horse traversing a mutated and poisoned landscape left behind by greedy and wealthy corporate nations.  This work will be presented alongside other works that illustrate the history of Travellers. Please join us as we step into the future, and discover the fascinating stories of extinction and survival, and learn about some of the features that sets Travellers apart from other species.   

Rajni Perera, ANCESTOR 1 | 48” X 36” mixed media on stretched paper | Courtesy of Patel Gallery, Toronto

Temple Contemporary Awarded a Project Grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

Karyn Olivier, Here and Now/ Glacier, Shard, Rock, (2015) Lenticular photo in billboard structure. Image courtesy of the artist. 
 

Temple Contemporary is proud to announce that it has been awarded a $300,000 project grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage for a multi-site exhibition that explores the nature of the archive as a living praxis within a Black cultural context.

The exhibition, titled Black Like That: Our Lives As Living Praxis, will open in August 2024 and be anchored at Temple Contemporary with off-site presentations in three Philadelphia neighborhoods central to Black history and Black life in the city: North Philadelphia, West Philadelphia and Germantown. The exhibition will be accompanied by a public program series that articulates the nature of contemporary Black life across multiple sites in Philadelphia and a digital platform that will serve as an interactive map and living archive.  

“Our project aims to capture the nature in which Black culture is lived as an active expression of archival practice,” said Temple Contemporary’s new director Jova Lynne. “That is to say, Black history and contemporary Black life are entangled–the past defines our present. Philadelphia is the nation’s first capital. The legacies of Black experience and movement here are rich and can be interpreted through many perspectives.”  

Announced this week as part of the Center’s 2022 grants, the funding will also support a program based at Temple Contemporary for three Philadelphia-based artists to research and develop the exhibition and public engagement: Tiona Nekkia McClodden, an interdisciplinary conceptual artist, filmmaker and Bucksbaum Award winner at the 2019 Whitney Biennial; Pat Phillips, a painter recognized as a “stand-out” at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and Tyler Professor Karyn Olivier, an award-winning and widely-exhibited sculptor known for commissions that reinterpret monuments and public art.  

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