Sunday Service is a curated series of short-form live performances across mediums. Taking place the first Sunday of each month in the Ready Room, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of in-progress works, performances, and presentations, anchored by a framing principle such as a question, proposition, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service encourages works in progress and interdisciplinary endeavors showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster experimentation and critical discourse amongst peers.

For the premier of Sunday Service, Knockdown Center invited MAMI’s Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze who in turn invited Alexandra Bell, NIC Kay, Isabel Flower, Marcel Rosa-Salas, and YATTA to share projects in development across movement, writing, visual art, and sonic practices. With an insistence on collective care, we’ll process what we’ve witnessed together in dialogue over drinks.

You can watch footage from the evening on our MEDIA page here.

Alexandra Bell
Alexandra Bell is a multidisciplinary artist who investigates the complexities of narrative, information consumption, and perception. Utilizing various media, she deconstructs dominant histories to highlight patterns in news reportage and society at large. Bell holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and an M.S. in Print Journalism from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York.

NIC Kay
NIC Kay is from the Bronx. Currently occupying several liminal spaces. They are a person who makes performances and creates/organizes performative spaces. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving the change of place, production of space, position, and the clarity/meaning gleaned from shifting of perspective. NIC’s current transdisciplinary projects explore movement as a place of reclamation of the body, history and spirituality. NIC Kay is currently a 2017 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence Van Lier Fellow in New York City.

Isabel Flower + Marcel Rosa-Salas
Isabel Flower and Marcel Rosa-Salas are friends living in New York City. Marcel is a PhD student in Anthropology at New York University who researches race and the American advertising industry. Isabel studied Art History and Studio Art at Princeton, and is an assistant editor at Artforum. Together they host Top Rank Magazine’s podcast and share a love for critical theory, ’90s R&B and Air Jordans.

YATTA
YATTA is a sierra-leonean american digipoet & performer who remixes shamanic sounds with her jazz vocals to create music to lie down in. a former Flux Factory resident, she currently works as the Operations Coordinator of the Silent Barn DIY Collective. Her work has been featured in Rookie Magazine, Dazed, Mask Magazine, and more.

About the curator:
MAMI is the collaborative curatorial initiative of Ali Rosa-Salas and Dyani Douze. Together, they organized MAMI, an exhibition and programming series at Knockdown Center in August of 2016. They’ve partnered with BALTI GURLS, BBZ London, Browntourage, POWRPLNT, Fake Accent, Holyrad Studio, Smart Girl Club, SISTER NYC, Top Rank Magazine and other womxn of color centered collectives to organize community gatherings that support our need to care for one another.

Cover image by Luis Nieto Dickens