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
Join us this spring for Sunday Service, a free monthly series of live work across mediums. This season’s curators include: Sarah Zapata, ray ferreira, Yanira Castro, and Shawné Michaelain Holloway.
Sunday Service Spring 2019 Schedule:
March 10, 7pm: Curated by Sarah Zapata
April 14, 7pm: Curated by ray ferreira
May 5, 7pm: Curated by Yanira Castro
June 2, 7pm: Curated by Shawné Michaelain Holloway
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 exploration of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.
About the Curators
Sarah Zapata makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Making work with meditative, mechanical means, her current work deals with the multiple facets of her complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as an evangelical Christian, a first generation American of Latin American descent, a contemporary artist inspired by ancient civilizations, an artist challenging the history of craft as “women’s work” within the realm of art. Zapata’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum (NY), El Museo del Barrio (NY), Museum of Art and Design (NY), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Boston University (MA), LAXART (CA), Deli Gallery (NY), Arsenal Contemporary (NY), and Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center (NY). Zapata has also completed recent residencies at MASS MoCA (MA), A-Z West (CA), and Wave Hill (NY), and is the recent recipient of an NFA Project Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. Zapata was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2016.
rayferreira w h e n a m i blaqlatinx from occupied Lenape lands called New York, N Y: the illegitimate EEUU. An o the r Corona, Queens a spacetimemattering a materialdiscusive (dis) continuity: [the Caribbean, the Greater Antilles, Hispañola, the Dominican Republic —> Corona, Queens] : history.
w h e n a m i a performer of sorts aka multidisciplinary artist aka polymath. She stays playin : the dance between materiality<->language through her body w h e n a m i where histories are made and remade. She plays with iridescence, text, rhythms (aka systems), to cruise a quantum poetics. Englishes, Spanishes, and other body languages spiral, dance, and twirl to create a banj criticality: that turnup w/the grls; that swerve past white cishet patriarchy. wh e n ami
Puerto Rican choreographer Yanira Castro is a Bessie-award-winning artist. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi. Castro’s work borrows from dance, performance, and visual art often utilizing interactive technology to form hybrid works. With her collaborators she has developed over ten projects for the stage, gallery and non-traditional sites ranging from video installations, performances and text-based computer games. The work was been presented most recently in NYC at The Chocolate Factory, The Invisible Dog, Abrons, and Danspace Project. Currently, she is a 2018/19 New York Live Arts’ Live Feed Artist, 2018 Yaddo Fellow and Marble House Project Artist-in-Residence. She has received various awards including NYFA’s Choreography Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project, and a 2019 NYSCA Theater Commission
Shawné Michaelain Holloway s a new media artist using sound, video, and performance to shape the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC, NY), Sorbus Galleria (Helsinki, Fi), The Kitchen (NYC, NY) Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, UK), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL). Currently, Holloway teaches in the New Arts Journalism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson. Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her work, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations through her multiple practices. Alexis Wilkinson is the Director of Exhibitions and Live Art at Knockdown Center.
Better Pleasures
“The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
For the opening event of the Spring 2019 season, Sarah Zapata brings together four artists who explore identity and geopolitical space, to present an imagined future through the understanding of one’s own position. It is through the examination of past and place that helps transport the ideals of the future to decay current tribulations. We strive for a better society, deeper intimacy, greater understanding, and ultimately a new world.
About the Curator
Sarah Zapata makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Making work with meditative, mechanical means, her current work deals with the multiple facets of her complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as an evangelical Christian, a first generation American of Latin American descent, a contemporary artist inspired by ancient civilizations, an artist challenging the history of craft as “women’s work” within the realm of art. Zapata’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum (NY), El Museo del Barrio (NY), Museum of Art and Design (NY), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Boston University (MA), LAXART (CA), Deli Gallery (NY), Arsenal Contemporary (NY), and Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center (NY). Zapata has also completed recent residencies at MASS MoCA (MA), A-Z West (CA), and Wave Hill (NY), and is the recent recipient of an NFA Project Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. Zapata was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2016.
About the Artists
Ignacio Torres was born in the US/Mexico border in El Paso, Texas and received a B.F.A. magna cum laude from the University of North Texas. Currently, Torres lives and works in New York City and is known for his cyanotype portraiture of Latinxs, which have a distinctly cyan blue color. Torres attributes his practice to his border upbringing and the Chicano culture he grew up in. His work involves the use of alternative photographic processes that require extensive manual work. The principal concern of his work investigates identity, othering, migration and the physical or invisible borders that we vacillate between. Torres’s use of botany serves as a symbol to the threat of plant life created by man made borders and references the historical use the cyanotype process. His work was recently exhibited as part of a group show held by JW Anderson in London.
Athena Torri is an Ecuadorian Italian artist. Born in Milan, Torri grew up in Quito, Ecuador before immigrating to the United States. Torri has a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design, and a General Studies Certificate from the International Center of Photography. Her solo show, titled “Land of Opportunities”, was exhibited at Deli Gallery in New York. Conveyor Editions in New Jersey published Torri’s first monograph, The Outsider. Torri’s group shows include exhibitions at the International Center of Photography Triennial in New York, Material Art Fair in Mexico City, Re: Art Show 21 in Brooklyn, NY, Serpentine Galleries in London, and Stitching Electron in the Netherlands.
Leslie Martinez is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised between The Rio Grande Valley of the Texas-Mexican border and Dallas, Texas. They received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 2018 and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City in 2008. In the decade between, they worked as a full-time graphic designer in New York City’s apparel industry where computer-aided design and garment construction profoundly transformed their image/object construction methodology paving the way for a radically transformed approach to painting. Martinez is currently developing these emerging forms as an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. Recent group shows include Independence at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, Texas, Heads/Tails at Next to Nothing Gallery in New York City, Way Out Now at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, California, Kaleidoscope at Kravetz | Wehby Gallery in New York City, and Life and Living presented by Deli Gallery at Hudson Valley LGBTQ Center in Kingston, NY.
María Fernanda (Chamorro) is an early-career poet whose poems and translations appear in The Wide Shore, Kweli Journal, Pa’lante a la luz, and elsewhere. A recipient of Callaloo, CantoMundo, and VONA/Voices fellowships, María Fernanda featured her work at The Brooklyn Museum, MoMaPS1, The Ecuadorian American Cultural Center, The New York Aquarium, and more. She is also a founder of Candela Writers Workshop, a literary arts organization offering programming designed to support Black-Latinx poets through the preservation and the advancement of Black-Latinx literary work. Candela launches in Spring 2019. María Fernanda is a Black Ecuadorian American and Washington, D.C. native.
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.
A night of celebrating diversity in the Muslim diaspora presented by Mipsterz, a non-profit initiative carving out positive creative spaces for Muslim Americans and other marginalized groups. Featuring performances from Zakarya Masmoudi, Fajjr + Ali, Zainab Mabizari, Sara Alfageeh, MIRUD, Chic Nunar, Fatima Farheen Mirza, Adam Maalouf, Humeysha, DJ AyesCold and visuals by Tingerine.
Schedule:
6:00 pm Doors
6:30 pm NYC Mipsterz Showcase, emceed by Abbas Rattani
7:45 pm Adam Maalouf
8:15 pm Humeysha
9:30 pm DJ AyesCold
Also featuring brand new original Mipsterz artwork and copies of Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us for sale, with refreshments from Kolkata Chai Co, Abu’s Homestyle Bakery, Taste of Lahore, and Allan’s Bakery.
Mipsterz is also proud to support the #SWABFORLINA Be The Match campaign, a nationwide effort to find the right stem cell donor for Liyna Anwar, currently battling leukemia. With 20 million potential donors, people of color are often underrepresented in potential matches.
About the Artists
Humeysha
Written and conceived in India by Zain Alam, Humeysha channels diverse influences, echoing sounds from New York to New Delhi. The multilingual self-titled debut evokes a wayfarer’s meditative travels through heritage and homeland. “Zain Alam is primarily a musician, but his work draws from a range of influences, from My Bloody Valentine, to the cinematic extravagance of Bollywood, to the gyrating percussions of Qawwali, a genre of devotional Sufi music known for its rhythm and lyricism. The result is a refined family of sounds that braids South Asian soundscapes into a distinctive flavor of spacious psych-pop, all built atop archival recordings that Alam collected on multiple trips he took to India and Pakistan.” – Pacific Standard
DJ AyesCold
Ayesha is a DJ, music producer, and former talent booker at U Street Music Hall, Washington DC. She recently relocated to New York to work with sample labels at Splice. Under the name ‘DJ Ayes Cold’ Ayesha has performed across the country, spinning at festivals like Bonnaroo and SXSW, and playing rooms featuring a wide range of talent like Blood Orange, Goldlink, Princess Nokia, Kingdom, Joekay, Shabazz Palaces, Gaslamp Killer, Tokimonsta, Venus X, Mike Q, Jayhood, Dave Nada, Madame Gandhi, and more. Ayesha is a vocal advocate for the representation of women and other musical minorities in the music industry, and more recently – in the world of sound design.
Adam Maalouf
Adam Maalouf’s music is found where the modern meets the ancient, where the Pantam (or handpan) meets ancient and traditional styles of music from around the globe brought together using both organic and electronic drums, beats and synthesizers. Pan-tam is the name of the “flying saucer” instrument invented in the year 2000, and the word stems from the combination of the Pan from Trinidad, and the Ghatam (clay pot drum) from South India. Adam’s unique musical style comes to life in genre-bending compositions for solo and ensembles incorporating global musicians.
About Mipsterz
Mipsterz is an arts and culture collective curating, enabling, and amplifying creators of marginalized backgrounds through illustration, film, and music.
On one hand, Mipsterz is a home for creators to build, collaborate, or experiment with diverse folks who share a common connection to a larger tradition. We actively provide mentorship, resources, and a platform to enable ideas and expression. On the other hand, Mipsterz content is for everyone. It is the collective representation and avenue through which our creativity is amplified in broader, diverse spaces. We have worked with everyone from the popular media, academia to museums and art spaces to bring our multi-dimensional third-culture inspired voices and stories to the forefront.
It can be the similarities between two people that draw them together, but it’s the differences between them that create something special. It would be nothing if those two polar opposites failed to meet in the middle. Such is the story of Pan-Pot.
Tassilo and Thomas met at Berlin’s renowned School of Audio Engineering, better known as the SAE Institute, and were drawn together as they were the only two in their studies who had their sights set on the sound of techno. Their initial musical efforts placed a primacy on integrating electronic experimentation with minimal stylings while simultaneously establishing the ominous, murky sounds that have since become synonymous with their name.
The defining moment of Pan-Pot’s career came in 2007 with the release of their debut artist album, Pan-O-Rama. The aptly named long player offered a 360-degree view of techno that was unique, uncompromised and most importantly, their own. The body of work perfectly balanced heavy, peak time club stormers to deeper, more intricate atmospherics and birthed the overground hit “Charly”. More recently “Confronted” and “Captain My Captain” have demonstrated their classic, bold and timeless production style, presenting them as the producers at the top of their game, both sonically and conceptually.
Pan-Pot haven’t gotten to where they are on their previous accolades alone, the duo have lent their craft recently in the form of a second album „The Other“ and high profile remixes for the likes of the legendary Carl Cox, Slam, Paul Kalkbrenner and the renowned Stephan Bodzin, all while touting a ferocious touring schedule appearing regularly at the best clubs and largest festivals in the world like Time Warp, Awakenings, Glastonbury, Kappa Future and Tomorrowland to name a few. The relentless touring is how they have truly gotten to where they are: by touching the writhing, euphoric, dancing seas of bodies at countless gigs every year. Not only do they have an electric vibe to watch, but their grasp and keen understanding of each and every dance floor is unparalleled. Whether it’s an intimate club night or a massive festival, Pan-Pot know exactly what to do. Unconstrained by boundaries, they traverse Techno, House and everything in between with a masters touch.
Although their name comes from a basic element of studio equipment, they have rewritten notions of form and function through their own idiosyncratic language and are now stepping completely into a new world since the launch of their own imprint, Second State in 2014. Over the last years, Second State has not only become a platform for Pan-Pot to release their own music, but a creative outlet derived from a family of like minded artists around them to inspire, imagine and travel the world with, spreading the Second State vision and catapulting new names into the spotlight like Amelie Lens, Stephan Hinz and Micheal Klein. It’s a place where all ideas can flow seamlessly, from music and events to art and fashion.
With no letting up in sight Tassilo Ippenberger and Thomas Benedix have proven that there are no limits to what can be achieved or dreamed. Now is the time Pan- Pot are truly coming into their own. Not only as world class artists and performers, but as tastemakers and masters of their own destiny.
Knockdown Center is pleased to present “27 Undoctored Photos of Betsy DeVos’ Radioactive Gingerbread Learnin’ Supercenter That Prove Camera Angle Is Everything. You Might Also Like: Transforming That Pesky White Guilt Into The Perfect Paleo Deviled Eggs, If You’re Into That Kind of Thing (Extruded Detail),” a new large-scale work by artist Morgan Blair as a part of our FiftyTwo Ft. series of long-term wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.
Blair’s painting process begins online, where she collects and collages together stills from children’s claymation projects on Youtube. Seeking crudely assembled approximations of reality, she further manipulates this visual material towards and away from abstraction, making new iterations from morphed and flattened blobs of colored clay. Ultimately these compositions are transferred onto wall and canvas where the shapes are filled with hard-edged airbrushed gradients and three-dimensional texture that further obscure the subject matter. Clashing, saturated colors root the paintings in an alternate reality while rambling, stream-of-consciousness titles combine personal, political, and pop culture references suggest new contexts for the final images.
Morgan Blair is an artist based in Ridgewood, Queens. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She has shown her work at The Hole (New York), Paul Kasmin Gallery (New York), Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago), Left Field (San Luis Obispo), Eighteen (Copenhagen), and the Newcomb Art Museum (New Orleans) and others. Blair has also painted large-scale murals at venues such as the Facebook offices in New York, Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Ma, Swanson Road Intermediate School in Auburn, MA, and Rudy’s Barbershop in Los Angeles. She also started Puzzle Time, an ongoing series of limited edition, hand-cut wooden jigsaw puzzles featuring the work of select contemporary artists.
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.
Kollektiv Turmstrasse (Diynamic Music / Musik Gewinnt Freunde / Germany)
Öona Dahl (All Day I Dream / Hallucienda / New York / Germany)
Daniel Cowel (Zero / New York)
*** TICKETS ON SALE NOW: https://ktkdc.eventbrite.com/ ***
About the Artists
There are few artists operating in the house/techno milieu who offer much beyond functionality in their music. Those who bring more than this to the table always stand out from the crowd. Hamburg/Berlin duo Kollektiv Turmstrasse (Christian Hilscher and Nico Plagemann) are one of those rare acts whose music caters for both body and soul.
Their cinematic take on 4/4 electronica has won praise from all quarters via releases on Diynamic, Connaisseur and their own Musik Gewinnt Freunde imprint. Debut album Rebellion der Träumer (‘The Dreamer’s Rebellion’) demonstrated a prowess beyond the realms of the dancefloor, laden with frosty electronic melody, downtempo rhythm and classy vocals. A busy remix schedule has seen them grace the likes of Cocoon, Get Physical, Soma, Poker Flat, Defected, Systematic and Traum, reworking multifarious acts including Trentemøller, Hot Chip and Terry Lee Brown Jnr. along the way.
Their sense of emotion – informed by their upbringing on Germany’s visually arresting Baltic Sea coast – lends their productions a human warmth, allowing them to slot effortlessly into both club and home listening scenarios. “Wide; open; top-heavy; all-consuming; shifted; simple; these are the words we use to describe our sound. We use both digital and analog. First and foremost we produce music for ourselves. We don‘t predetermine whether it’s suited for home or club environment.” This lack of contrition serves them well. Electronic music is an art for them; not a science.
Watching their live show reveals how their music connects with crowds on an emotional level, and how its melodic and textural depth works in such synergy with its rhythmic backbone. “We play live with two MacBooks running Ableton Live with over a thousand clips, which gives us a lot of space to improvise. The whole thing is controlled with one iPad each which allows us to work very fast and intuitively.”
Their show has been finding them in high demand across the globe, and has helped them to strengthen their relationship with Solomun’s Diynamic label – playing at their international parties while releasing music with them on a regular basis. “They have been friends of ours for over ten years” says Solomun. “It was a mere matter of time for them to join in. Mutual friends, interests and in general a similar perception of music and life brought us together.” While the label’s sound has evolved in recent years, there has always been a place for Kollektiv Turmstrasse within their fabric. “One thing that we all have in common is a certain melancholy and harmony in our productions.” For a duo who don’t like to be pigeonholed, it’s a perfect fit.
“The journey has alway been more important to us than the reward” Christian and Nico say on their future with music. “There is a lot to discover along the way and it might just be that the detour is the more scenic route to the next goal.” With such an organic pulse running through their productions, it should come as no surprise that they hope their career progresses in similarly unforced fashion.
Öona Dahl’s home is found beyond the conscious state, transforming dance floors into spaces wreathed in sound. With an open mind and a vast range of music knowledge, she knows how to connect on another level when playing her music to the crowd. Testing traditional musical limits with extended mixes, isochronic tones and melodies, Öona’s breadth of skill behind the decks is hard to match. A graduate of The International Academy of Design and Technology for Digital Media and Recording Arts. Her original production spans broad dance floor territory, from Techno, Deep House to Experimental Electronica. Finding the balance between light and dark with both her solo work and as Slumber has kept her inspired and able to express both arrays of emotions through her sound.
A true perfectionist, Daniel Cowel has traveled the world in search of the deepest roots of music and matched his geographical education with a deep study of the nature of the art, which is reflected in the breadth and integrity of his sets. An extremely humble and gracious human being, Daniel Cowel has built an international name for himself with his ZERO residency opening sets, carefully warming rooms and crafting slow boiling vibes, each set individually handled with delicate care and respect for whoever comes next. Yet, when his moments to shine arrive, Daniel Cowel delivers, giving us some incredible memories.