Heart and Flowers (or A New Flower Song) is a soundtrack for silent films composed by Theodore Moses-Tobani in 1893. Originally written as a cue for melodramatic scenes, it became so widely used that it was quickly proclaimed time-worn. The piece was then repurposed in parodies to exaggerate emotional tensions, and “hearts-and-flowers” entered the English language as a term for excessive sentimentality and nostalgia. Bringing together five artists working with pop cultural references, archives, and personal histories, the show considers how elements of shared and individual memories are reconfigured for current public circulation. Rather than reconstructing the past, the works in the exhibition examine its fragments, treating nostalgia as an open-ended, speculative condition and an engine for newness. The exhibition is developed in collaboration with PopDiary, a research initiative excavating the secrets of pop music. For this show, PopDiary has prototyped a generative score, live performance protocol, and an all-new unspecified object.

New Flower Song