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Mar 20

Three Years of Dévotion

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Dévotion returns to Knockdown Center to celebrate their three-year anniversary. This immersive dance party features Dévotion residents Ostro and Nocholas Maddix, as well as the U.S. debut of Chilean-born and Swiss-based DJ Mayasa.
Featuring: 
– Professionally tuned Four-point Funktion One sound by One Source Audio
– Crowd centered booth for 360 degrees of dance floor excellence
– Custom fabricated reactive laser installation
– Large outdoor patio & “greenroom” accessible directly off dance floor
++ more surprises and announcements

21+ w/ ID

Reminders from Dévotion: This is not your ordinary gathering of conscious bodies, we encourage everyone to connect, be present and most importantly express yourself creatively & comfortably. We are a community with an ethos founded with a passion for mindfulness and connectivity. If we’ve had the pleasure of your presence in the past, then you know words fail to capture the moments and memories that make these gatherings such a wild success. If you’re here for the first time, welcome to our collective of compassionate creators & dreamers – don’t hesitate to reach out to anyone in the community if you need help or have any concerns.

Mar 19

Open Call: Exhibitions and Artist Projects

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We are currently seeking proposals for exhibitions, short-term projects, and events! We’ve rolled out a fresh proposal process, which you can find here. Review the guidelines for open calls for gallery exhibitions and projects in our main spaces, and apply by April 15th! We are also seeking proposals on a rolling basis for Open Capacity – our new space support program for artists and organizers.

Take a look at our proposal page for full details and guidelines.

Submit your proposal here.

About Knockdown Center’s Open Call for Proposals

The goal of Knockdown Center’s proposal process is to be responsive to the needs of cultural producers making experimental and cross-disciplinary work, and to provide a platform for in-depth inquiry from varying viewpoints across diverse formats. Through an open proposal process, we offer artists, curators, and organizers the freedom to challenge traditional notions of presentation and reception.

 

Mar 05

Sunday Service: Rena Anakwe presents

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In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.

EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
(Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”, chapter 14)

Join us on April 8th for an evening of live art and sound curated by Rena Anakwe. Anakwe is interested in the ways in which people manifest their healing. This quote from Octavia Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ speaks of an event of destruction that must first occur before healing and resilience begins in our own lives. We all have our own life experiences, ancestral and present, that form our current healing practices in all forms. While the world spins out around us, the ways in which we ground ourselves, tell our stories and survive are what reconnect us to our humanity and the humanity of others. This Sunday Service offers a glimpse into the ways that five artists evoke their own healing and discovery through various forms of media, storytelling and ritual.

About the Curator

Rena Anakwe is an interdisciplinary artist and performer, working primarily with sound, visuals, and scent. Exploring intersections between traditional healing practices, spirituality and performance she creates works focused on sensory-based, experiential interactions using technology. A member of the artistic collective NON Worldwide, she is based in Brooklyn, New York by way of Nigeria and Canada.

About the Artists

Sharon De La Cruz
Sharon Lee De La Cruz is an artist and activist from New York City. She earned a BFA from The Cooper Union, is a Fulbright scholar, and obtained her Masters at NYU’s ITP program (Interactive Telecommunications Program). Sharon’s work ranges from comics, to STEM education, to interactive sculptures. She works at the intersection of tech, art, and social justice. She currently lives in New Jersey and is the Assistant Director of The StudioLab, a creative tech lab, at Princeton University.

Johann Diedrick
Johann Diedrick makes installations, performances, and objects that let people play with sound. He shares his work through workshops, listening tours, and open-source software and hardware. He is a recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Fellows grant and has been featured in Wire Magazine and Musicworks Magazine. He has exhibited internationally in numerous group exhibitions, conferences and festivals, including the Soundscapes symposium at Yale University, the NIME conference in Daejeon and Seoul, Korea, and the Invisible Places conference in Viseu, Portugal. He studied at the ITP program at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU focusing on sound art. He was a researcher at the InterLab at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Yamaguchi, Japan and worked as an interactive software developer at Qosmo in Tokyo, Japan. He is currently a senior developer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Delphine Fawundu
Adama Delphine Fawundu is photo-based visual artist and activist born in Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder and author of the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. Ms. Fawundu is a New York Foundation of the Arts Photography Fellow.

Her multimedia fine art work uses photography, video and sculpture to interrogate identity with the African African Diaspora.

Her extensive New York City 90’s hip-hop archive includes photographs of artists such as Nas, The Notorious BIG, Big Daddy Kane, Jay Z, Lil’Wayne and Mobb Deep. Since 2008 she’s been documenting the urban music scene in several African cities including Nairobi, Lagos, Freetown, Accra, Bamako, Johannesburg, and Dakar. As an activist, Ms. Fawundu has used art a vehicle to mobilize her community to fight against gentrification through her project, “Tivoli: A Place We Call Home: A Community Faces Gentrification.” She’s collaborated with the Women’s Institute/GMHC create a traveling photographic series “touched: Women affected by HIV” to spread awareness around HIV. She has also organized and facilitated photography and social awareness workshops for women and youth in Nigeria, Colombia and Sierra Leone.

GENG
Geng is a New York City-borne and currently-residing sound artist and founder of PTP (formerly, Purple Tape Pedigree), a collective, plus imprint, acting as “purveyors of weaponized media.” With roots in the city’s underground hip hop and then experimental electronic/metal/punk communities since the mid-90’s, his sonic narrative typically spills forth a cocktail of these influences, with a focus on meditative confrontation of traumatic histories, sleep paralysis, aquaphobia, and the communication bridge between self-actualized identity and spirit. In a live setting, one may be challenged by disembodied vocals piercing through a collage of field recordings, ASMR tape loops, and walls of distorted dread from various hardware – once reviewed as a “brutal ritual … drawn from dystopian nightmares … this is metal machine music meant for catharsis, not escapism” by Washington City Paper.

Pamela Liou
Pamela Liou is an artist and technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work examines tensions between craft, emerging platforms, and pursuit of self-actualization. Through digitally fabricated machines, analog video, and virtual environments Pamela’s work offers alternative modalities for recoupling and reacquainting the individual with a sense of creative efficacy.

Pamela is a former resident at Eyebeam, Museum of Arts and Design, and DBRS Labs. She currently teaches hardware and environment design at Parsons School of Design in the Design and Technology department.

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: From the Ashes, Rena Anakwe. Courtesy of the artist.

Feb 28

Sango

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SANGO: Kai “Sango” Wright refers to his productions simply as beats, leaving the classification of his stylistically variable output — which has drawn from contemporary R&B and hip-hop styles, non-commercial dubstep, funk carioca, and downtempo electronica — to the listener. Wright was born in Washington state but spent a good portion of his childhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan prior to attending college 50 miles south at Western Michigan University. When Wright graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts’ degree in graphic design, his number of short-form releases was already in double digits, and he had the support of Soulection, which had issued his 2013 set North.

Additionally, Wright had bugeun flirting with the mainstream by co-producting “Cold Sweat” for Tinashe‘s Top 20 2014 hit ‘Aquarius,’ and contributed to “The Sequence,” off Bryson Tiller‘s T R A P S O U L, a Top 20 entry during the fall of 2015.

Wright’s own releases continued to flow after he moved back to Seattle. Among the titles were 2016’s Hours Spent Loving You (a collaboration with Xavier Omär) and 2017’s De Mim, Pra Você, both of which were self-released.

050418_Sango_1920x1080_preview

Feb 27

Despacio

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Despacio brings its eight-hour vinyl-only odysseys to New York! Conceived by James Murphy (LCD Soundystem, DFA Records) and David and Stephen Dewaele (Soulwax, 2manydjs), Despacio creates an experience like no other. James, David & Stephen will be behind the decks for three daily eight-hour sessions from 8pm to 4am throughout Despacio’s run at the Knockdown Center.

About James Murphy
James Murphy is one of the most influential musical figures of the last two decades. As founder and principal of LCD Soundsystem, he has created four of the most acclaimed albums of the millennium—including the recent #1 AMERICAN DREAM (Columbia Records/DFA), which featured the Best Dance Recording GRAMMY-winning track “tonite”—while the band continues to be one of the top drawing live acts on the international circuit. Murphy is also founder of the DFA label, a renowned producer whose credits include albums by Arcade Fire and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, an in-demand remixer, guest musician on the likes of David Bowie’s ★, composer of scores for films including Greenberg and While We’re Young, and, of course, DJ with exquisite taste and great love of dark and obscure, undiscovered music, in the disco and house tradition.

About 2manydjs
Brothers David and Stephen Dewaele are famous worldwide as both Soulwax and 2manydjs who’s album “As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 1” completely revolutionized the dance music landscape in the early 2000s, for its imaginative mixture of artist and genres from all eras. As Soulwax they chartered new territory again with Nite Versions, a remix album of their own record Any Minute Now.  With Radio Soulwax they tore up the rulebook again creating and curating an app and website featuring 24 one hour mixes with accompanying visuals based on the sleeve artwork of the records used. The app has had to date over 600,000 downloads. In March 2017 Soulwax released ‘From Deewee’, their new album recorded  in a single day in their Deewee studio. Deewee is also a label, record collection and a publishing house, all contained within the same building.

About McIntosh
Founded in 1949, McIntosh Laboratory is known for offering distinguished quality audio products, superior customer service and the ultimate experience in music and film.  All McIntosh products are handcrafted at the Binghamton, NY factory by 130 employees with a passion for music and the McIntosh heritage.  McIntosh continues to define the ultimate home entertainment experience for discriminating consumers around the world, with the iconic “McIntosh Blue” Watt Meters globally recognized as a symbol of quality audio.  Since its inception, McIntosh has been powering some of the most important moments in music history and pop culture.  From President Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration speech, to Woodstock, to the infamous Grateful Dead “Wall of Sound,” McIntosh has not only witnessed history, it has shaped it.  With McIntosh, customers have the ability to create their own premium audio experience – and truly live their music.

 

 

Despacio_1080x1080inMClogo

 

Feb 22

Knee Deep in Queens: Hot Since 82 / Pete Tong / Lauren Lane

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Globally-recognized talent and Knee Deep in Sound head honcho Hot Since 82 brings his world-class sound to the stunning Queens performance space Knockdown Center for OUTPOST presents Knee Deep in Queens. The British DJ and producer, widely-known for his prolific productions and Labyrinth residency at Pacha Ibiza, maintains a dominant presence among the top tier of electronic music artists. Knee Deep in Queens also welcomes esteemed visionary and bonafide legend Pete Tong, DJ, producer and the voice of BBC Radio 1’s prestigious Essential Mix and Essential Selection. The critically-acclaimed tastemaker presides over multiple All Gone Pete Tong residencies across the US bringing his forward-thinking sensibility to the dance floor. Rounding out the stacked lineup is globetrotting DJ and producer Lauren Lane, DJ Mag’s Breakthrough Artist of 2017, rising quickly through the ranks and establishing a name for herself in the international underground scene.

 

Feb 21

Knockdown Center x Open Engagement presents

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Knockdown Center and Open Engagement present an evening of performances and dancing with opening act Lykanthea followed by a Discwoman showcase with BEARCAT and Riobamba in conjunction with the Open Engagement SUSTAINABILITY conference May 11 – 13, 2018.

Official drink sponsor for the event is Kombrewcha, the first hard kombucha that allows you to socialize without compromise.

 

Open Engagement 2018 – SUSTAINABILITY will take place May 11 – 13, 2018 at the Queens Museum in New York. Open Engagement (OE) is an annual, three-day, artist-led conference dedicated to expanding the dialogue around and creating a site of care for the field of socially engaged art. The conference highlights the work of transdisciplinary artists, activists, students, scholars, community members, and organizations working within the complex social issues and struggles of our time. Since 2007, OE has presented eight conferences in two countries and six cities, hosting over 1,600 presenters and over 6,000 attendees. Annual programming is selected by committees comprised of artists, educators, professionals, and community members from a free, open call for proposals. http://openengagement.info/

Founded by Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, Emma Burgess-Olson and Christine McCharen-Tran, Discwoman is a New York-based platform, collective, and booking agency—that showcases and represents talent in electronic music. Started as a two-day festival in September 2014 at Bossa Nova Civic Club Discwoman has since produced and curated events in 15+ cities—working with over 250 DJs and producers to-date.

BEARCAT is a London born, Brooklyn based artist. She is internationally known, and has performed all over the world, including Egypt, Paris, Lyon, Berlin, Leipzig, Barcelona, Mexico City, Oakland and Chicago. She has worked as a DJ/producer, audio engineer and professional make-up artist since 2005. BEARCAT provided creative direction for live events and festivals such as Afropunk, Glastonbury, Reading and Lovebox, among others. She has also DJ’ed sets for the musicians 21 Savage, CupcakKe and Caleborate. She draws from deeply personal experiences and Diaspora roots, and isn’t afraid to delve deep. Her sets are emotive musical selections as a form of therapy. Her ear guides her into creating bass-heavy uncompromising, powerful mixes that harness a symbiotic energy between the music and the crowd to generate the perfect soundtrack to any event. 2017 was a year of astounding new heights. BEARCAT performed at the Guggenheim, Wiener Festwochen in Vienna), Bloomberg Summer Picnic, 29Rooms, Performa 17 Biennial. BEARCAT’s archive of work and sets can be found at bearcat.digital

Riobamba is an Ecuadorian-Lithuanian producer, DJ, and cultural activist based in Brooklyn. Riobamba’s rowdy, deeply researched live sets reflect back nightlife’s power as a site of joy and resistance, amplifying connective tissues between YouTube clips, dembow brujería, bodega soundtracks, and noise hyperreality “suped up with a twisted, industrial gnarl” (Complex). As a self-made bridge between música urbana’s underground movements and pioneers, Riobamba has recently shared the stage with Tego Calderón, Maluma, Nina Sky, DJ Playero, Rosa Pistola, and DJ Blass. The Fader has called her production work “a radically self-expressive piece of futurism that stands against a single, boxed-in definition of what Latinx club music can be.” Riobamba is founder of record label and creative agency APOCALIPSIS, a platform insistent on visibility for narratives by those “ni de aquí, ni de allá” (neither from here, nor there); recent highlights include curating and co-producing Boiler Room’s first reggaetón showcase, and providing ongoing music education in a Brooklyn juvenile detention center. Riobamba leads A&R for the iconic Nuyorican music label Fania, home to groundbreaking artists Celia Cruz, Héctor Lavoe, and Willie Colón, and was previously Music Editor of cultural platform Remezcla. Prior to moving to NYC, she was the first Colombia-based researcher in the Fulbright-mtvU program, studying the subversive power of digital music production in a region enduring the effects of civil conflict. Her original work has been featured in Resident Advisor, Univision, Fact Mag, The Fader, Thump, Complex, and Red Bull Music Academy Radio.

Lykanthea is Lakshmi Ramgopal, an electronic musician from Chicago, IL. Her haunting voice and gauzy drones explore kinship, community, loss, and identity in shows that integrate performance art, synths, the sruti box, and processed vocals that draw on Carnatic improvisational traditions. Her debut EP Migration released in 2014 to praise from Noisey, Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, and Public Radio International’s The World, and was followed by a European tour and appearances at Leipzig, Germany’s Wave Gotik Treffen, NYU’s Occult Humanities Conference, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Her recent work includes the sound installation Maalai, which explores the role of family archives and the preservation of cultural memory, and an upcoming installation for Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory. She will be performing with violinist Lucy Little at Open Engagement.

***

Kombrewcha was created to provide people with an option to drink socially without having to compromise taste, experience, or the pursuit of a well-balanced life. Born and brewed in Brooklyn, New York, our hard kombucha (3.2% ABV) is a fizzy fermented tea with naturally occurring alcohol. Low in sugar and calories, our light and refreshing gluten-free brew is the perfect alternative to beer, wine, or cider- hold the hangover.

Feb 21

Seeing Solidarity

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Seeing Solidarity is a day-long program of film screenings featuring documentaries made in the 1960s and 1970s which explore labor organizing efforts from the point of view of workers, while addressing the struggles of different groups, including women and people of color, within the labor movement itself. Speakers with direct experience in labor unions and relevant campaigns will introduce each film in relation to the contemporary set of challenges, questioning the potential of filmic representation in the promotion of worker solidarity both then and now.

Film Program:
2:00pm
À Bientôt, J’espère (Be Seeing You), 1968
Chris Marker and Mario Marret, produced by SLON
16mm film, 39 min
Introduction by Erik Forman

À Bientôt, J’espère documents a strike at a French textile factory by following a young, charismatic unionist as he energizes workers and articulates their need not only for an adequate wage, but a meaningful existence. Informal conversations set around the kitchen table narrate the workers’ concerns in their own words although the strained silence of the wives sat beside them is often what speaks volumes.

3:30pm
Finally Got the News, 1970
Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner, produced in association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers
16mm film, 55 min
Introduction by Tim Schermerhorn

Finally Got the News delves into the issue of racism within organized labor and the particularities of the black workers’ struggle. Produced in association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, it centers on the labor conditions in Detroit’s auto factories and expresses the injustices of the capitalist system through the direct language of the workers themselves, providing a clear and compelling account of their frustration.

6:00pm
Nightcleaners, 1975
Berwick Street Film Collective
16 mm film, 90 min
Introduction by Lise Soskolne

Nightcleaners depicts an attempt by the Women’s Movement to unionize the female workers, many of them mothers, cleaning London’s office blocks. While formally experimental, the film’s many interviews reveal the physical and psychological consequences of working the graveyard shift—sometimes allowing only a couple of hours of sleep daily—as it simultaneously demonstrates the difficulty in organizing an atomized, precarious and exhausted workforce.

About the Speakers
Erik Forman has been active in the labor movement for over a decade as a rank-and-file organizer. He played a leading role in groundbreaking attempts to unionize the US fast food industry with the Industrial Workers of the World. He currently works as a labor educator in New York City.

Tim Schermerhorn is an Organizer with Democracy at Work and a member of the Labor Notes Policy Committee and the Black Workers Rank-and-File Network. Before retiring from the New York City Transit Authority in 2015, he was a rank-and-file member of Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York.

Lise Soskolne is an artist living in New York and core organizer of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), an activist organization whose mission is to establish sustainable economic relationships between artists and the institutions that contract their labor, and to introduce mechanisms for self-regulation into the art field that collectively bring about a more equitable distribution of its economy.

About the Organizer
Ana Torok is a curator and art historian based in New York City, specializing in conceptual and time-based media practices of the 1960s and 1970s.

*If you would like to attend this event but lack the funds, please contact alexis@knockdowncenter.com.

Feb 20

Chroma Presents Continuity

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Chroma Presents Continuity: A Conference on Self-Preservation for Women of Color.

In 2017, Chroma partnered with 8 Ball Community and Red Bull and hosted The Working Woman of Color Conference, a live podcast event employing self-actualization as an organizing principle to think, construct and shape powerful narratives of mobility for women of color. Over 30 women from different backgrounds were invited to engage in conversations over a two-day period. The conference and corresponding Podcast is produced by Chroma, who aims to create an accessible blueprint in response to the socio and economic mobility of women of color.

This year, Chroma is excited to host a two-day conference event titled Continuity to recognize the ways in which women of color continuously attempt to sustain their livelihoods, careers, and overall well-being given the many industries and spaces they occupy. By inviting a cadre of makers, thinkers, artists, scholars, and innovators, the participants will explore self-preservation for women of color as a narrative for liberation. This will be done through a series of art happenings, lectures, and panels over the course of a weekend. Continuity aims to empower the community with methods of self-preservation as a tool for empowerment and sustenance.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
APRIL 14

2:30PM – Personal, Political Digital Expression moderated by Sienna Fekete
Participants:
Elyse Fox
Ifrah Ahmed
Guadalupe Rosales

4:00PM – Revisualizing our Truth(s) moderated by Ladin Awad
Participants:
Shaniqwa Jarvis
Martine Gutierrez
Cynthia Cervantes

5:30PM – Cultural Sustainability moderated by June Canedo
Participants:
Antonia Perez
Mennlay Aggrey
Nia Hampton

6:30PM – Brown Up Your Feed by Mandy Harris Williams

APRIL 15

2:30PM – Self-Care & Intellectual Labor moderated by June Canedo
Participants:
Mona Chalabi
Lizania Cruz
Ashlee Haze
Aurel Haize Odogbo

4:00PM – Fashion Beyond Representation moderated by Ladin Awad
Participants:
Recho Omondi
Kyle Luu
Jessica Willis

5:30PM – Amplifying our Industries moderated by Sienna Fekete
Participants:
Thanu Yakupityage (aka DJ Ushka)
Tygapaw
Yulan “shyboi” Grant

6:30PM – Archiving our Past, Present, and Future(s) moderated by Ladin Awad
Participants:
Marcel Rosa-Salas & Isabel Flower
Ruth Gebreysus
Margaret Vendryes

Included Participants:
Mennlay Aggrey
Ifrah Ahmed
Cynthia Cervantes
Mona Chalabi
Lizania Cruz
Isabel Flower
Elyse Fox
Ruth Gebreysus
Martine Gutierrez
Nia Hampton
Ashlee Haze
Shaniqwa Jarvis
Kyle Luu
Aurel Haize Odogbo
Recho Omondi
Antonia Perez
Marcel Rosa-Salas
Guadalupe Rosales
Tygapaw
Margaret Vendryes
Mandy Harris Williams
Jessica Willis
Thanu Yakupityage (aka DJ Ushka)

+ video work by
Damali Abrams
Ayqa Khan
Alima Lee
Martine Gutierrez

About Chroma
Chroma aims to formalize networks of mobility for women of color through a dialogue of resistance, action, and healing. Chroma is comprised of three womxn of color. Ladin Awad is a filmmaker, producer, and organizer. Her work has been featured at the Queens Museum, Alexis Grady Gallery, MoCADA, and will premiere new work at Frieze Art in the spring. She has contributed work to VICE, Fusion, OkayAfrica, Boiler Room, Nike and more. Sienna Fekete is a producer and has an extensive background in radio and podcasting. She has worked exclusively with BBC Radio 1 & 1Xtra on various programming, produced podcasts with Red Bull Studios, Top Rank Magazine, and SiriusXM’s Spoke. She most recently contributed audio to the Well-Read Black Girl Conference. June Canedo is an artist and has contributed to publications such as Vogue Magazine and The New York Times. She has exhibited work in New York, Berlin, London, Paris, Budapest, and Melbourne. She will exhibit at The New Orleans Museum of Art and Moma PS1 this coming spring.

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