Skip to main content
All Posts By

wpengine

Nov 06

Bedford and Bowery on BABZ 2017

By Press

“This year, the festival formerly known as the Bushwick Art Book & Zine Fair is being held in Queens, so let’s just call it BABZ Fair. Occurring on the same weekend as BookCon, this fair is its indie counterpart, and will feature eclectic offerings from over 100 publishers. Among those exhibiting and presenting are Williamsburg comics shop Desert Island; Jeremy Nguyen, the Bushwick satirist whose comics have landed in the New Yorker; Greenpoint comic artist Tony Wolf; Brooklyn-based Maga Books (no relationship to Making America Great Again); and Bushwick bookstore and sexy chess host Molasses Books. Wendy’s Subway, the non-profit library and writing space that moved from Williamsburg to Bushwick a year ago, will host feedback sessions for those who want to bring in-progress work. Should you want to self-publish that work, Red Hook art-book publisher Small Editions will be leading a bookbinding workshop.”

– Daniel Maurer, Bedford and Bowery

Oct 17

Conversation with Nikita Vishnevskiy, Curator of UNSEEN HAND

By Audio

March 15, 2017

Curator Nikita Vishnevskiy speaks with Knockdown Center’s Stephanie Acosta about the exhibition, UNSEEN HAND, which was on view March 4 – April 9, 2017.

UNSEEN HAND is a group exhibition that brings together fifteen artists who employ various mediums and processes to question technology and expand upon its conventional definition. The artists exhibited assert their practice as an encounter with a technological event, whether by disrupting the technical order, poetizing methods of industrial production, or inciting sensuality by means of devices typically associated with disconnection. By presenting these instances, the exhibition warns us of the danger in comprehending technology merely through scientific merits.

Including Tom Butter, Lars van Dooren, Juliette Dumas, Todd Fink, Langdon Graves, Rachel Harrison, Corin Hewitt, Ross Knight, Andres Laracuente, Jen Mazza, William McMillin, Thomas Stevenson, Alina Tenser, Steven Thompson, and dan Waller.

Learn more about the exhibition here.

***

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Oct 17

Poetry Reading: You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously

By Audio

February 10, 2017

In conjunction with the exhibition You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously., poet Steven Zultanski curated a poetry reading featuring texts that share affinities with his own poem, Agony (2012). The evening included readings by poets Alejandro Crawford, Mónica de la Torre, Shiv Kotecha, and Stacy Szymaszek and a sound installation by Fernando Diaz.

You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously. is a group exhibition curated by Alison Burstein, on view at Knockdown Center January 13 – February 26, 2017 with artwork by David Court, Erin Diebboll, David Horvitz, Anouk Kruithof, Amanda Turner Pohan, and Steven Zultanski. The show brings together artworks whose techniques resonate with Agony’s provocative alchemical idiom: these pieces quantify bodily and affective features, apply logical and scientific reasoning to absurd ends, and manipulate the linkages between language and things.

Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford is a poet, video artist, and game designer living in Brooklyn, NY. http://amjc.tv

Fernando Diaz is the author of “Autocorrelation and Regularization of Query-Based Retrieval Scores” (University of Massachusetts, 2008). His work has been screened at the Melbourne International Animation Festival.

Mónica de la Torre is the author of five books of poetry, including The Happy End/All Welcome(forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in the spring of 2017). Recent and forthcoming publications include Triple Canopy, Harper’s, andPoetry. She is a contributing editor of BOMB Magazine and teaches poetry at Brown University.

Shiv Kotecha is the author of the Unlovable (Troll Thread, 2016), and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). Other stuff can be found @ shivkotecha.com

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island(2015), Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals(2016), and A Year From Today, forthcoming from Nightboat in 2017. She is also executive director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

You can learn more about the exhibition here.

Image: Erin Diebboll, “Thirty Years – Basement” (detail), (2010). Pencil on paper, 51” x 85”.

***
Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Oct 17

Conversation with Alison Burstein, curator of “You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously.”

By Audio

February 2017

Curator Alison Burstein and author Steven Zultanski talk with Knockdown Center’s Stephanie Acosta about the exhibition You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously, which was on view in Knockdown Center’s gallery January 13 – February 26, 2017.

Alison Burstein is the Program Director at Recess. Burstein previously worked as a member of the education departments at MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum and organized a wide array of public programs, performances, experimental classes, and artist projects across these institutions. As an independent curator, she has staged exhibitions at NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY) and the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles, CA). Burstein is a master’s student in Art History at Columbia University.

Steven Zultanski is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Bribery (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014) and Agony (BookThug, 2012).

Exhibition Info:

You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously.
January 13 – February 26, 2017

Taking up the processes of formal alchemy that lie at the core of the book-length poem Agony by Steven Zultanski, You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously. is an exhibition that traffics in transformative acts.

The show brought together the work of five artists whose techniques resonate with Agony’s provocative alchemical idiom: these artworks quantify bodily and affective features, apply logical and scientific reasoning to absurd ends, and manipulate the linkages between language and things. By placing the objects in calculated proximity to one another—and in relation to the connective tissue of Zultanski’s text—the exhibition format effects its own dynamic shift, conjuring poem-as-exhibition.

You can tell I’m alive and well because I weep continuously. invites viewers to inspect examples of morphed materiality within and between the elements on view, and thereby creates opportunities to consider the potential (and celebrate the futility) of giving stable form to ephemeral traits or experiences.

Featured Artists:
David Court
Erin Diebboll
David Horvitz
Anouk Kruithof
Amanda Turner Pohan
Steven Zultanski

You can learn more about the exhibition here.

***

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Aug 22

KDC Episodes: großer Lauscher

By Video

August 22, 2017

Artist Alyssa Miserendino and collaborator Léonard Roussel of Arup discuss the making of großer Lauscher, an exhibition on view at Knockdown Center July 22 – August 27, 2017.

großer Lauscher (“big Eavesdropper” in German) is a spatial sound installation created by interdisciplinary artist Alyssa Miserendino. The piece was recorded in the main radar dome at the Field Station Berlin, a listening station built during the Cold War by the US National Security Agency (NSA). Exhibited in the darkness, the piece is comprised of five narrators from five different continents reciting the story of Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, while the protracted echos created by the architecture allow visitors to visualize the space of the Field Station.

Additional information on the exhibition here.

Videography by Mehmet Salih Yildirim

Jun 15

Sunday Service: Caitlin Baucom Presents…

By Video

Artists: Orlando Estrada, Greem Jellyfish, PAUL (Angelina Dreem), QUALIATIK, Lorelei Ramirez and An Only Child

May 7, 2017

For this iteration of Sunday Service, Caitlin Baucom curated an evening titled A Raging Grace, gathering artists across disciplines who are lit from within by a burning well, and rather than combust, they use its fuels to go higher and brighter. Featuring Orlando Estrada, Greem Jellyfish, PAUL (Angelina Dreem), QUALIATIK, Lorelei Ramirez, and An Only Child.

‘It’s like having a sickness that gets more fierce as it passes on to wellness. We don’t have to view that period as an invitation to despair, but as a sign of potential transformation… whatever pain we are experiencing…’ –bell hooks

Working across performative disciplines, the artists included are also active as organizers and participants in their broader communities, acknowledging that the roots of rage go beyond the merely personal and its power can feed the world. Together, ‘we admit that we don’t want to see the world blown up; we are for the human species.’ –Andrea Juno & V. Vale, Angry Women.

About the Curator

Caitlin Baucom is a Brooklyn based artist and composer. She has shown interdisciplinary performance work at Knockdown Center, SIGNAL Gallery, HERE Arts, Dixon Place, JACK, 315 Gallery, and ABC No Rio in NYC; Dfbrl8r Gallery, High Concept Labs, Mana Contemporary, and MCA Chicago; and in Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Leipzig and Weimar, Germany. As a performer she works regularly with other artists, and has interpreted the works of Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark and James Lee Byars for MoMA and New Museum. She’s held residencies in Chicago, New York and Weimar, and has work and writing published in Emergency INDEX: Volume 3, Bad at Sports, Incident Magazine, and Sorry Archive’s Air Sheets. Her curatorial experiment trevorshaus programs monthly events bringing artists working across performative disciplines into a heightened temporary reality, and recently premiered the immersive sci–fi opera GENERATION SHIP at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, featuring site specific commissions from a community of movement and sound artists.

About Sunday Service

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

 

Video by James Tate

***

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Jun 15

Sunday Service: Buzz Slutzky presents…

By Video

Artists: Jes Fan, Trace Peterson, and Catalina Schliebener

April 2, 2017

For the 3rd iteration of our new performance series Sunday Service, Buzz Slutzky invited artists Jes Fan, Trace Peterson, and Catalina Schliebener to present experimental or in-progress works around the theme of the “Slumber Party,” relating to trans aesthetics and childhood.

About the Artists

Jes Fan is a Brooklyn based artist from Hong Kong, China. Fan’s practice is based on a material inquiry into otherness as it relates to identity politics. They received a BFA in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design. Fan is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies, such as Pioneer Works Artist Residency, Edward and Sally Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design, CCGA Fellowship at Wheaton Arts, and John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD. Fan has exhibited in the United States and internationally. Selected exhibitions include No Clearance in Niche at Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Whereabouts at Glazenhuis Museum (Belgium), Material Location at Agnes Varis Gallery (New York), Ot(her) at Brown University (Providence), and Remembering Something without a Name, Chrysler Museum of Art (Virginia).

Trace Peterson is a poet, publisher, and critic. She is the author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press), Editor of EOAGH books which won the first Lammy Award in Transgender Poetry, Co-editor of the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books), and Co-editor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott. Her writing has recently appeared in TSQ, Pen America, Posit, The Brooklyn Rail, and is forthcoming in Boston Review.

Catalina Schliebener (born in Santiago, Chile, in 1980) received her bachelor of philosophy from Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales ARCIS, in Santiago. Afterwards, she studied visual arts at the same university. From 2002-2008, she worked as an assistant professor within the areas of philosophy and art theory at several universities in Chile. Schliebener’s work has been exhibited individually and collectively in galleries, museums and art fairs in Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, Belfast, Londres, Miami, Ontario and New York. She has also received scholarships granted by the Development of Culture and the Arts Fund of the Government of Chile (Fondart), the Board of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Relations of Chile (Dirac) as well as the Henry Moore Foundation of the United Kingdom. Recent exhibitions include the solo show, Pin the Tail at Point of Contact Gallery at Syracuse University, and the group exhibition, Queering the BibliObect at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan. She lives and works in New York.

About the Curator

Buzz Slutzky is an artist, writer, and curator whose practice incorporates drawing, sculpture, performance, video, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Buzz Slutzky’s work is primarily focused on humorously investigating the relationship between individual self-identity and social/historical context. 2010-2012, Slutzky was a Curator of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and has continued to organize art exhibitions relating to queerness, humor, politics, and history. Slutzky has exhibited, performed, and screened at Los Ojos, Cooper Union, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Boston Center for the Arts, La Mama, MIX, Frameline, Columbia College Chicago, Mindscape Universe (Berlin), among others. Slutzky earned their BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2010, and their MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2015, after which, they were a resident at the Vermont Studio Center. They currently teach a course in video post-production at the College of Staten Island, and later this year, will be a resident at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn. www.buzzslutzky.com

About Sunday Service

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

 

Video by James Tate

***

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Jun 15

Sunday Service: MAMI presents…

By Video

Artists: Alexandra Bell, NIC Kay, Isabel Flower + Marcel Rosa-Salas, YATTA

February 12, 2017

For the premier of Sunday Service, Knockdown Center invited MAMI’s Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze who in turn invited Alexandra Bell, NIC Kay, Isabel Flower, Marcel Rosa-Salas, and YATTA to share projects in development across movement, writing, visual art, and sonic practices.

About the Artists

Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the complexities of narrative, information consumption, and perception. Utilizing various media, she deconstructs dominant histories to highlight patterns in news reportage and society at large. Bell holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and an M.S. in Print Journalism from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York.

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. NIC Kay is currently a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.

Isabel Flower and Marcel Rosa-Salas are friends living in New York City. Marcel is a PhD student in Anthropology at New York University who researches race and the American advertising industry. Isabel studied Art History and Studio Art at Princeton, and is an assistant editor at Artforum. Together they host Top Rank Magazine’s podcast and share a love for critical theory, ’90s R&B and Air Jordans.

YATTA is a sierra-leonean american digipoet & performer who remixes shamanic sounds with her jazz vocals to create music to lie down in. a former Flux Factory resident, she currently works as the Operations Coordinator of the Silent Barn DIY Collective. Her work has been featured in Rookie Magazine, Dazed, Mask Magazine, and more.

About the Curator

MAMI is the collaborative curatorial initiative of Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze. Together, they organized MAMI, an exhibition and programming series at Knockdown Center in August of 2016. They’ve partnered with BALTI GURLS, BBZ London, Browntourage, POWRPLNT, Fake Accent, Holyrad Studio, Smart Girl Club, SISTER NYC, Top Rank Magazine and other womxn of color centered collectives to organize community gatherings that support our need to care for one another.

About Sunday Service

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

 

Video Courtesy of Derek Schultz

***

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Jun 15

Sunday Service: Niall Jones Presents…

By Video

Artists: Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Effie Bowen, Angie Pittman, Raha, and Travis Sisk / Manifestany Squirtz

March 5, 2017

Niall Jones’ organized an evening that explored the dance party and nightlife, historically and empirically, as a commingling of multiple bodies and multiple ethics. The dance party ostensibly functions as a movement, at once, for and against the sturdiness of identity, and all the while irreducibly in pursuit of (un)certain pleasures and intractable notions of self. Invited participents were Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Effie Bowen, Angie Pittman, Raha, and Travis Sisk / Manifestany Squirtz, who shared work across mediums

Night, the persistence of virtuosic utterances, when language slips into dance, into moan.

About the Artists

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves is an artist chiefly concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany working in the mediums of scholarship, corporeal wisdom, archival gesture and language. She lives and works in New York City where she is currently completing work on The Bulletin of Wilderness and Academy: an introductory conclusion to unschoolMFA forthcoming from Organic Electric Industries.

Effie Bowen graduated with a BFA in dance from Hollins University and has since performed work in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Upcoming projects include Transpacific at Northwestern University with Kentaro Kumanomido and DANCE SPORT, a solo at Gibney.

Angie Pittman is a dance artist, educator, and choreographer. Angie has had the pleasure of dancing in work by Ralph Lemon, Jennifer Lacey and Wally Cordona, Tere O’Connor, Jennifer Monson, Johanna S. Meyer, Kyli Kleven, Anna Sperber, and others. Angie has performed her work at BAAD!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Triskelion Arts, and STooPS. She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a graduate minor in African American Studies and a BA in Dance from Old Dominion University. She was a 2015 DanceWEB scholar for Impulstanz Dance Festival in Vienna, Austria and is a 2016 Artist-in-Residence with Movement Research. Angie’s work resides in a space that investigates how her body moves through ballad, groove, sparkle, spirit, spirituals, ancestry, vulnerability, and power.

Raha is a performing artist, dancer and writer. She holds a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her interests lie at the intersections of urban politics, postcoloniality, critical dance studies and embodiment.

Manifestany Squirtz (aka Travis Steele Sisk) is a Brooklyn drag performance artist. Born out of condom wrapper on corner of Jefferson and Knickerbocker Ave, their sorted life as a performer has brought the masses gender-bending sex appeal and appalling stage behavior. A four time performer of Bushwig (Brooklyn’s annual non-gender conformist performance onslaught) and the former producer/host of RITUAL, a now deceased monthly queer cabaret.

About the Curator

Niall Jones is a dance artist and educator working in New York City and Philadelphia as a visiting professor in the Performance + Performance Studies graduate program at Pratt Institute and is Assistant Director for the School of Dance at the University of the Arts. Niall’s work collects between performance and visual art modalities; disorientation, pleasure, and materiality serve as conceptual access points related to structures of time and exhaustion and impermanence.

About Sunday Service

Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

***

Knockdown Center’s MEDIA page is an ongoing collection of audio, video, writing, and ephemera produced by our arts programming. It serves not only as an aural and visual index of the diverse artistic activities that occur within the space, but also as a resource for artists, writers, curators, and researchers who may be interested in learning more about the practitioners that come through our doors. As a primary source, documents housed within the MEDIA page have been minimally edited and largely unmodified. Audio files link to our Soundcloud channel, where curator conversations, exhibition walkthroughs, panels, and poetry readings can be heard individually, or as select playlists.

Jun 06

KDC Episodes: OVERTIME

By Video

On Saturday, May 27th, 2017 Knockdown Center kicked of it’s outdoor music series OVERTIME. Our inaugural party was presented by NUBIAN MAFIA and hosted by Zuri Lyric Marley, featuring OSHUN, Highclass Hoodlums, JIL, Nakaya, and Sounds by Shiva.

Video: Mehmet Salih Yildirim

About OVERTIME

This summer, we’ve teaming up with the best promoters, hosts, and DJs to bring you an outdoor party every weekend! Come get down in the Ruins and kick back with a frozen drink and your favorite acts.

EVERY SATURDAY ALL SUMMER LONG
Tickets Start At $15

Additional Details: https://knockdown.center/event/overtime/

Skip to content