Sunday Service: Miguel Gutierrez Presents… Bryanna Bradley, Camilo Godoy, Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez, and xtian w

Miguel Gutierrez hosts the final Sunday Service of the season on December 9th, where invited artists Bryanna Bradley, Camilo Godoy, Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez, and xtian w will respond to ideas around ancestry.

Gutierrez offers the following prompt to the artists: “I have been thinking about “ancestry,” which I see as a kind of fascination for many artists, particularly trans and POC peeps. I’m wondering about how people are contending with the past to forge a future. Is this a tension for you or not? How do you think of the concept of ancestry? How do tethers to the past make space for the future for you?”

About the Curator

Miguel Gutierrez lives in Brooklyn, NY. He creates dance-based performances, music and poetry that focus on desire, identity and the search for meaning. His work has been presented in venues such as Centre National de Danse, Centre Pompidou, ImPulsTanz, Fringe Arts, Walker Art Center, TBA/PICA, MCA Chicago, New York Live Arts, Live Arts Bard, American Realness, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He has received support from Creative Capital, MAP, National Dance Project, and Jerome Foundation. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, New York Foundation for the Arts, Tides Foundation and an award from Foundation for Contemporary Art. He is a 2016 Doris Duke Artist and he has received four NY Dance and Performance Bessie Awards. He recently created a commission for Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, France. He runs LANDING, an educational initiative at Gibney and his book When You Rise Up is available from 53rd State Press. His upcoming piece, This Bridge Called My Ass, premieres in January 2019.

About the Artists

Bryanna Bradley is a Queens native and a body-based broad. In July 2016, Bradley participated in the Improv Traditions & Innovations Program at The School at Jacob’s Pillow under the tutelage of Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (Urban Bush Women). That same summer she was a Black Girl Spectrum (BGS) on Tour participant with award-winning choreographer Camille A. Brown. In May 2017, Bradley premiered her dance work buck:an exploration of black masculinity in Nick Cave’s exhibit ‘Unti’ at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the largest contemporary art museum in the U.S. Bradley made her theatrical debut in October 2017 as a guest actor and choreographer at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts(MCLA) Theatre production of Passing Strange. She has performed for other artists like choreographer Mersiha Mesihoivc/Circuit Debris, dream-pop band Arc Iris, and Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges. Bradley was a 2018 LANDING program participant at Gibney led by Miguel Gutierrez and spends her days laughing at her own sense of humor.

Camilo Godoy is an artist whose practice is concerned with the construction of political meanings and histories. His work engages with conceptual, photographic, and choreographic strategies to negotiate questions that confront the politics of citizenship, imperialism and sexuality. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia and is based in New York, United States. He is a graduate of The New School with a BFA from Parsons School of Design, 2012; and a BA from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, 2013. Godoy was recently a 2017 Artist-in-Residence, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP); and 2015-2017 Artist-in-Residence, Movement Research. His work has been presented in public space as a billboard in New York and at venues such as Instituto Cervantes, New York; La MaMa Galleria, New York; Donaufestival, Krems; and Mousonturm, Frankfurt; among others. Godoy is currently in Session at Recess and has a solo exhibition in February 2019 at CUE in New York.

Sun/moon Evelyn is a complicated happy child allowing herself to feel. They are grounded by healing, being messy, collaging, style & adornment, soil, salty & sweet waters, spirits, traditions, incense, story, vulnerability, rigor AND are currently being challenged by Abby Z and the New Utility, Jill Sigman, Miguel Gutierrez, Gibney, and the shadows of her past. Evelyn shows gratitude to the lineage of Warrior (womb)yn they come from by continuing to live in laughter (a privilege few get to practice).

xtian w is a non binary trans femme writer and performer. Their poems and essays appear in [PANK], No, Dear, VIDA, Bone Bouquet, Jaded Ibis, and Hematopoiesis Press, among others. Current creative—life interests include Medusa, hysteria, Trans sensorialities, weaving and braiding, coriander, ancestry, gut bacteria, ghazals, list poems, friendship beyond heteronormativity, boundaries, and houseplants. An Aquarius sun/ Capricorn moon/ Virgo rising, xtian is an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU and paints their nails in Brooklyn.

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.

Join Kid Fury and Crissle for a live taping of their weekly podcast covering hip-hop and pop culture’s most trying stars. Throwing shade and spilling tea with a flippant and humorous attitude, no star is safe from Fury and Crissle unless their name is Beyoncé. (Or Blue Ivy.)

As transplants to NYC, The Read also serves as an on-air therapy session for two friends trying to adjust to life and rats in the big city.

In conjunction with Werk It – the Women’s Podcast Festival. The annual Werk It festival from WNYC Studios is the podcasting industry’s only gathering dedicated to elevating women’s voices on both sides of the microphone. For registration to Werk It! (November 13-14, 2018) visit https://www.werkitfestival.com/

[Tickets to The Read Live! and Werk It! Festival are sold separately and do not gain access to the other]

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.

***

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

Phase Shift

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Recent findings in neuroscience challenge the prevailing notion of a centralized self persisting throughout one’s lifetime. Expanding upon Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, a seminal science fiction novel where Gethenian humanoids cycle between sexes through their lives, Phase Shift hopes to offer artists an opportunity to explore the shifting landscapes of their own identities. Much like the circu-lunar hormonal cycles in the human body, so too does our self-concept fluctuate and meander, moving in and out of moments of transformation without apotheosis.

From the enduring metaphor of the werewolf to the transformative powers of girls in shoujo anime, artists have long explored cyclicality of the subconscious self. Phase Shift provides a space for six artists, writers, and musicians to embrace the hidden or contradictory sides of themselves in order to realize previously unexplored terrains. By performing new personas or exploring methodologies outside or adjacent to their current art practice, performances offer a new lens into their interiority.

About the Curator
Pamela Liou is an artist and technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. Incorporating immersive technology, analog video circuits, and custom hardware, her work examines creative efficacy and ornamentation as tools for self-actualization and the negotiation of the self in spaces both physical and virtual. Liou was a keynote speaker at 2017’s Open Source Hardware Summit where she debuted her invention DOTI, a programmable desktop jacquard-style loom. She was a resident at Eyebeam, Museum of Arts and Design, and DBRS labs and recently performed live visuals for choreographer Jonathan Gonzalez’s piece Obeah at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival. She currently teaches creative technology at School for Poetic Computation and Parsons School of Design. She studied at the Dramatic Writing Department and Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts.

About the Artists
Devin Curry is an interdisciplinary artist, music producer, and DJ based in Brooklyn, NY. Curry hosted his solo art exhibition of “Working Rhythms” at REVERSE gallery, New York City, in 2016; this installation consisted of an interactive music sculpture, multi-channel audio, accompanied by a series of the artist’s ink drawings and digital prints. He has also presented his work at the Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), NYC Media Lab Summit, and IAC Building (NYC) and received press from outlets such as Forbes.com, Make Magazine, Greenpointers, and Synthtopia. Under the recording alias Grand Atrium, Curry has released electronic music on labels Maison Kitsuné and Secretly Canadian and received press from Nylon and numerous music blogs. He has partnered with composer Brett Parnell to create the score for the Shaker Museum’s audio tour app, The Water & The Word. Curry received his Master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and his BA in Cinematic Arts Production from the University of Southern California. He has served on the faculty of Fordham University’s Communication and Media Studies program and Queens College’s School of Art & Design, and currently works in multimedia education at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Originally hailing from Los Angeles, Kristen Garris is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and video editor. She has created video content for companies such as Google, Vogue, Nylon Magazine, Vice Media, and Style.com that have garnered over 2,000,000+ views collectively worldwide. She also writes and directs narrative short films and edits branded commercial content. She holds a B.F.A in Film and TV Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and recently graduated from Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema with an MFA in Film Directing.

Fei Liu 刘斐 is a New York-based Chinese designer, artist, writer, and DJ exploring digital intimacy and the narrative potential of interfaces. She is an adjunct professor at Parsons MFA Design and Technology and previously a Researcher in Residence at NEW INC, and a Digital Solitude fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She has mid-to-average combined student debt from an undergraduate as well as a master’s degree, with no health insurance, car, or house.

Katrina Reid is a performing artist based in Queens, NY. She’s had the pleasure to collaborate and perform in works by David Thomson, Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Jonathan Gonzalez, Third Rail Projects, and Megan Byrne. A 2016-17 Dancing While Black Fellow, her own work has been presented as part of AUNTS, the Current Sessions, Gibney Dance Double Plus series, Cocoon Theatre, Studio 26 Gallery, and BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

Hellyn Teng is a musician, wearable technologist, and a Co-Founder and Creative Director at the fashion technology design studio, Wearable Media. She is a graduate from NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and currently a Member at NEW INC, the New Museum’s Cultural Incubator, supporting projects at the intersections of art, design, and technology. Her work explores ways we can engage with sound as an interactive media and through computational fashion technology. Her music projects are inspired by industrial soundscapes, discordant spaces, and metaphysical experiences, performed with analog and digital synthesis. The music is driven by ambient industrial sounds, layered with heavy melodic synths, and cavernous electronic drum patterns. Influenced by early 80s industrial and post punk music movements. She recently performed at the Basilica 24 Hour Drone festival under her solo project, The Less Effectives.

Madeline Wilcox was raised in flagstaff, arizona before relocating to brooklyn in 2011. she has identified as a dancer since the age of 9, and has spent her professional career consciously and subconsciously questioning her relationship to dance, to live performance, and to the assumed hierarchy of a director-performer dynamic. she is interested in living inside the role of director for the first time in an effort to expand her viewpoint, personally navigate her own uncharted performance mediums, and unpack past experiences. she is in her first year at hunter college working towards a masters in social work. she thanks the incomparable Pamela Liou for trusting her.

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.

My Last American Dollar: Round 1. Tricking and Flipping Coins: Making Dollars Hit, Round 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat, Round 3. Whatchu Gonna Do: Marvelous like Marva
A performance by Keijaun Thomas

Free with RSVP
RSVP for Thursday, September 13 HERE
RSVP for Friday, September 14 HERE

Knockdown Center and Franklin Furnace are pleased to present the world premiere of My Last American Dollar: Round 1. Tricking and Flipping Coins: Making Dollars Hit; Round 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat; Round 3. Whatchu Gonna Do: Marvelous like Marva, a performance by artist Keijaun Thomas.

In this immersive solo work, Thomas interrogates and embodies resistance, asking: “How do we resist temptation, how do we slow down, how do we play, how do we survive?” Thomas traverses a multimedia installation that extends across Knockdown Center’s expansive main space, combining structural fragments of environments associated with labor, ritual, and hospitality such as locker rooms, strip clubs, waiting rooms, church pews, and field days. Investigating forms through which black and brown people hold space for each other, Thomas demonstrates how to carry the multiplicities of being young, gifted, and black.

Powerfully engaging with the entangled histories of labor, subjugation, and resistance, Thomas emphasizes the ways in which carrying multiplicities is complicated. In a passage from Round 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat, she states:

“It is complicated. it is blurry. it is rooted and unrooted in my peoples history. my people being black people. it is difficult and hard, it is attached to my spine, it is connected to the middle passage of the Atlantic slave trade, it is in my blood, it is in the color of my shit in the toilet bowel, it is in the smell of my ancestors shit for weeks on end decaying, decaying on their chained bodies. it is crystal clear. it is as blue as water, it is as heavy as 1,000 black bodies being dumped into the ocean. it is dark. it is so peculiar. it is only felt as phantom pains, missing links, pedestals of display. it is the value of the auction block, it is the price of your coffee beans, your sugar and your tea leaves. your coffee beans, your sugar and your tea leaves. it is unforgiven and not speakable. it is unbelievable and thinkable. it is high yellow, red bone, caramel, chocolate. it is so black, it is blue. it is so black, it is blue. it is so fucking queer, it is so clear, it is so queer, it is detached and left for the faggots that can never be black men. it is detached and left for the faggots that can never be black men. it is fragile, it is as soft as cotton and hair weaves. as cotton and hair weaves. it is an open as the wounds on a slaves back. my ancestors backs. it is everything that i have ever known and resisted. it is everything that I have ever known and resisted. it is every piece of fabric and different colored paper with numerical value. it is the palms of my hands, my fathers hands, my brothers hands, my mothers hands, my sisters hands, my aunties hands, my cousins hands, my children’s hands. it is… complicated.”

Artist Bio
Keijaun Thomas is a New York based artist and current Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient for 2018. Thomas creates live performances and multimedia installations— her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within Black personhood. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has presented work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles and Palo, Alto, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Steuben, WI; Boston and Cambridge, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation, The SHS Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

ITINERANT Performance Art Festival NYC Closing Event featuring artists: Concha Vidal, Carl Lawrence, Angeli, and Steven Pestana.

As a part of
ITINERANT Performance Art Festival NYC
May 17 – 25, 2018

Knockdown Center hosts the final performance event of ITINERANT Performance Art Festival NYC, an annual festival that invites the public to a week of Live Action Art in the five boroughs across New York City with performances by international artists Concha Vidal (Spain), Carl Lawrence (United States), Angeli (United States), and Steven Pestana (Colombia / United States).

The five-borough festival will take place from Thursday, May 17th to Friday, May 25th, 2018. This year’s program focuses on works that explore, treat, and propose new alternatives to binary constructions regarding gender, nationality, identity, religion and/or ideological structures. Departing from the current socio-politico-economic transformations around the globe, and the questioning of habitual norms about race, gender, sexuality, and origin, ITINERANT 2018 features performance art works by local, national and international artists coming from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America.

ITINERANT 2018 kicks off its 8th edition with the exhibition “Entanglements” on Thursday, May 17th, at the artist-run space EOArts in Bushwick, and opens its performance program on Friday, May 18th at Last Frontier NYC in Greenpoint. The week-long festival dedicated to Performance Art will be hosted by the following institutions: QUEENS MUSEUM (Saturday, May 19th), STATEN ISLAND ARTS (Sunday, May 20th), BRONX ACADEMY OF ARTS AND DANCE, BAAD (Tuesday, May 22nd), SMACK MELLON in Brooklyn (Wednesday, May 23rd, and BMCC Tribeca in Manhattan (May 24th). In addition, the festival hill host the artists symposium “Bodies that Matter” at La Guardia Community College in Long Island City (May 20th), and public Interventions at the historical Flushing Meadows Corona Park inQueens (Saturday, May 19th).

About the artists:

Concha Vidal (Spain) has a degree in Psychology and a doctorate in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. She now works as a performer and video artist after a long career as a painter and an art residence at University and Cooper Union and SVA (NYC). She has been performing in Switzerland, Croatia, Spain and NYC. Her performances are an interdisciplinary confluence of theatre, dance and video art. With a very personal language, Concha weaves a new iconography in her poetic actions while recovering the spirit of the 60´s. Retaking the theme of woman, body and landscape from a fresh perspective, a view sometimes uncomfortable. Among her notable performances are: 2013: “Unconventional you“ Macceleria D’arte Gallery.Sant Gallen.Switzerland; 2014: “The last dance” Festival Palma amb la dansa. Palma de Mallorca .Spain; “Strange fruit” Festival Dansa Novembre. Es Baluard. Palma de Mallorca. Spain. “The last dance”.Galeria Xavier Fiol. Palma Brunch; 2015: Performance “The weight of my blood”.Verchio. Switzerland; “The last dance”at Dance Week Festival. Zagreb, Croatia Performance “Sun on set” en col.laboració amb el Museu es Baluard; 2016: “Stormy Red” a Festival Inundart .Girona. Catalunya; “The weight of my blood” Territori Festival, Teatro Sociale. Bellinzona. Suïssa; “I.O.D(Internet Obsessive Disorder)”.Festival Teatro Fira B. Mallorca. Baleares; 2017 Performance “Sur de sal”.Teatre Principal. I.O.D Teatre Sa Màniga.Cala Millor.Mallorca; Trasatlántico Festival. with “Stormy Red”Uruguay and Argentina. Insolit Festival with 1 Michellin star Chef Andreu Genestra. Mallorca .Spain. 2018Art Hybrid Festival with “Wet”.Madrid.Spain.

Carl Lawrence (United States) is a Seattle-based artist and director whose work oscillates between performance, installation, and visual art. His work has been seen most notably with Seattle-based experimental theatre company Modern Recollections with whom he has presented work locally and nationally at venues such as The Watermill Center, On The Boards, Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA), Olson Kundig, Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival XIV, festival:festival 2017, and Next Fest NW 2014. Lawrence’s work has garnered the attention of internationally-acclaimed artist Robert Wilson who invited him to present an installation at the Watermill Center in 2014 for his gala “Devil’s Heaven,” which received accolades from Bill Cunningham and the New York Times, Marina Abramovic, Lady Gaga, and Jacques Reynaud. His work has also been praised locally in publications such as City Arts Magazine, Vanguard Seattle, Seattle Dances, and The Stranger. He is currently developing a new play entitled “aaaa” that will premiere at Base: Experimental Arts + Space in November 2018 in Seattle, WA.

Angeli (United States) is an artist whose performance works access the body as thinking form, connect to psychic currents, and move with other nonhuman forces. Her practice attends to embodied transformation and moves toward the more than human. Her work has been performed in New York, Portland, Marfa and NW Arkansas, often researching place as a framework to shape memory. She received a MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University ’12 and a BFA from Parsons ’11 in a self-directed program formed at the edges of fields and positioned to create new systems. As a performance artist, she is writing the fiction of her persona as a processual rehearsal of another way of thinking-recognizing.

Steven Pestana (Colombia / United States) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his BA in Art History from New York University and his MFA in Digital Media from Rhode Island School of Design. He has participated in numerous solo and group shows and previously exhibited at Spring/Break Art Show, Satellite Art Show, BRIC, Momenta, Invisible Exports, Grin Providence, Rhode Island College, and Boston Center for the Arts. He was the recipient of a 2015 Puffin Foundation Grant for Fine Arts, a 2018 Scholarship from Urbanglass, and has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Mass MoCA, Santa Fe Art Institute, Catwalk, and CalArt’s inaugural Summer Residency. His work has also appeared in publications such as Hyperallergic, Artsy.net, and The Boston Globe. When not making art, Steven Pestana indulges his love of writing as a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail. Pestana performs with Sophia Sobers.

About the Festival:
ITINERANT was created in 2010 by interdisciplinary artist Hector Canonge. The initiative was a small platform for Contemporary Performance Art, and had its origins in the monthly series A-Lab Forum that Canonge organized at Crossing Art Gallery in Flushing, Queens. Following the growing interest in Live Art, and the need to present performance programs in the borough, ITINERANT was launched in 2011 under the auspices of QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development. In 2012, ITINERANT was recognized by the City of New York as the first Performance Art festival taking place in the five boroughs that make the metropolitan region: Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island. In 2013, following the large scale venture in NYC, Canonge journeyed through Latin America creating the Spanish edition of the festival and calling it Encuentro ITINERANTe with public presentations in various cities in the Southern Hemisphere. In 2015, Canonge brought back the festival to New York City with a program that included the participation of 30 artists from over ten countries with presentations at the Queens Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Momenta Art, Glasshouse ArtLifeLab, and with an opening and closing event at The Atrium of PS 69 in Jackson Heights. As an important characteristic of the festival, Public Interventions took place at 37th Rd. Pedestrian Plaza, and at Manuel de Dios Unanue Triangle Plaza, Roosevelt Avenue and 83rd Street in Queens. The latest edition of the festival took place in 2017 with the participation of local, national and international artists whose works were featured at the Queens Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the performance art venues: The Last Frontier, Grace Exhibition Space, and Panoply Performance Laboratory. The festival’s closing event was marked by public performances at the historical landmark of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, site of the 1939 and 1969 World’s Fairs.