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Sunday Service: Camilo Godoy Presents…

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Camilo Godoy presents the December Sunday Service titled We have to live differently that brings together artists from various disciplines to explore ideas of “difference.” The title is borrowed from Alice Walker’s poem “Calling All Grand Mothers.” This program projects a video piece by artist Eduardo Restrepo standing with their gender-nonconforming self in front of a cathedral, writer Ella Boureau reads excerpts from her lesbian erotica, poets Jorge Sánchez and Xavier Valcárcel read about homosexual encounters, love, lust, and Latinidad, dancer Miguel Angel Guzmán improvises various movement phrases throughout the space to interrogate how the body moves, and artist Jordan Demetrius Lloyd performs a scored improvisation solo about blackness, sensuality and the audience’s gaze. This program confronts questions of gender, sexual, and racial difference to insist that we live differently.

Image: Camilo Godoy, ‘Allie Rickard,’ from the zine ‘Amigxs,’ 2017, photography.

About the Curator

Camilo Godoy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is concerned with the construction of political meanings and histories. His work engages with conceptual and choreographic strategies to negotiate questions that confront the politics of citizenship, imperialism and sexuality. Godoy analyzes and challenges past and present historical moments to imagine different subversive ways of being. 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 is currently a resident at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) and was a 2015-2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence; 2014 Keyholder Resident, Lower East Side Printshop; 2014 Hemispheric New York Emerging Performers Program Fellow, The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, NYU; and 2012 Fellow, Queer Art Mentorship. His work has been presented at venues such as Center for Performance Research, New York; Judson Church, New York; La Mama Galleria, New York; Donaufestival, Krems; and Mousonturm, Frankfurt, among others.

About the Artists

Ella Boureau
Ella Boureau is an NYC based playwright, director, essayist, and short-story writer, as well as the Awards Coordinator for Lambda Literary Foundation. She founded and ran the online magazine and reading series In the Flesh for several years. Her writing has been featured in Guernica, Tin House, Slice Magazine, and Full Stop, and her first play, Helps to Hate You a Little: A Lovestory debuted at Cloud City in November 2016.

Miguel Angel Guzmán
Miguel Angel Guzmán is an independent dancer and actor residing in New York City. He has lived and performed in Mexico, Tel Aviv and Berlin, and continues to travel extensively to make work alongside artists from various disciplines. His most recent collaborations include work with choreographer Coco Karol as well as with musicians Lady Rizo and Amanda Palmer. He will been seen next in Romanian choreographer Alexandra Pirici’s commissioned piece at the New Museum of Contemporary Art at the beginning of February 2018.

Eduardo Restrepo-Castaño
eduardo restrepo-castaño generates surreal narratives through a practice that draws from academic research and lived experience, to delve into sites where social constructions around nature, gender difference, and the diasporic condition overlap. Co-founder of curatorial platform Sweety’s, as well as participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, restrepo-castaño has exhibited in spaces such as SOMA (Mexico,) Musée de l’Élysés (Switzerland,) and Bruce High Quality Foundation (New York,).

Mike Funk
Mike Funk is a writer who draws. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and makes comics, music and time for his cat.

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd
Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a NYC based artist living in West Harlem. Originally from Albany, NY he is a graduate of The College at Brockport. He has collaborated with and performed for Karl Rogers/Red Dirt Dance, Netta Yerushalmy, Tammy Carrasco/Wild Beast Dance, Brendan Drake and David Dorfman Dance.

Xavier Valcárcel
Xavier Valcárcel is a Puerto Rican writer and editor. In 2009, he founded in San Juan, along with Puerto Rican poet and translator Nicole Delgado, the editorial project Atarraya Cartonera, the first Cartonera project in the Caribbean. He has published seven poetry books to date and his work has been translated to English, German and Portuguese.

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.

Brunch Bounce

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Save some space this Thanksgiving Eve; we’re serving up 5 DJs in the main room, featuring RedBull Thre3Style Champion Four Color Zack, and 5 more DJs in our Global Music Room playing some of the best music of different genres from around the world.

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Cura(Collected) Closing Performances

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Join us for the closing performances of Cura(Collected), an exhibition on view in Knockdown Center’s galleries November 4 – December 3rd, 2017.

Sunday, December 3
4:00pm
Five Movements with Anjuli Rathod and Lily Jue Sheng
Anjuli Rathod and Lily Jue Sheng present Five Movements, a multimedia work comprised of a video, painting, sculpture, and performance with contributions from Nyle Genevieve Kim Kaliski and Zach Hart. Sheng’s choreography between forms explores a deeply personal and contemporary interpretation of Wu Xing, a traditional Chinese concept of elements and cycles. In Five Movements, the artists present a synesthetic environment, combining Sheng’s inspirations from Taoist philosophy, lucid dreams, and ceremonial practices, and Rathod’s interests in dreams, memory, animism, and hybridity. The artists’ integration of their bodies navigate different spaces: between thought and action, theater and reality, immaterial and physical, interior and exterior. This collaborative effort considers the tradition of women practicing ritual in support of themselves and each other in healing from trauma and depression, and as a means of survival under systemic barriers and oppression.

6:00pm
recursos/resources with Eduardo Restrepo Castaño
Eduardo Restrepo Castaño restages their performance recursos/resources, a performative auction. In the piece, the artist auctions off one piece of work, along with three hours of labor to participating audience members. 100% of the money gathered will go towards a monetary fund that will be then given directly to a trans-femme individual in Restrepo Castaño’s home town Quimbaya, Colombia.

Cura(Collected) is an exhibition that accumulates over time in a series of artist interventions that investigate care, empathy, and nurture. Organized by Sessa Englund, Cura(Collected) is a collaborative project by Anjuli Rathod, Eduardo Restrepo Castaño, Oscar Moises Diaz with an accompanying essay by manuel arturo abreu. For this project each artist has brought in collaborators and community for a series of ongoing, cumulative interventions that will take place within an architectural structure inside of the gallery each week from November 4th through December 3rd, and will remain on view in its final state until December 17th, 2017.

In addition to scheduled performances, the collaborating artists will activate the architectural structure in the center of the gallery on a daily basis. As the exhibition accumulates, the material residue and traces of prior interventions will remain in the space alongside a video record of each act.

Exhibition and activation details: https://knockdown.center/event/curacollected/

Cura(Collected) Opening Performances

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Join us for the opening performances of Cura(Collected), an exhibition on view in Knockdown Center’s galleries November 4 – December 17, 2017.

5:00pm – Me eligio with Mariana Herrera Castaño
Mariana Herrera Castaño’s performance Me eligio asks audiences to participate in facilitating the translation between Spanish and English, music and spoken language.

6:00pm – as of it with Justin Cabrillos and Matt Shalzi
Justin Cabrillos presents a dance with performer and sculptor Matt Shalzi, examining contemporary manifestations of the sacred through morphing, repetitive movements. An emulsion of religious fervor, hallucinogenic ecstasy, hardcore moshing, and trance, Cabrillos and Shalzi respond to each other’s somatic improvisations, superimposing gestures that result in sculptural formations that undulate in between abstract and bodily compositions.

About the Exhibition
Cura(Collected) is an exhibition that accumulates over time in a series of artist interventions that investigate care, empathy, and nurture. Organized by Sessa Englund, Cura(Collected) is a collaborative project by Anjuli Rathod, Eduardo Restrepo Castaño, Oscar Moises Diaz with an accompanying essay by manuel arturo abreu. For this project each artist has brought in collaborators and community for a series of ongoing, cumulative interventions that will take place within an architectural structure inside of the gallery each week from November 4th through December 3rd, and will remain on view in its final state until December 17th, 2017.

In addition to scheduled performances, the collaborating artists will activate the architectural structure in the center of the gallery on a daily basis. As the exhibition accumulates, the material residue and traces of prior interventions will remain in the space alongside a video record of each act.

Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime Performance Series

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For this edition of the Jimmy’s Thrift Of New Davonhaime Performance Series, third generation DJ Susan Z Anthony will be exploring and playing records from her archive of her grandfather’s records. The archive is called Big Jeff’s Records, as her grandfather, Big Jeff was a DJ and his collection spans the late 50’s to mid 70’s. Susan Z Anthony will also have ephemera from her grandfathers days as a set-up man (a term Susan Z Anthony has told us was used for DJ’s of the time) including record sleeves, promotional material from some of the musical acts featured on the records and buttons / stickers from some of the radio stations Big Jeff worked with during his time playing music.

This is part of a series of events hosted within the space of Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime, an exhibition by Azikiwe Mohammed currently on view in the Knockdown Center Galleries.

About Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime
Currently on view at Knockdown Center, artist Azikiwe Mohammed has staged a performative installation of his fictional thrift store, Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime. New Davonhaime – a location conceived by Mohammed – is an amalgamation of the names of the five most densely populated Black cities in America: New Orleans, Detroit, Jackson, Birmingham, and Savannah. Jimmy’s Thrift of New Davonhaime was created to serve as a safe space for Black and Brown people living in America. Knockdown Center’s galleries have been fully transformed into a thrift store that contains objects both created and found by Mohammed including tapestries, records, postcards, paintings, lamps, and books.

Sunday Service: J.Soto Presents…

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Don’t Fall Back
A program dedicated to remaining in the moment, aware, and offering no apologies.

How is Queer (self)love a form of resistance? What shapes and objects does that take on and what images does it conjure?

What can be the practice of Queer, Transgender and Gender-nonconforming community care across POC communities, now?

How will we combat Queer, Transgender and Gender-nonconforming POC histories and perspectives being invisibilized?

Dedicated to creating existences that are not polite; that are not apologetic and care for eachother.

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The artists are performers, dancers, video makers, object makers. They are connected through their individual approaches to their material and expressiveness of embodied existences, and through the sinuous tendons of queer, black, and and POC communities. Using their work as they use tools to build, frame, practice, and to repeat; to create approaches that are textual, aware, speak-out-wards and in preservation.

Edging upon the deep areas in-between documentation, performance, and gesture the work is alive. These are approaches, unlanded, yet, this is what I hope we are working towards in community, in fortification. In fortification of our own communities.

About the Curator
J.Soto is a queer brown transgender interdisciplinary artist, writer, and arts organizer. He has curated and performed work for The National Queer Arts Festival (San Francisco), Links Hall (Chicago), as well as Vox Populi (Philadelphia) among others nationally. His collaborative writing project, “Ya Presente Ayer” can be found in Support Networks, Chicago Social Practice History Series (University of Chicago Press). His organizing projects include the Latinx Artists Retreat (LXAR), which he recently launched with a group of Latinx artists and administrators and the Latinx Artist Visibility Award (LAVA) for Ox-Bow School of Art in partnership with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also a recent Fellow of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Advocacy Leadership Institute (ALI). His recent writing can be found in Original Plumbing and Apogee Journal: Queer History, Queer Now Folio. He is currently Programs Coordinator for Equity & Inclusion Initiatives at Movement Research and Production & Access Coordinator at Eyebeam.

About the Artists

Miatta Kawinzi
Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist. She explores the figure, the inner & outer landscape, and culture as sites of re-imagination & possibility. She works with images, objects, sound, space, the body, and language. She was born in 1987 in Nashville, TN to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father. Based in NYC, she received a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College in 2010 and an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College in 2016. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Bag Factory (Johannesburg, South Africa), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Greatmore Studios (Cape Town, South Africa), IAAB (Basel, Switzerland), Flux Factory (NYC), and the SOMA Summer program (Mexico City, Mexico). She has received additional awards from the NY Community Trust Foundation, Hampshire College, Hunter College, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant in 2017. Recent exhibition sites of her work include the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), Aljira Center for Contemporary Art (NJ), and the FNB Joburg Art Fair (SA).

IV Castellanos and Amanda Hunt
The artists IV Castellanos and Amanda Hunt explore the continuous catching and falling of one another’s bodies. With this idea, that takes many aesthetic forms, aim to define arrival as reciprocity. This work of jumping, catching, holding, climbing, falling and/or dropping, and dragging one another on repeat, is juxtaposed with task based labor driven work.
Hunt and Castellanos have performed at Highways Performance Space Los Angeles, CA the AHA Festival Santa Fe, NM, Gibney Dance, Dixon Place Grace Exhibition Space, Panoply Performance Lab and at Dance Space, NY in collaboration with the Feminist Art Group.

ray ferreira
w h e n a m i blaqlatinx from occupied Lenape lands called New York, N Y: the illegitimate EEUU. An o t the r Corona, Queens a spacetimemattering a materialdiscusive (dis) continuity: [the Caribbean, the Greater Antilles, Hispañola, the Dominican Republic —> Corona, Queens] : history.
ray ferreira b.1991 w h e n a m i a performer of sorts aka multidisciplinary artist aka polymath. She stays playin : the dance between materialitylanguage 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
She can be located museum educating at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as floating through other museum education departments. In addition, she lead teaches at the Octavia Project, and freelances for various artists. w h e nam i Other intersections of space|time|matter residencies at the Institute for Electronic Arts and EmergeNYC, performances at the Segue reading series, Dixon Place, and La MaMa, slightly different performances at the Queens Museum of Art, and differently different in Femmescapes: Vol 2. whenami She has performed two durational performances to obtain an expensive pieces of paper: a BA in Studio Art from SUNY Geneseo, and an MFA in Combined Media from CUNY Hunter College.

Keijaun Thomas
Keijaun Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas is reimagining, reworking, and reconstructing notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of blackness in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Boston, 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.

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.

 

Image: NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover image of the sun setting from the rover’s location in Gale Crater.

Machines in Music

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Machines in Music (MIM) is a 2-day festival that bridges artists, musicians, and instrument builders with a focus towards modular synthesizer hardware.The exhibition is free and open to the public of all ages.

This year we are proudly hosting the event at The Knockdown Center once again. KDC is a cross-disciplinary art and performance space Knockdown Center in Queens, New York.

Saturday and Sunday daytime exhibitions are free and open to the public with exhibitors displaying modular technology from North America and Europe, as well as presentations, visual art and other events. Live performances on both nights. For more information and tickets for Saturday’s performance with Imaginary Softwoods, Via App, Patricia, S.S.P.S., and Hiro Kone, visit http://www.ticketfly.com/event/1572699.

www.machinesinmusic.com

Hans Tammen & Dark Circuits Orchestra: CROSSING THE LAGRANGIAN POINT

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“Crossing the Lagrangian Point” is a large multi-movement piece written by Hans Tammen for 10 light & sound performers, a spatialist, and a conductor. A large collection of lightbulbs, LED structures and fluorescent lights fight and clash with bizarre visuals projected onto objects, fabrics, ceilings and walls. Sounds are generated with ear-scorching intensity directly from the visuals or from a mad combination of audio and video synth modules, while the “spatialist” throws them around in an 8-channel sound system like a violently moving fluid. It is a controlled chaos of loud, visceral blast of colors, flashes and polyrhythmic machinations.

With Michael Vorfeld, ChiKa, Benton C Bainbridge, James Yuxi Cao, MSHR (Birch Cooper & Brenna Murphy), Dafna Naphtali, Eric Drasin, Jonas Bers, Matthew Ostrowski, Daniel Neumann (spatialist) and Hans Tammen (concept, composing, conducting).

Hans Tammen likes to set sounds in motion, and then sitting back to watch the movements unfold. Using textures, timbre and dynamics as primary elements, his music is continuously shifting, with different layers floating into the foreground while others disappear. The Dark Circuits Orchestra is a large ensemble devoted to contemporary electronic instrument practices such as circuit bending, no-input mixers, laptops, turntablism and analogue synth, including visuals. Dark Circuits concepts and workshops have been presented in the US, Mexico, Ukraine, Russia, and all over Europe.

Hans Tammen: http://tammen.org
Michael Vorfeld: http://www.vorfeld.org
ChiKa: http://www.imagima.com
Benton C Bainbridge: http://www.bentoncbainbridge.com
James Yuxi Cao: https://caoyuxi.com
MSHR (Birch Cooper & Brenna Murphy): http://mshr.info/index.html
Dafna Naphtali: http://dafna.info
Eric Drasin: http://www.ericbarrydrasin.com
Jonas Bers: https://jonasbers.com
Matthew Ostrowski: http://www.ostrowski.info
Daniel Neuman & CT-SWaM: https://ctswam.org

The event is a co-production between Hans Tammen and CT-SWaM, and was commissioned by Harvestworks with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

With opening performance by NHLK / MEMBRANES (7pm)
NHLK is a duo from Switzerland that explores the boundaries where music and language overlap. They are using hybrid instruments – constructed from drum-skins and electronic components – as devices to turn written texts into pulses of light and percussive sound. As each machine translation emerges, the network of instruments starts to share the texts, transforming written material into aesthetic, visual and sonic patterns, for the performers to further interact with. Extrapolating from the example of the African talking drum, Membranes builds up an altogether new kind of tone language, constantly shifting and adapting itself before the viewer and performers alike.

Membranes_Studio

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