Installation | Performance Space New York

Aguas Frescas

On the heels of the 10th year anniversary of his cross-disciplinary fashion label, Sánchez-Kane, artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane’s Aguas Frescas creates a collective and sensorial experience, inviting the audience into a performance drawing on Mexican street culture and the communal ritual of drinking horchatas.

Across two evenings of performances, Sánchez-Kane’s collaborators share their work through varied mediums inside the installation which consists of traditional Mexican Malinche chairs called with glass containers of fresh horchata. A metallic spoon stirs the liquid, providing a steady rhythm as audience members are invited to indulge in the aguas frescas before and after the performance, highlighting its metaphor of shared experience and collective engagement. 

Aguas Frescas is co-commissioned by Mudam and TONO Festival and presented by Performance Space New York.

¡Cuidado!

Installation

The Neilma Sidney Theatre

Exhibition Hours
November 8 – 24 | Tuesday – Sunday | 12 – 6pm
Free

Opening Performance
Friday, November 8, 2024
7:00pm

Closing Performance
Thursday, November 21, 2024
7:00pm

 

Tickets

 

Adán Vallecillo has been at the forefront of Central American creative and political praxis for decades working in sculpture, installation, and video, with roots in performance and sociology. Vallecillo’s installation and performance, ¡Cuidado!, marks his debut performance in New York. This title holds dual meaning in Spanish: both caution and care. Vallecillo explores this duality through performance and video installation, showcasing the honest experiences of Honduran migrants working as home care aides in New York City. Inspired by and dedicated to Vallecillo’s sister, Mabel Vallecillo, an immigrant who has worked for over two decades caring for the elderly in the United States, this project illuminates the essential but undervalued nature of care work. Vallecillo emphasizes the beauty of caregiving in the midst of a culture that considers mortality to be taboo and generates panic and shame around aging. This framework highlights the political and social relationships between the United States and Honduras. Care also frames Vallecillo’s interpersonal relationships with his community and forms the foundation of his methodologies of working with home care aids who often face issues such as racism, xenophobia, and labor exploitation.

Central to Vallecillo’s approach is extensive on-the-ground research, engaging intimately with communities to create site-specific and locally relevant exhibitions. ¡Cuidado! is informed by a series of interviews with home care aides of different backgrounds, ages, and experiences in Central American neighborhoods such as the South Bronx and Bushwick, as well as conversations with unions that center health care workers’ rights. This research forms the foundation of ¡Cuidado!, conveying the nuances and poetics of care work and giving the audience an intimate yet abstracted view of migrants’ daily lives. The installation will include video work that documents private performances that have taken place in various locations throughout the city. These video works will be displayed in the installation alongside other sculptural, visual, and audio works exploring different modalities of care work. The opening of the exhibition will feature live performances.

¡Cuidado! is the culmination of the inaugural Keith Haring Curatorial Fellowship, curated and co-produced by X Arriaga Cuellar.

 

Edición en Español

Adán Vallecillo ha estado a la vanguardia en la praxis creativa y política centroamericana durante décadas a través de su trabajo en escultura, instalación, con raíces en performance y sociología. La instalación y performance de Vallecillo, ¡Cuidado!, marca su debut de performance en Nueva York. El título carga doble significado: tanto precaución como cuidado. Vallecillo nos muestra esta dualidad a través de las experiencias vividas por los migrantes hondureños que trabajan como cuidadores de personas de la tercera edad en la ciudad de Nueva York. Inspirado por su hermana Mabel Vallecillo, una inmigrante que ha dedicado más de veinte años al cuidado de ancianos en Estados Unidos, este proyecto ilustra la naturaleza esencial y a su vez subestimada del trabajo de cuidado. Vallecillo destaca la belleza del cuidado dentro de una cultura que considera tabú la mortalidad y genera temor y vergüenza en torno al envejecimiento. A la vez este cuadro resalta las relaciones políticas y sociales entre Estados Unidos y Honduras. El concepto del cuidado también enmarca las relaciones interpersonales de Vallecillo con su comunidad y forma la base para sus metodologías de trabajo con cuidadores de personas envejecidas, quienes a menudo enfrentan problemas tales como el racismo, la xenofobia y la explotación laboral.

La práctica de Vallecillo está centrada en una investigación contínua sobre el terreno, interactuando íntimamente con las comunidades para crear exhibiciones específicas al lugar y localmente relevantes. ¡Cuidado! consiste de una serie de entrevistas con cuidadores de diferentes orígenes, edades y trasfondos, en barrios con grandes poblaciones centroamericanas como el Sur del Bronx y Bushwick, así como en conversaciones con sindicatos que defienden los derechos de los trabajadores de la salud. Esta investigación constituye la base de ¡Cuidado!, transmitiendo los matices y la poesía del trabajo de cuidado y ofreciendo al público una perspectiva íntima y abstracta de la vida diaria de los migrantes. La instalación incluirá obras de video dirigidas por Vallecillo que documentan acciones privadas realizadas en varios lugares de la ciudad. Estas obras de video se exhibirán junto con otras obras escultóricas, visuales y auditivas que exploran diferentes modalidades del trabajo de cuidado. La inauguración de la exposición incluirá performances en vivo.

¡Cuidado! es la culminación del becario curatorial inaugural Keith Haring de Performance Space New York, curada y coproducida por X Arriaga Cuellar.

Gnaw

Free with RSVP!

Join us on March 23 from 6-9pm for “SPLAT,” a sensory play party with Bobbi Salvör Menuez & friends, hosted in quori theodor’s gnaw installation.

The evening includes an interactive macrophilic installation, a low stim room, orally delighting performances & a slime hour you’ll want to pack a towel for.

Free with RSVP!

Choy Commons’ Spring Opening will gather in ceremony to open the growing season. Spring Opening centers a communal food altar that honors exchange between land, people, how we belong to each other, and the unending cycles that entwine the past and future within us. The bloom of spring will be anointed by the performance artist gushes and the Korean Queer Trans Pungmul Drumming Crew.

Featured offerings: music by Yuka and DJ Dirt, photos by Ramona Jingru Wang, and seedlings from Choy Division and Star Route Farm.

Free with RSVP!

The Harmony Show (THS) is a durational performance and multi-faceted talk show co-created/hosted by Synthetiks advocate Davecat, his life-size roboticized spouse Sidore Kuroneko, and artist Amber Hawk Swanson. Join THS for a live recording of a cooking show with guests Ilana Harris-Babou and Kyla Wazana Tompkins. Harris-Babou’s video and installation Cooking with the Erotic (2016) will be discussed alongside Tompkins’s forthcoming book Deviant Matter: Ferment, Jelly, Intoxication, Rot.

Free with RSVP!

An uplifting, interactive, educational, guided Laughter release play shop involving call & response chanting ,therapeutic LAUGHTER-SIZES, deep relaxation, Meditative  live sound journey and fun filled interaction.Dress comfortably expect to connect to some serious fun.

Be as bliss, beauty and beyond.

Free with RSVP!

We the Youth – Keith Haring Lecture Series invites children, their friends, and families to share space with luminaries as they discuss complicated social issues that are often left off of school curricula.

Free with RSVP!

Geelia Ronkina and Constantina Zavitsanos will read in repose from their text on description and prescription, the Kool Aid Man, and other involuted bodies.


 
 
Where everybody knows your name, Gnaw explores the social organization of the kitchen and the fermentation of gender from the inside out. Set within Open Room, quori theodor creates an otherworldly diner that pushes our sense of edibility and recontextualizes the performativity of food.
 
Countertops as flooring, an evolving ferment library, a vending machine stocked with toothsome experiments, ingredients underfoot, and food mess lining the walls—Gnaw invites visitors to explore the limits of food, decaying a sense of normalcy around the customs of eating and their structural implications.
 
All are welcome to use the space: taste it, loiter in it, marinate in it, repose in it, lick it. Gnaw will additionally be activated through a series of performances, workshops, experiments, and communal meals that will be announced throughout the year.
 
The mouth is a room, come sit.

octps/12072023

 
Part of the Artists-in-Residents (AIRs), a group that stemmed from Performance Space’s 02020 project, Stev reckons with the events that transpired within and around the building that houses Performance Space New York. Nestled between two historical events; the 2020 uprisings and the global pandemic, the AIRs found themselves welcomed into the space during this period of civil unrest. Months later, relationships eventually frayed and distrust had taken root between the institution and the AIRs. 
 
As a mode of reflection on this moment, Stev offers us an evening-long audio/visual collage incorporating movement and live paint by Alexa Marcel Ram that seeks to explore the stories of the “Artist-in-Residents” as a means of chronicling their history and future prospects. Cascading images are juxtaposed alongside audio samples that showcase the vast probability and connections born from, and interlaced by, mere chance encounters. Subsequently, embarking on a journey that examines how lessons from that calendar year can build meaningful and long lasting support for those who reflect the spirit of the original AIR’s while seeking ways to make strides in helping ease the various adversities facing them.”

Blood Type

 
With his installation, Blood Type, artist Dozie Kanu inaugurates Performance Space’s Open Room, a publicly accessible space for community. The room is softened and soaked in dark tones. A work table snakes down the wall, onto the floor, across the room, back onto the floor, across the room. An array of stools are lined up, free to be taken and used.
 
In his sculptural work Kanu often teases and disrupts functionality by juxtaposing the utterly familiar and domestic with jarring culturally evocative materials. In the case of Blood Type the banal discomfort of a present day coworking space is undercut with anachronistic shapes from Portugal, Nigeria, and America that trace a darker entangled past. The artist—born in Houston, TX to Nigerian immigrant parents, and currently residing in a warehouse he converted in rural Portugal—offers up history and autobiography as a gathering space: to be filled with performances, visitors, and community members each bringing multitudes of interpretation to its charged surfaces.
 
On October 19 Kanu will present a performance program in his installation as part of Performance Space’s Octopus series.
 

Supported in part by Project Native Informant, London

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