Show Category: Performance

Organized by American Artist.

With American Artist, NIC Kay, Raúl De Nieves, Jackie Wang, NUNATS NEN-TUK NUTAKS DIPA (THE WRONG VOICE IS COMING OUT OF YOU)
 
In conjunction with the installation A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN, American Artist invites writers and performers whose works embody radical imagination. As the exhibition speculates on survival strategies of the people who have always been surviving, in the face of an apocalypse, Artist is drawn to music for its legacy within liberation struggles as well as a means of meaning-making in another (non)world. Rather than being purely musical, the performances are often interdisciplinary in nature, and share a genesis in writing and radical pedagogy.
 
Co-presented with Eyebeam.
 

Post-show talk on Friday, October 26 with NIC Kay.
 
DEAD THOROUGHBRED is a collaboration that includes at least keyon gaskin and sidony o’neal. DEAD THOROUGHBRED feels ambivalent about the posthuman future. Rather than the post-human, DEAD THOROUGHBRED feels the ante-human (ante = before in Latin), i.e. the dead and other non-human living and non-living forms, in an effort to complicate the idea that living human consciousness is the central or sole indicator of subjective relation. DEAD THOROUGHBRED acknowledges the inherent exclusion and limitations of posthuman theory. DEAD THOROUGHBRED’s presentation in the Posthuman Series fucks with the generativity of death and hopelessness as a critical antithesis to DEAD THOROUGHBRED’s interest in posthuman ideas of enhanced living, futurity, and occult possibility.
 
DT is peri-conceptual, dis-experimental, and a-nihilist.

DT is a blackened performance that is never not happening.

DT is après-queer and post-ratchet.

DT is anti anti-capital capital.

DT is heavy evasion– worthless.

DT is useless currency devoid of value and wide in circulation.

DT has null intension and null extension.

DT is dead frivolous af.

DT is detrital presence; an exhaustion of lack.

DT is at least sidony o’neal and keyon gaskin.
 

Sex is everywhere. Once shunned from the public sphere, the pornographic now saturates advertisements, language, and design. For almost a decade the Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen has created a body of work that explores an all-pervasive sexuality, changing how we relate to ourselves and to each other. With 21 pornographies, the latest solo in the series, the artist performs a densely edited procession of references widely ranging from de Sade to 1970s Danish Porn and sexualized torture in war. Drawing connections between sex, power, politics, and crime, Ingvartsen takes the audience on an associative tour de force that is equally stimulating, disturbing, cheerful, and sensuous.
 
*Post-show talk on Thursday, October 4.
 

Post-show talk on Friday, November 16 with Cynthia Carr.
 
Best known for his boundary-pushing body mutilations, Ron Athey has been pursuing the transcendent and sublime for more than three decades. After the Death of God (famously proclaimed by the philosopher Nietzsche who anticipated the end of religion in Western society), Athey considers it one of the artist’s roles to invent new forms of ritual and celebration, to conjure the sacred as an antidote to the empty individualism of contemporary life. For his new work, Acephalous Monster, Athey turns to the Acéphale, the figure of the headless man, which inspired George Bataille’s secret society of the same name to combat nihilism and fascism before the Second World War in France. The headless or beheaded man is a powerful symbol of radical transformation, the driving force of all of Athey’s performances pushing towards the merging of humans and gods.
 

Few artists have taken the idea of technological theater further than Annie Dorsen. Whereas most productions that address the digitization of everyday life stop at the inclusion of, say, video and computer-generated imagery, Dorsen hands the very act of creating a play over to algorithmic processes. The result of “collaborating with algorithms as full creative partners,” as Dorsen puts it, is its own theatrical form that she has termed algorithmic theater. It shatters our notion that a play’s worth lies in how aptly it reflects our humanity back to us and reveals the dramaturgical potential at the heart of the digital code. For her new work, The Slow Room, Dorsen uses more traditional theatrical means to explore the uncertain space where the virtual meets the embodied.
 
*Post-show talk on Friday, September 28.