By May Zhee Lim, Markets Media Life Correspondent

Mana Contemporary has commissioned 30 artists from 15 countries to create large-scale installations, sculpture, video art, photography, and paintings displayed in the 50,000 square-foot Glass Gallery. Curated by acclaimed writer, curator, and editor Octavio Zaya, “Theorem. You Simply Destroy the Image I Always Had of Myself” opened yesterday and will run until August 1.

Zaya has curated more than 25 exhibitions in museums around the world, including the MUSAC, Guggenheim New York, and Helsinki City Art Museum. Under his direction, artists traveling from Norway to Brazil gathered in the former tobacco warehouse in Jersey City to ponder the hypothetical question, “What if?” and create art that breaks free from the constraints of pragmatism. In particular, there’ll be a focus on artists from Latin American countries with artworks by Elena Damiani (Peru), Marìa Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba), Radames “Juni” Figuearoa (Puerto Rico) and many others.

Inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema and drawing comparison to Joaquín Torres-Garcia’s Upside-Down Map, the exhibition is meant to be an emancipatory project based on the idea that reality isn’t always as it seems. It’ll be interesting to see how each of the artist use their medium of choice to amplify the tensions between reality and appearance, turning established systems on their head and reaching the point of “poetic subversion.”

Mana Contemporary. 888 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, NJ. Free admission. Monday to Friday, 10-5.

Featured image: Santiago Roose, Bridge, 2015