On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628) documents William Harvey’s watershed findings on the two-way circulatory system; one way pumping blood to the extremities and another back to the heart to be reinvigorated with oxygen. During this dissection, Harvey also encountered an ominous black fluid like ’thick earth’ termed colloquially as ‘black bile’ in the arteries. As one of the four body humors, coleric/black bile was said to hold the properties of mysticism, hysteria, and evil – but as Harvey’s findings revealed…the black stuff in the body was blood all along.

For this Sunday Service, five artists are invited to commune with the Ready Room as a living site for a circulatory exchange.

Photo credit: Gio Pastori

Artist Bios

NIC Kay is from the Bronx. Currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history and spirituality.

Rena Anakwe, is an interdisciplinary artist and performer, working primarily with sound, visuals, scent and space. A member of the artistic collective NON Worldwide, she is based in Brooklyn, New York by way of Nigeria and Canada. Using storytelling as a medium, her work focuses on sensory-based, experiential interactions through art and technology. Rena is a graduate of: the Interactive Telecommunications Program (iTP) at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (MPS), The Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University (MFA) and New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business (BS.)  www.aspaceforsound.com

Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. He has written for Mosaic Literary Magazine, Lambda Literary, ARTS.BLACK, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s journal The Archive, among others. He has read his work at the Whitney, The Poetry Project, and Artists Space, and recently completed a residency at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Iowa City, IA.

I was named Marlene Mulele Seecharan. I do not know how many times I have lived as a human. I know I have been a house in a past life. My goal with art as expression is to live in truth and to live in complete harmony with the rest of nature. I wish you the courage to live in pure consciousness.

Sepo Seecharan Prins is