Talk | Performance Space New York

Knowledge of Wounds

Knowledge of Wounds is a ceremony, a digital fire, a calling to vibrate in good relations across Indigenous time and space. Curated and led by SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) and Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation), Knowledge of Wounds will unfold as a series of digital events throughout 2021, foregrounding Indigenous methodologies and leadership to create new spaces for knowledge exchange between First Nations communities across the world.Knowledge of Wounds is one of the first programs of its kind to focus specifically on the intersections of Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and the body. Centering Indigenous practices of care, sovereignty, and accessibility, the Knowledge of Wounds virtual platform will remain as an Indigenous led and held archive, handing back centuries of archival and epistemological authority from settlers to Indigenous communities.Honoring Indigenous time and space in the spirit of the Wiradjuri term Yindyamarra—which refers to the qualities of respect, going slow, honoring, and taking responsibility—the structures and principles for these virtual gatherings are being developed by the curators in early 2021, with individual events being announced throughout the year as the program evolves. Please sign up to the Knowledge of Wounds newsletter for regular updates.

Following the first edition of Knowledge of Wounds—held in-person in January 2020 at Performance Space New York—organizers Norman and Pierce have expanded the program to become a global digital gathering which is collectively supported by five leading experimental arts organisations: Performance Space New York (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PDX), The Momentary (AR), Ballroom Marfa (TX) and Performance Space Sydney (NSW, Australia).

Credits

Photo by Blair LeBlanc (cropped into heart)

Sphere Brilliance Forum

Co-hosted by Hadrien Coumans and Juana Burga

Sphere Brilliance Forum is a series of dynamic, creative and engaging community-shared responses to the existential crisis humanity is facing with accelerating climate change. With the aim of moving humanity into balance with Earth, Sphere Brilliance Forum is a project which calls upon brilliant, creative minds and hearts to meet, share, support and solve together.

This fall, the project will launch its first public event at the legendary Performance Space New York with a conversation about our immediate future, keeping with forward thinking, generationally responsible indigenous cultures who maintain responsibility to place, community, family, and wellbeing. The event will have the audience sitting in the sphere, a circle, which will enable dialogue, engagement and community support to unfold through a series of interactions.

An Evening with Princess Nokia

With an introduction by Robot MoonJuice

Princess Nokia, who grew up between East Harlem and the Lower East Side, identifies as an afro-indigenous, queer, Puerto Rican woman. Nokia’s unique musical and performance practice pursues a radical intersectional feminist agenda, and breaks through music genres merging goth and punk with rap and hip hop. Her performances are a celebration of community and female empowerment.

On the occasion of the evening lecture, Princess Nokia will talk to us about her practice as an artist, musician, performer and political activist.

*ASL and Live-Captioning will be available.

Credits

Photo courtesy of Princess Nokia.

Man Machine

Related Event

A special workshop for experienced DJ’s led by John Collins and Mark Flash.

October 20 | 3-5pm

For the last thirty years the Detroit label, Underground Resistance (UR), has been producing techno music aiming at “electrifying the inner city with hi-tech, sci-fi thoughts.” Equipped with radical politics UR’s collective practice aligns itself with the African American working class experience combating the so-called “programming by mediocre mainstream music and public institutions. Simultaneously, a complex mythology invents a sonic future beyond fixed identities which cannot be racialized and stereotyped anymore. The idea of man and technology merging appears all over the UR universe—machines are being manipulated and experimented with to create the distinct extraterrestrial UR sound and explore humans’ potential to make and remake themselves.

The program includes conversation and music.

Schrei 27

Hailed as the “high priestess of vocal apocalypse,” legendary avant-garde musician Diamanda Galás presents the U.S. Premiere of her collaboration with video artist Davide Pepe, Schrei 27. The film is based on a work Galás first developed for radio and turned into a quadraphonic performance, Schrei X—a sequence of Beckettian monologues alternately sung, shrieked, whispered, or cried—that Galás gave in complete darkness at Performance Space 122 in 1996. Schrei 27 confronts the audience with an unrelenting visual and sonic portrait of a body enduring torture in the physical confinements of a mental health facility. To Galás, whose work often evokes the suffering of the powerless, “the object of this kind of torture is complete demoralization—and the erasure of all that the captive has ever known—including the fact that he was ever a human being.”

Funding Credits

Schrei 27 was made possible with support from the Howard Gilman Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.