You are invited to the Kinstillatory Fire, with artists S.J. Norman and Razelle Benally.
Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring our practices, grammars, needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. Alot is happening in the time/space envelope of the kinstillatory that is care, that is necessary. This is a practice of provocating. This is an offering of seed, of vessel, of protection, of becomingness.
Artists
Oglala Lakota/Diné film director and writer Razelle Benally holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is currently a 3rd year MFA candidate of Film Production at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was a 2015 Sundance Institute NativeLab Short Film Production Fellow with her first short narrative I am Thy Weapon. In 2017 her two-hundred dollar budgeted thesis film Raven traveled the international film festival circuit and found local success winning several awards including best short narrative at: the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, Native Cinema Showcase, and the New Mexico Film Foundation.
In 2018 Benally directed a PSA promoting the Indigenous Vote featuring Mark Ruffalo, Tonia Jo Hall, and Shailene Woodley. Her latestshort narrative Ókiya was funded by Academy Award Winner Spike Lee and is currently in post-production for a December 2020 premiere. She is in development of two feature-length narratives: Winter in Black Mesa (pre-production 2022), and War Cries (pre-production 2023). She has received support from Sundance Institute’s 2018 Creative Producing Summit and is now being supported through the 2020 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program as part of the Screenwriters Intensive track. She is represented by Rain Management Group, a talent and creative firm out of Los Angeles, CA.
S.J. Norman is an artist, author and cultural worker. He is a transmasculine Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Since 2006 he has lived and worked between so-called Australia, Germany, the UK and the continent known to many Native tribes as Turtle Island (US).
His practice is routed through the volatile interstices of the social and the corporeal. His artistic and curatorial praxes are sites of ongoing, situated research into the body and its extended field of political, cultural, physical and metaphysical interactions. Drawing on embodied ancestral lineages of ceremonial praxis, Norman frequently utilises relational and process-based choreographies as a mode of structural critique: reflected in his work is an abiding interest in the space of co- and inter-corporeality, the forces that suffuse it, and how the live act might be utilised as a mean to examine, disrupt and re-inscribe prevailing systems of social power.
He was the recipient of the the 67th Blake Prize for Art, a 2018 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and a 2019 Australia Council Fellowship. His most recent exhibitions include the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia. His work has been featured in Artforum, the New York Times, and Vogue Magazine, among many others. A forthcoming monograph of his practice will be published by Art+Australia in 2023. Since 2019 he has been the co-curator (with Joseph M. Pierce, Cherokee Nation), of Knowledge of Wounds, a multi-disciplinary platform centering queer and trans First Nations artists, writers, healers and cultural workers.
He is also a poet and storyteller: his first book, the short story collection Permafrost, won the Kill Your Darlings Prize for Unpublished Manuscript in 2017, and upon publication in 2021, was shortlisted for 6 major literary awards in Australia, including the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in two categories, and the Stella Prize. His second book, Blood from a Stone, is forthcoming with the University of Queensland press in 2023.