Protocinema, presents Mulberry Bend, a group exhibition with Canal Street Research Association (CSRA), David L. Johnson, Sidian Liu, and Paul Pfeiffer, curated by Dylan Seh-Jin Kim within Protocinema Emerging Curator Series 2025-2026, mentored by Mari Spirito, Jessica Kwok, and Christopher Y. Lew. Taking its title from Mulberry Bend, a name historically used to describe the area surrounding Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown for its bend in the road, since 1755, this exhibition explores the relationship between art’s autonomy, use value, and civic function by responding to contemporary social struggles facing the community.

Emerging from a need to reckon with the public conditions that shape life in the neighborhood, Mulberry Bend considers how artistic practices might generate modes of civic engagement without reverting to the didactic or extractive models that have historically accompanied social practice. Rather than mirroring struggle through representation, the works presented here mobilize aesthetic strategies, opening space for shared forms of gathering, reflection, and action, and are situated within the lived immediacy of the neighborhood and its publics.

Mulberry Bend explores new forms of aesthetic action that embed artistic production within ongoing struggles in labor, real estate development, and collective space. The exhibition responds to the terrain of Chinatown and the abutting neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, which have long been sites of transnational intersection and mutual aid, often reflecting the ongoing living conditions of greater New York. Today, the area is being cast by the coercive policing of public space, urban displacement framed as inevitability, neglect of maintenance, escalating ICE raids, racialized violence, and mechanisms of incarceration with the planned Manhattan jail site. As these encroaching forces converge, the need for us to imagine new forms of collective life and civic action becomes all the more urgent.