05.07.24 - Nile Harris, minor a - The series opens with minor a, a very minor unfinished performance by Nile Harris, curated by Kyla Gordon, in his studio at 99CANAL. With special guests Kwami Winfield, Ley Gambucci and Jonah Rollins, this can be understood as a very first iteration of his larger installation at the Shed in early August.

05.08.24 - Fana Fraser, AUTOGAMY - A performance curated by Habiba Hopson, AUTOGAMY explores themes of self-fertilization and transformation, drawing from goddess and mother archetypes. Premiering on May 8, 2024, at 99CANAL, Fraser's work uses sound and movement to delve into fertility, love, and divinity, and aims to embody the nurturing essence of self-creation. The performance is inspired by botanical reproductive processes and seeks to remind both artist and audience of their innate potential for growth and nourishment.

05.09.24 - Alvin Tran, Murder on Canal St - A performance curated by Jeanette Bisschops, Murder on Canal St reflects on the intersection of physical and digital experiences. The piece captures both our cultural moment and the feeling of transitioning into adulthood in the internet generation, fusing elements of pop and post-modern dance with a focus on online behaviors and societal disconnection. Tran’s choreography and eclectic musical choices create a tension between familiar and innovative movement, questioning how we navigate and make sense of our experiences in a digitally mediated world.

05.10.24 - Raymond Pinto, effigy: a shifting landscape - A performance curated by Diallo Simon Ponte, effigy: a shifting landscape invites the audience to reflect on their connection to the earth and memory. The piece emphasizes the importance of listening to and remembering the terrain we inhabit, integrating themes of displacement and ancestral ties. Pinto’s work encourages a deep, immersive engagement with the environment, highlighting the intimate relationship between humanity and the natural world.

05.11.24 - Kevin Peter He and Jake Oleson, FLUX - A performance curated by Emma Stern, FLUX by Kevin Peter He and Jake Oleson combines virtual reality with live performance. The piece features a humanoid figure navigating a virtual landscape, with movements derived from motion capture and real-time manipulation of the virtual environment. The performance blurs the lines between physical and virtual experiences, questioning the nature of presence and perception in a technologically mediated age. Kevin and Jake’s work challenges traditional cinematic processes with a focus on live, immersive experiences.

Animal Farm entices the observer on a visual odyssey exalted by pastoral solace, animist minstrelsy and metaphysical riddles – ghosts, ghouls and goblins – offering fleeting glimpses of an alterity existing between techne and poiesis, the human and the non-human, the nocturnal and the diurnal. Through over a dozen new 16 mm film projections we are invited to explore the latest toils in a long-lasting inquiry into analogue means and analogue concepts. A journey towards an eco-friendly estrangement from the extractivist rural landscape.
For this venture, the Portuguese artist suggests a distinctive approach to engaging with his craft, molding the instances of aesthetic contemplation and anchoring them to the circadian cadence of the metropolis. It is solely under the fading rays of the city that never sleeps that the 16 mm projections come alive, revealing the radiant entities that inhabit them. It is, if you will, an exhibition for night owls, creatures of the dark and vespertine folk.

“Forward, comrades! Long live the windmill! Long live Animal Farm!”
-George Orwell.

Technology is conceived as a tangible apparatus, reminiscent of early computing machines that highlight the physical and social impact of repetitive tasks. Alexa West’s choreography explores movement around such constructed apparatuses, with dancers embodying archetypal figures through repetitive gestures that evoke the memetic qualities of digital culture. Technology also functions as a tool within larger systems of control, where concepts like gender and race act as capitalist technologies enforcing social divisions. This is exemplified in American Idoll, where ms. z tye uses ritualistic flag folding to memorialize the 27 trans lives lost to violence in 2023, questioning the exclusion of marginalized communities from America’s national myth of liberty and justice, especially in conservative political contexts. Mayfield Brooks’ work further abstracts technology to systemic and metaphysical realms, emphasizing spirit, memory, and grief. Amid advances in miniaturization and automation, a renewed focus on craft and manual interaction emerges, reflected in digital language such as “thread” and “pin.” The performance challenges traditional notions of human verticality and linear time, incorporating natural elements into artificial environments to suggest a future of deeper interconnection between humans and other species.

Like many of Alexa West’s performances which often explore networked systems of labor and human behavior, The Department of Aging relied on the city’s public service departments. In the performance, dancers Jade Manns and Gwendolyn Knapp interacted with three filing cabinets sourced from the city’s “Department of Aging”; Much like this department addresses issues of care for aging citizens, West’s performance considered the threshold of productivity and what we deem a useful body.

For Agnes Questionmark, recent developments in DNA research and gene editing technology trouble an easy understanding of a discrete human body. In Attempt II, the artist imagined an experiment to create a new species and suggested through an iterative title that this performance is part of a series of trials. Twelve performers lay on the floor as experimental subjects in cadaver bags resembling embryonic sacs. Their promise of a rebirth into a new species was foreshadowed by imminent death. The subject’s life depended on their umbilical connection to the bag, a body rooted in technological innovation or collapse.

In Visible_Devices (2023), Tianyi Sun’s voice was intertwined with an AI bot in a feedback loop that, at points, led to conversation and, at other moments, interruption. As Sun traversed the room, Fiel Guhit, an artist and software engineer, managed the AI input, giving an electronic voice to the input data points and the sculptural assemblages around the room. The network of cables and readers provided a body for the AI system, a partner for Sun, and a conduit between her and Guhit that both simulated and inverted how innovation has distanced the human experience.

Whereas Sun’s soliloquy was mirrored by the AI system, in Louis Osmosis “Balconisms: A small filibuster on bursting the fill”; his monologue was met without a partner response. He reported on his surroundings to the audience live from an unknown location. He was only made visible through a walkie-talkie on a pedestal that operated as a stand-in for his body. While this technology connected him with the audience, the signal was fragile. Several times in the performance, the audience approached the pedestal and turned the volume up only to disrupt the signal and make Louis entirely unintelligible.

Heather McCalden’s Easy Listening also explored methods of legibility and communication, though framed through scientific narratives around movement. Formally, riffing on Bruce Nauman’s work Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, McCalden asked: “whether the languages we apply to the physical world can effectively express our embodied, emotional experience.”

Dear Reader,

Allow me, at the outset, to clarify what the title of this exhibition/screening stands for. The Hungarian idiom —annyit ér, mint halottnak a csók— literally translates into: worth as much as a kiss to a dead man. However, the figurative meaning conveys that something is not worth a whoop, not worth the effort, worthless...

The project is, at first glance, no more than a small appetizer addressing the practices of certain figures (artists and non-art artists) of the (so-called) Hungarian Neo Avant-Garde . Yet, just as in the title, the symbiosis or lack thereof between a figurative and a literal interpretation of the pieces, and of the project as a whole, brings forth resources capable of de-constructing dichotomies, building, in turn, nuances.

As a result of such frictions — frictions that can expand the interpretive abilities of a viewer — this project means — once more like the title — not one thing or the other, but both, none, or a number of them.

It is a collection of images and actions against value (worthless). It is an implicit and heartfelt nod to my late father (a kiss if you will). It is not worth the effort. It is an iniciatic rite that invokes the spirit of a bygone time and space. A serious matter. A joke. A collection of pastimes "for killing boredom [...] turning away from active-constructive activity, and, thus, facilitating the politics of subversive decentralization." [1] A bomb targeting the status quo. A journey through time. A Poetic gesture. A game of Kalah. A system of proportions. A conversation.

With love, Marco Bene.

[1] These are some of the words written by an informant of the Hungarian secret police (codename: Mészáros) after witnessing the first happening in Hungary: The Lunch (in memoriam Batu Khan), 1966; organised by Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby (codename: Schwitters), with the cooperation of Miklós Jankovics and István Varannai; and the help of Enikő Balla, Miklós Erdély, and Csaba Koncz.

Source: LINK