Show Category: Installation

 
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.
 

 
Wet ash falls from the ceiling. It slowly empties into an algae filled stream surrounded by moss covered boulders and gravel. Responding to last year’s brutal mood of apocalypse and rapture, Precious Okoyomon’s installation creates an ecosystem that seeks to hold grief. Visitors are invited to sit or stand or lay down in the uncomfortable space of mourning that we so often avoid.
 
An important material here is the ash from the incinerated kudzu, grown for Okomoyon’s most recent exhibition, Earthseed, at the MMK in Frankfurt. The vine, originally from Japan, was used to prevent soil erosion resulting from the cultivation of cotton during slavery; a bandage intended to cover up the environmental tolls of slavery, it instead proliferated, and became known as “the vine that ate the south.”
 
With FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD Okoyomon creates a new world in the Keith Haring Theatre, a wake for death allowing for catharsis, celebration, and closing: “2020 was the reckoning of death, and we’re still living in it. We have to face it and live in it and allow it to change us and be changed by it.”
 
Medium: moss, gravel, soil, ladybugs,crickets, mud, anoles, kudzu ash, wildflowers ❤️
 
 

Weather report

Today i wake up still the assemblage associated distortions bewilder me

IN THIS WORLD I AM A SHAPESHIFTER

FRAGMENTED BODY PERCEPTIONS AS HIGHER VIBRATION FREQUENCIES TO GOD

In the supernatural sky

I was restful as I had reached my place of salvation

The surface as a material structure neither heaven nor solace

Only the wind

Only quenched light

Lulled into covering until everything was the same

soul object well formed

the irreducible always already truth

Hidden in the trees

It is nothing i am here i am still here

desire dissolves away

glug glguhhh guhhhh i drink gulps of light

Putting myself back together

The rain pushes all the glyphosate

and

polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons down into the ground

industrial operation rehearses suffering its moves the world with terrible momentum shift me into dimensional alienation

CONSTRUCT AN OBSTRUCTION ALREADY WEAPONIZED WITHIN

THE SURFACE IS THE LOSS OF WHAT IS ALREADY MISSING WITHIN

I look up at the sky bathed in pink

longing for a liberated psyche I could rinse of any meaning into light no former shape

Like the word, the world is dying in flames

Like rapacious gloom in the empires burning afterlife

Like looking out the window a hollow flower

Like falling into the wind

Like falling into the heavy air

Like falling to limitless love

Made into air returning into the membrane of the real high shit

Pathogenic pleasure

Like we gotta make a new world

Like fade up reform resound

Open association vacate

Reframe

Like the surprising sun is blossoming somewhere and here i am blown away into the paradox of smiling

 
With her work farsa (engl. farce), the Brazilian artist Renata Lucas creates “a theatre that performs itself” generating a montage of space and perception that disarms dynamics of totality. A large hanging curtain that spans across Performance Space’s main theatre—within which two smaller curtains are embedded—rotates and opens up passageways when activated by the viewer. As bodies move through the work, their limbs appear as disembodied pieces cutting through perceived truths and assumptions, leaving us in a state of farcical reality where nothing is static or stable. With farsa, Lucas alludes to the current political situation in Brazil, where totalitarian currents attempt to reshape rights and liberties and disembody established values and moral systems.