Show Category: Installation

 
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. 
 

 
Zapata invites you to enter and linger in her large-scale textile installation—handwoven, hand-tufted, and sewn into shapes and textures that are a bit misshapen, and refreshingly different from familiar everyday objects. Zapata’s objects can hold our fantasies. They form a landscape in which we can spend time and experience ourselves with other bodies. Through the excess of labor put into this work, Zapata conveys an amorphous sense of time, honoring tradition with untraditional aspects of existence and queerness. This approach also mirrors Zapata’s complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as evangelical Christian, a first-generation American of Latin American descent, whose work is inspired by ancient indigenous traditions and ritual.
 
Sarah Zapata will also organize an event for Octopus on November 2 at 4pm.
 

Related Event

Choir of the Slain (part X)— niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa | January 9, 11.

In our society, relaxation and rest is a luxury reserved for the privileged and rich. Recent studies have shown that the distribution of rest is determined by race, with people of color regularly getting less sleep than white people. niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s Black Power Naps is a direct response to the Sleep Gap, which the artists see as a continued form of state-sanctioned punishment born from the ongoing legacy of slavery. Reclaiming idleness and play as sources of power and strength, this installation takes over Performance Space’s large theater and invites people of color to break with constant fatigue by slowing down, resting, and interacting with soft, comfortable surfaces.
 

Our culture has required that people of color present themselves as extraordinary performers, athletes, or entertainers in order to exist in the public realm, Black Power Naps refuses institutionalized exhaustion and demands the redistribution of idleness, down time, and quality sleep.

Follow niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa on Instagram – @zombiecocolo @funniesosa.