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Innervisions New York

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Innervisions will hold its first US event of the year in none other than the city that never sleeps, New York.

Dixon and Âme will be joined by some of the most exciting names in underground dance music: critically-acclaimed DJ Koze, fast-rising star Trikk and French talent, Jennifer Cardini.

Knockdown Center in Queens, a former factory with over a century of history and now transformed into an innovative arts and performance space, will play host to Innervisions for 8 hours of non stop music and dancing.

For more information about Innervisions:
www.facebook.com/innercityvisions
www.instagram.com/Innervisions_Official

Kuldeep Singh: THROUGH THE KALI-EROS

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Kuldeep Singh: THROUGH THE KĀLI-EROS, an evening of immersive performance.

Kali, the often misunderstood goddess of time, terror, destruction and protection is visualized here as a system of performative and sonic tropes equated to Eros.

Weaving together visual art elements with Indian classical dance gestures and theatre, multidisciplinary artist Kuldeep Singh and his collaborators present THROUGH THE KĀLI-EROS, an installation based performance project where meanings and boundaries are blurred through pathos and eros.

Against a hypnotic score drawn from Hindustani classical music layered with tones of prolonged echoed narrations in gibberish and live instrumental music, the work interlaces a myriad of haunting gestures and fluctuating movements as acts, interspersed with a film projected on suspended painted surfaces. These performance acts are fragmented in nature and unfold on cracked mud and dirt ground within Knockdown Centers large industrial space. Reflecting on a chapter in the 12th century Sanskrit tome Manasollasà that addresses the nature of dance, the work attends to realities of the post-colonial world through a relationship between abstraction and representation.

THROUGH THE KĀLI-EROS presents the viewer with a concocted world of its own, where hybrid meanings lead to an inner cleansing mechanism.

Collaborators include Jeffrey Grunthaner on guitar, Harsh Shah on sitar and vocals, and Russell Cole in movement.

About the artists
Kuldeep Singh is a multi-disciplinary artist with a compound artistic practice, comprising a system of non-linear narratives in visual art and multi-media performance. Through inventing situations in theatrical installations and hybrid myths, he surveys hiatuses in post-colonial histories. With his intensive, decade long training in the Indian classical dance form of Odissi (with critically acclaimed dancer Madhavi Mudgal, in New Delhi) he deconstructs components in movement and acting, sound/percussion mnemonics and spatial arrangements – all as re-arranged fragments in layers, engaging in body politics and social anthropology. The content transpires from eclectic stories across timelines, classic Sanskrit texts, and is layered to contemporary human situations – re emphasizing contemporary relevances.

Kuldeep is the recipient of some of the prestigious art residencies including: the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME (2014), Yaddo, NY (2015) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, NE (2016); and has recently been artist in residence at Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn (2018) and at HH Art Spaces, Goa (2018) – on an award from Inlaks Foundation, Mumbai. He recently has been awarded the highly competitive New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2018), in interdisciplinary arts category. Kuldeep holds the National Freedom of Expression Award, Mumbai (2009, Infinity Films). His selected solo performances include at the Kolkata International Performance Festival (2014), Yaddo (2015) and Rapid Pulse International Performance Festival in Chicago (2016), La Mama Theater (2016), and most recently at Asia Society, NYC (2018) to name a few. His selected lectures & demonstrations include at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art – New Delhi, Queens Museum – NYC, Delhi University, University College London, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska-Omaha and Hunter College, NYC.

Russell Cole is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. His works are often collaborative and improvisatory and explore the intersection of poetry, music, circus and dance. He holds an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College and has performed with The Commons Choir,Tori Lawrence & amp; Co., and recently at Triskelion’s Never Before, Never Again festival with Luther Bangert. He is co-founder of the art/literature magazine 叵CLIP.

Jeffrey Grunthaner is a writer, artist, musician, and curator based in Brooklyn. Their articles, reviews, poems, and essays have appeared via Drag City Books, BOMB, American Art Catalogues, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet News, Hyperallergic, and other venues. Recent curatorial projects include the reading and discussion series Conversations in Contemporary Poetics at Hauser & Wirth, New York City, and Daniel Turner; Drawings and Sculpture, at Spoonbill Studio, Brooklyn.

Harsh Shah is a pursuing a full fledge career as a Construction Manager in NYC. But his passion and yearning for instrumental sitar and Indian classical vocal music has pulled him for diversified collaborating experience with many other instrumentalists – including Indian flute, Violin and Veena and dancers. He is in training, past 4 years under the guidance of Indrojit Roy Chowdhury – one of the most talented young exponents of Rampur Senia Gharana. And also learning Hindustani vocal music. His recent most collaboration was at Queens Museum, NY.

About Residency Unlimited (RU)
Residency Unlimited (RU) supports the creative process and promotes exchange through its unique residency program and year-round public programs. Moving beyond the traditional studio model, RU forges strategic partnerships with collaborating institutions to offer flexible and customized residencies designed to meet the individual goals, needs and visions of local and international artists and curators. RU is particularly committed to promoting multidisciplinary practices and building lasting connections between residents and the broader arts community.

 

Photos courtesy of Zhiyuan Yang

A Continuous Stream of Occurrence

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Exhibition Events
Sunday April 28, 6pm
Closing reception and performance by Roarke Menzies

A Continuous Stream of Occurrence is an exhibition that brings together the works of Luba Drozd and William Lamson to explore how time manifests in natural and physical phenomena.

The artists will create new site-specific, time-based works that modify Knockdown Center’s gallery space into an uncertain laboratory, where architecture, light, piano cords, copper, salts, and glass create an ever-evolving environment that unveils time as materially constructed. By focusing on sound and vibration, or on crystallization and geological transformation, the exhibition invites visitors to experience the sensory elements that make up these living systems.

Luba Drozd is a site specific video and sound installation artist. Working across media, the components of her installations continuously interconnect with architecture and each other. Her synthetic spaces examine tangible and intangible structures of authority and its manifestations in a built environment. The final pieces gesture to how intangible spaces within us – such as memory, knowledge and perception of time – are controlled and regimented. Luba earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her work was exhibited at the Bronx Museum, UIMA Chicago, Apexart, LUBOV Gallery, Smack Mellon, Ukrainian Museum, Carver Center for Art and Technology and many others. She is the recipient of a MASS MoCA Artist Residency, BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, Bronx Museum AIM program, Eastern State Historic Site Grant for New Work, VCCA Artist Residency Fellowship, Millay Colony residency and MacDowell Fellowship.

William Lamson is an interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice involves working with elemental forces to create durational performative actions. Set in landscapes as varied as New York’s East River and Chile’s Atacama Desert, his projects reveal the invisible systems and forces at play within these sites. In all of his projects, Lamson’s work represents a performative gesture, a collaboration with forces outside of his control to explore systems of knowledge and belief. Lamson’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including the Brooklyn Musuem, The Moscow Biennial, P.S.1. MOMA, Kunsthalle Erfurt, the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Denver, and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition, he has produced site specific installations for the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Storm King Art Center. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and a number of private collections. He has been awarded grants from the Shifting Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, and is a Guggenheim Fellow. His work has appeared in ArtForum, Frieze, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Harpers, and the Village Voice. William Lamson was born Arlington, Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his MFA from Bard College, and he teaches in the Parsons MFA photography program and at the School of Visual Arts.

XP is the curatorial signature of Xavier Acarín and Park C. Myers.

Xavier Acarín works at the intersection of performance, architecture, object, and exhibition-making while considering art history, social issues, and the effects of globalization. His projects and programs have been presented at Chez Bushwick, Elastic City, The New School for Social Research, CCS-Hessel Museum, Peekskill Project 6, Java Projects, ESTE, Abrons Arts Center in New York, La Ira de Dios in Buenos Aires, MUU Kaapeli in Helsinki and LOOP Festival in Barcelona. His writings have been published at A-Desk, Culturas-La Vanguardia, Terremoto and BRAC (University of Barcelona). He has participated as author of the books Designing Experience (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Dear Helen (CCS Bard, 2014). Acarín holds an M.A. from the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Park C. Myers is a curator and writer from Houston, TX, formerly based in New York City and Brussels. Myers is currently The Royall Family Curator at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA. He studied Film and Video at the Maryland Institute College of Art and holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. He has curated exhibitions and projects at Actual Size LA, Komplot, Brussels, the Steamboat Springs Arts Council in Steamboat, CO, the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and the Copenhagen Art Festival, among many other institutions. Publications include The Cure, published by Komplot, and Dear Helen published by CCS Bard. He is a co-founder and contributing editor of aCCeSsions an online journal for exploration in interdisciplinary curatorial praxis. Myers current research directions involve cognitive science, psychology, exhibition design, and the interaction of these fields of study with contemporary art.

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Knockdown Center’s exhibitions are selected through a competitive open call for proposals. Through a multi-round process, exhibition proposals are reviewed by Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board and selected based on quality, distinctiveness, and response to Knockdown Center’s unique site and context within an ecosystem of live events.

Founded in 2015, the Knockdown Center’s Curatorial Advisory Board is currently comprised of seven sitting arts professionals with diverse but overlapping interests and fields of expertise. The Curatorial Advisory Board meets bi-annually to provide critical feedback on a wide range of proposals as well as contributing to discussions about larger programmatic goals. To learn more about proposing an exhibition or short-term project please visit our Proposals Page.

 

 

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