Monira Foundation Presents Ten Years Later, Highlights of the Mana Collection

In The Lost Happy Hours project, Lauren Silberman documented the bars and nightclubs of her vibrant Brooklyn neighborhood as they sat indefinitely unoccupied through the long, Covid months. Spaces of togetherness and conviviality had morphed quickly into funereal catacombs, and Silberman captures the palpable loneliness. In one image, a disco ball hangs forlornly over a vacant dance floor, the nightclub’s spotlights shining down into nothingness. In another, plants replace people on a dancefloor, stand-ins for the nightlife denizens now plunged into isolation with the onset of the pandemic. But for Silberman, the lush, thriving greenery also served as a much-needed symbol of hope, representing life and growth during a time of so much fear and uncertainty.

Alexa Hoyer’s Window Dressing images were taken mainly during the month of June 2020 when, combined with the Covid lockdown, the world witnessed a series of protests and civil unrest unfold in American cities following the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota. As protests mounted in New York and elsewhere, shuttered storefronts were hastily boarded up as a means of protection against the perceived threat of looters. Hoyer chronicled the patchworks of wood hammered across doors and shop windows, thrusting to the forefront the uneasy contention between race and capital that exists in the American marketplace. Strikingly, her photographs also highlight the marvels of New York’s architecture. Dingy plywood all of a sudden brings the ornate details of a Hermès boutique’s façade, for instance, as the mundane clashes with the opulent in an architectural allegory paralleling what was happening on the streets.

Lauren Silberman received her MFA from the International Center of Photography-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, New York in 2008. She has been awarded residencies at Mana Contemporary as well as others including the Camera Club of New York, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, and ArtGarda in Sirmione, Italy. Her work has been featured in publications like The New York Times Magazine, Elle, and The New Yorker and included in a number of solo and group exhibitions. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

German-born photographer Alexa Hoyer received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia in 2005. She recently completed a residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Governor’s Island residency program, and her work has been featured in publications like Vice.com, DOMUS, and Harper’s Magazine. Exhibitions include those at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas, and Wave Hill in New York. Hoyer lives and works in Brooklyn.