Sunday Service: Zavé Martohardjono Presents… Megan C. Barton, Salomé Egas, Aviva Jaye, and Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez

Join us for Sunday Service curated by Zavé Martohardjono entitled A Political Relief Party. This gathering and collectivity-oriented evening will include performances, participatory dance, and music with artists Megan C. Barton, Salomé Egas, Aviva Jaye, and Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez.

As those of us with the right to vote get ready to put pen to paper ballot, let’s come together for an evening of performance that asks: Who among us get politically represented? How do we divest, disentangle, decolonize — rather than re-invest in, re-appropriate, re-animate — the failed systems that got us here in the first place? Can we form democratic bodies in a nation-state that denies equity? What does voice and the body give us that legislatures cannot? Can we, tonight, form a temporary body that speaks to a collective freedom?

About the Curator

Zavé Martohardjono is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist interested in geopolitics, social justice, queer glam, and embodied healing. They co-curated Movement Research Fall Festival 2017: invisible material and have exhibited at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Asian Arts Initiative, Bronx River Art Center Gallery, Center for Art + Thought, Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Gallery 102 at George Washington University, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, SOMArts Gallery, Winslow Garage, and xart splitta in Berlin. They’ve performed at BAAD!, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, Issue Project Room, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Recess, Storm King Art Center, Wendy’s Subway, the Wild Project, and elsewhere. Zavé was in LMCC’s 2017-2018 Workspace Residency program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ BxMA Co-Lab Residency, Gibney Dance Work Up 3.0, Shandaken: Storm King, La MaMa, and Chez Bushwick. They co-organize the Potluck Project with artists of color and work at the ACLU to end mass incarceration. They received their B.A. from Brown University and their M.F.A. in Media Arts Production from the City College of New York.

About the Artists

Megan C. Barton is a psychotherapist and movement artist, who’s been dancing for 20 years, and currently trains in Dance and Movement Therapy at the 92nd street Y. Megan finds sustainment in unearthing kinesthetic memories, honest communication through movement, and using the intersections of the ancestral and the now to show up here, to move into what’s next.

Salomé Egas is an Ecuadorian actor, dancer, activist, and arts educator. She graduated from Skidmore College with honors in Dance and Theater, obtained a Master’s degree from NYU Gallatin, focusing her studies in International Education, Mythology, and Performing Arts and is an EmergeNYC 2018 fellow. Salomé’s works aim to combine her passion for the performing arts and social justice with the goal of helping her Latinx and many other international communities to heal from the pain and traumas created by uprootedness and immigration through applied dance and theater. She currently works as a teaching artist at Girl Be Heard and as the creative force behind the dance and theater F.U.N Collective (Fierce Untamed Niñas).

Aviva Jaye is a Brooklyn-based artist + performer who is dedicated to empathy + diversity primarily through music. Her interdisciplinary experience includes theatre, dance, composition +poetry. Aviva currently focuses on performative projects through the lens of community engagement, social justice + DIY resistance. Recent features include Queer Abstract, Brooklyn’s monthly performance series for QTPOC artists; “Four Questions”, a Pride production at LaMama; the Civic Salon series at The Public + the Spring 2018 Artist-In-Residence program at Guildhall in East Hampton.

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez is a Providence-based artist and educator. His performance and visual art works emerge from his experiences of being a transnational adoptee from Colombia growing up and living in the U.S. and have recently focused on questioning who or what gets to be (in) public, and the limits of empathy when working on problems of structural inequity. Lundberg Torres Sánchez’s work has appeared at the Queens Museum, Bowery Poetry Club, Silent Barn, the Morgan Library & Museum, RISD Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, PHI Centre, The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts as well as around the globe. Lundberg Torres Sánchez is a resident artist at AS220 in Providence, sits on the board of the Colombian American Cultural Society of Rhode Island, and is the recipient of NEA funding. [jointhebenjam.org / @benjofaman]

About Sunday Service

Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.

Becoming Otherwise

ALTER

PIE root al “beyond” suffix ter “other”  intransitive sense “ to become otherwise”

STATE

Sta- “to stand, make or be firm”

Julia Santoli’s Sunday Service, entitled Becoming Otherwise, explores unfixed territories and altered states featuring five artists whose work enacts and conjures transformative spaces of energetic exchange through inner/outer intentions, sculptural relations, and virtual play. Over the course of the evening, the artists will employ tools and tactics that rove through movement, task-based performance, sculpture, sound, and VR.

About the Curator

Julia Santoli is a multi-media artist and experimental musician. Creating immersive and precarious environments with voice, feedback, electronics, and installation, her work deals with intergenerational hauntings and reclamation through the body. She has presented solo and collaborative works at various sites such as Queens Museum, Drawing Center, ISSUE Project Room, New York Live Arts, Judson Memorial Church, LUMP, Widow Jane Mine cave, Panoply Performance Laboratory; as well as presented and taught workshops during a 5-month residency in Spinnerei, Leipzig, DE. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Issue Project Room, and a 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow.

About the Artists

Kaia Gilje is a movement artist, working improvisationally and with task based actions.  She has worked as a solo artist, a dancer for choreographers, and as a part of many groups and collectives including Panoply Performance Laboratory, Feminist Art Group, and Undoing and Doing.

Sarah Viviana Valdez is an artist previously based out of Sarasota, FL and recently moved to Brooklyn, NY. Her practice spans across different disciplines of visual arts, video, wearable technology, performance, and sound. Under the moniker i_like_dog_face, Valdez uses live performances combining sound and visuals to explore the malleability of environments, both spatially and on the level of human interaction (the audience-performer relationship). A primary focus as of late has been the use of digital processes in conjunction with microbial substance, under the loose guise of fashion. She has been working with unconventional materials that biodegrade in order to merge biology with technology. She received a B.F.A from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2010. Valdez has exhibited and performed artworks nationally and internationally at venues such as ICA Miami, Elastic Arts, Art in Odd Places Orlando, INDEX Festival, Casa Quien and John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

Jung Hee Mun is a multimedia video artist based in NYC. Mun earned her MFA from School of Visual Arts in NYC and BFA in printmaking installation from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Mun currently teaches at School of Visual Arts and BMCC. Mun’s work addresses the increasing tension between an idea of what it truly means to be “human”, if such a thing exists, and the contemporary technologies that threaten this notion under the guise of “enriching” it. Is it possible to be more in touch with ourselves, by means which actually take us further away from ourselves? Means which seemingly allow us ultimate control of ourselves, while technically rendering our control useless? Through this lens, With inherently performative aspects of  VR / AR technology, she investigates identity politics, relationships (internal and external), history, and the future – all classical thematics in an increasingly less-than-classical contemporary state. Mung has had solo exhibitions at the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art; group exhibitions at the McNay Museum of Art, BlueStar Contemporary Art Museum, School of Visual Arts, Women, Their Work in Texas and various venues in NYC including Microscope Gallery, Lesley Heller Workspace Gallery, Union City Museum. Her work is included in the collection of the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Raki Malhotra is an interdisciplinary artist from Toronto currently living in Brooklyn. Since 2013 her work has addressed ideas and topics related to self-psychology, pop culture, consumerism, location, and ‘issues of identity and social positioning’. Malhotra most often uses the performative process to deliver non-linear discourse and composition in the forms of live performance, social practice, installation, and video. She is currently completing her MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice at The City College of New York.

Kathie Halfin is an interdisciplinary and performance artist. She works in variety of mediums including performance, textile, sound, installation. Kathie was born in Ukraine and lived in Israel. She has an MFA from School Of Visual Arts in New York. Kathie exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, AIR Gallery, El Museo De Los Sures and NARS Foundation, The Clemente among others. She received fellowships and residencies at School Of Visual Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Bronx Museum AIM Program and Wassaic Project. Kathie’s work involves collaborative dialogical process and a research-based practice. Her work seeks to subvert and reimagine existing dysfunctional narratives and create a new visual language that spans in between speculation and fiction. In her performances Kathie seeks for the moments that break of the routines, anxieties, human-centric worlds and propose possibilities for the body to be an alien, mortal, organic shape shifter.

Jean Carla Rodea is an interdisciplinary artist with a research based practice. She is originally from Mexico City and currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She works across disciplines such as music, sound, performance, photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice is informed by memory, identity, immigration, ritual, performance, and improvisation. Rodea’s work questions critical socio-political issues such as: the politics of the body, gender, and the asymmetry of human relations. She has performed and shown work at Roulette, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Judson Church, Panoply Lab, Danspace Project, Center for Performance Research, Rio ll Gallery, The Clemente, El Museo de Los Sures, to mention a few. She received her MFA from City College’s DIAP where she received the First-Place Graduate M. F. A. Studio Award and two Connor Study Abroad Fellowships for archival research and studio practice in Mexico City. This past summer Rodea was a resident and education fellow at The Wassaic Project.

About Sunday Service

Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.

Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.

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Image by Kathy Halfin and Jean Carla Rodea “Matter in Flux” at Wassaic Project 2018, photo by Marisa Adesman