On View: October 27-December 31, 2022
The Kitchen at Westbeth (163 Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft)
Sharmi Basu: #HOWDOIFINDYOU? with Jesús
Hilario-Reyes
October 27, 7 pm
Westbeth (163 Bank Street,
4th Floor Loft)
Tickets: SOLD OUT
Video Viewing Room: Will Lee: [All it does is turn](https://thekitchen.org/on-screen/all-it-does-is-turn/)
Premiering in November
The Kitchen
OnScreen
Tyler Morse and Nia Nottage: NYC Performance Archive 1980–2005
Oral histories to be conducted beginning in fall 2022
Building on the research they conducted as participants in The Kitchen’s 2021 Research Residency, Sharmi Basu, Will Lee, and Tyler Morse and nia nottage of steph christ collective present new projects drawing on their engagements with the institutional archive.
In October, Basu will organize a performance event titled #HOWDOIFINDYOU?. Featuring the artist performing as Beast Nest along with invited guest multidisciplinary artist, DJ, and producer Jesús Hilario-Reyes (also known as MORENXX), the event centers experimental sound artists of color coming together in a present-day intervention into the archive. The artist additionally presents a new piece of printed ephemera for takeaway that marks this program’s place within a lineage of The Kitchen’s events. By creating and distributing a new resource that counters gaps in the archival records, Basu invites audiences to consider: Who is archived starting when? Who is left out and who is fighting to be seen? If the folks who are creating work as a means of fighting for survival are left out, what purpose does the avant-garde serve?
In November, in The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, Lee will present a new videogame that draws on his exploration of selected videos, exhibitions, and performances represented in The Kitchen’s archive. The game, All it does is turn, is a short necro-drama where the player speaks to denizens of the Mulch while investigating a string of historical misadventures.
In fall 2022, Morse and nottage will begin conducting oral histories for the NYC Performance Archive 1980–2005, a forthcoming open source platform that will house the oral histories and digitized ephemera of artists and collectives involved in performance practice during a particular period of the discipline’s evolution in New York City. The archive will center the voices of LGBT individuals, women, and artists of color.
2021 Research Residency Projects are organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, with Daniella Brito, The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation Fellow.
BIOS
Sharmi Basu is a multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, and arts organizer born and based in the unceded territories of Chochenyo Ohlone peoples, also known as Oakland, California. They create sound and performance pieces that address vulnerability, accountability, and experiences of diaspora by creating new narratives for decolonial thinking toward individual and collective liberation. Their primary performance project, Beast Nest, shows us that the abstract and immaterial experiences of trauma can be transformed through the process of creation in art and sound. They believe that transcending the emotional landscape through active presence is the key to accessing multidimensionality and work with these ideas in their Sound and Liberation workshops, their curatorial projects, and their BIPOC improvisation group, the Mara Performance Collective. They received their MFA from Mills College and have hosted a number of workshops internationally that center on sound healing, decolonization, and conflict & accountability, as well as technical skill-shares. They have performed for SFMOMA, YBCA, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Cluster Festival, Ableton Loop, the International Symposium of Improvised Music, Soundwave SF, Human Resources LA, and many other spaces throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. They have exhibited work at Coaxial, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, Counterpulse, Gray Area, and the Smithsonian.
Will Lee is an artist based in New York. He is interested in video games as a medium for exploring a zero-degree aesthetics, or the minimal conditions for experience. Games reveal how something can be perfectly intelligible, but utterly meaningless by playing with concepts, actions, and rules. In 2018–2019, he was an artist fellow at Ashkal Alwan and completed the studio program at the Whitney ISP in 2022.
Tyler Morse is a 2020 Larry J. Hackman fellow with New York State Archives, a Wendy’s Subway resident with Rider Alsop (as Porosity Press x BAILFRONT), and in collaboration with nia nottage and steph christ collective, a 2021 Research Resident with The Kitchen. She co-operates Porosity Press and BAILFRONT, a donation-based bail fundraising operation. She’s interested in undermining prisons as a barrier to organizing and exchange, and the question, “How can a press be a shared resource?” She is an arts program associate alongside collaborator Willie Kearse at the Parole Preparation Project, codeveloping a series of archive-based creative workshops. She’s the author of Hearing/s (No, Dear, 2020), and lives and writes poems about her friends in Brooklyn.
nia nottage is an archives + community organizer /and// media artist. Their projects aim to transform markers of time and place in contemporary media. Their interests include community archives, porn, somatics, and the production of a world with less work and more reward. They are a 2021 Kitchen Research Resident in collaboration with Tyler Morse and Steph Christ Collective. + They are currently accepting advice and donations for the launch of ‘come forever,’ a co-op arts/community center in Brooklyn, New York.
steph christ is a fag communist collective of artists, archivists, and activists, as well as a small press - find us at http://stephs.net
FUNDING SUPPORT & CREDITS
Sharmi Basu: #HOWDOIFINDYOU? is made possible with residency support from Keith Haring Foundation; endowment support from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; annual grants from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Howard Gilman Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels 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 the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.