Video

Artists: Sepo Seecharan Prins and Marlene Mulele Seecharan, NIC Kay, Justin Allen, Rena Anakwe

October 1, 2017

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.

About the Artists

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.) 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 MAGIC

About the Curator

Jonathan Gonzalez is a choreographer and Bessie-nominated performer based in his native New York City. He has been a New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Artist in collaboration with EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, BAX/Dancing While Black Fellow under the direction of Paloma McGregor, Diebold Award recipient for Distinction in Choreography & Performance, Rema Hort Mann Foundation nominee, as well as a POSSE Leadership and Bessie Schonberg Scholar; he is currently a BAX/SUBMERGE! artist. He has performed in the works of Ligia Lewis, Cynthia Oliver, Isabel Lewis, Alex Baczyinski-Jenkins, Phillip Howe, Ni’Ja Whitson, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Grisha Coleman, among others. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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/

Co-curator Dana Kopel speaks about Formal Complaint, an exhibition on view at Knockdown Center April 15 – June 4, 2017.

Craft, scrap, and architectural minimalism coincide in Formal Complaint. Featuring work by Aria Dean, Female Background, Christopher Hanrahan, Mario Navarro, and Megan Pahmier, the exhibition returns handiwork to formalism, maintaining a sense of slackness. Metal armatures lean and bend precariously; a painting on unstretched canvas drags on the floor. Discarded materials and everyday objects come to conjure an upright but ‘bereft formalism’ (as Hanrahan calls it). Tenderness and despair coalesce in objects that can only just support themselves, much less make a claim for historical or philosophical significance. The works in the exhibition undermine past minimalisms from multiple directions—in terms of material, attitude, and dependence on context—but out of a care for and maintenance of form, rather than a casting off of it. Through these mergers of vernacular minimalism and sad design, work and supporting structure, Formal Complaint creates its own ecology of exhibitionary space.

Curated by Dana Kopel and Rachael Rakes

Videography: Mehmet Salih Yildirim

Artist and FiveMyles Director Hanne Tierney speaks about her exhibition, Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas, at the Knockdown Center April 15 – May 28, 2017.

Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas is a self-performing object theater produced by artist Hanne Tierney. Installed across the expanse of Knockdown Center’s Annex, a series of vignettes come to life as cloth figures, hula hoops, and satin configurations gesture, twirl, and sway, manipulated by a system of motors and robotic electronics, designed by engineer Oskar Strautmanis. A soundtrack further animates each semi-abstract character, composed of a drifting narrative that stages imagined arguments between Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas, woven with excerpts from Stein’s early plays, and with music by Erik Satie. Baby, Said Alice B. Toklas is played on a fifteen-minute loop during gallery hours, offering viewers the possibility of an ongoing encounter with the immersive, ambulatory experience of Tierney’s enchanting work.

Videography: Mehmet Salih Yildirim

January 19th, 2017

Power Share/Power Surge: A Panel Discussion on Activism, Aging, Art, Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights, Intersectional Feminisms, Sexuality, Trans Rights, and more. What can we do? Where do we connect? How can we share power?

Curated and donated by Christen Clifford and moderated by Stephanie Acosta
Panelists: Ashton Applewhite, Ayana Evans, and Pamela Sneed

This panel, curated by artist and activist Christen Clifford, came about through a consideration of feminism and asking whether there was a difference between identity politics and civil rights, and how we can come together to share our power. Clifford invited four artists and writers to connect, with the definition of “connect” in mind as “a link to a power supply.”

Christen Clifford is an activist, curator, feminist performance artist, mother and writer whose work includes the PussyBow . She teaches at The New School.

This event was part of STAY NASTY, a fundraising series of music, performances, and workshops that accompanied the NASTY WOMEN exhibition, January 12-15th, 2017.

Video courtesy of James Tate + Intrinsic Grey

Christen Clifford
http://christenclifford.tumblr.com/

Ashton Applewhite
https://thischairrocks.com/

Ayana Evans
https://www.ayanaevans.com/

Pamela Sneed
http://www.pamelasneedspeaks.com/

Stephanie Acosta
http://www.stephanieacosta.org/

***

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.