You are invited to the Kinstillatory Fire ✨June 20, 6-8 pm, in the backyard at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, LES, Lenapehoking.
Gather with a fire for our futures.
Curated by Ashley Pierre-Louis with artists Eternal Oyster (Jennae Santos of gushes), Ke’ron Wilson & friends, Kimiko Tanabe, Muyassar Kurdi, and a sharing from Eve Tuck.
Eternal Oyster is perpetually moved and held by site-and-community specificity. Ke’ron Wilson & friends transmute through music and poems. Kimiko Tanabe offers us a possibility toward communal remembering, a meditation on the relationship between eroticism, decay, and transformation. In the spirit of resistance, Muyassar Kurdi forwards a meditative embodiment with sounds from the Palestinian sound archive. Eve Tuck will attend to new intentions for collaborative Indigenous research in NYC, with and beyond the university, always for communities and lands and waters.
This special Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter is hosted, held, and lightly curated by Emily Johnson and Karyn Recollet, and is centered practices of rewording in celebration of Catalyst’s newest land-based project Build And Reworld Now. The fire is central and communities are invited to GATHER HERE as artists and organizers articulate our collective futures, our otherwise possibilities. Fireside, we bring practices, grammars and needs forward and through the portals fire allows. The fire itself is process, a way to bring us out of the catastrophe of now. A lot 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.
FREE! No registration required!
Ashley Pierre-Louis (she/her) is a dance artist and creator freelancing and exploring choreography in New York City. When making, she asks herself and audiences to imagine what our physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us is, and how we can share them collectively in order to create a sense of freedom in the mind and body.
Eternal Oyster (Jennae Santos of gushes) is a Filipinx Bay Area-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist building tactile mythos through eco-erotic performance, love and liberation song, and decolonized social practice.
Fed by Indigenous Filipino psychology and combat, the feminist occult, plant medicine, coastal ecologies, and animal architecture, their practice flows into three art containers: progressive art-rock project, gushes, earth-body research-response play, Eternal Oyster, and sensory installation partnership with Ana Vásquez, Tree+Oyster.
Eternal Oyster’s work encompasses chamber prog ensemble, dance music, movement cycle, tea ceremony, drone, ritual, video, sound sculpture and other intermedia incarnations as unbound, eternal expressions of liberation. They are perpetually moved and held by site-and-community specificity. They believe in food and climate justice, landback, and a Free Palestine.
Ke’ron J. Wilson (she/they) is a healing-centered transfemme movement artist, choreographer, model, actor, musician, and poet based out of New York City. Born in Lakeland Florida, Ke’ron began training at Harrison School for the Arts and Florida Dance Theater. After graduating with a BFA in dance from Sam Houston State University, her career began as a founding member of Social Movement Contemporary Dance Theater and as a recurring guest choreographer for the Pilot Dance Project in Houston, TX.
Ke’ron’s current creative research is deeply rooted in the spiritual possibilities that are born from art-making within queer community, aiming to decentralize singular perspectives and to expand understandings of queer/trans identity. In this process, she prioritizes care as the bridge to generative collaboration, and compassion as the key to rigorous self and social reflection. Ke’ron’s research has recently been supported by MNE’s Emerging Choreographer’s Series (2022-2024). In addition, she has also appeared on the Tamron Hall Show with Sonya Renee Taylor; on the New York Fashion Week runway as a model for Bad Binch Tong Tong’s SS24 collection; and continues to lead wellness/meditation portals, mostly in collaboration with the Angelito Collective, for the NYC Trans community when and where she can.
Ke’ron is now receiving support through Movement Research’s Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship, which is supported by the New York Community Trust through the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund.
Kimiko (she/her) is a yonsei dance artist creating surreal performance art that is both playful and haunting. Her work wanders into the afterlife of Japanese American internment where she wrestles with the joys and failures of the body as a site of remembering.
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. She currently focuses on interweaving electronic instruments into her embodied voice performances, stirring a plethora of emotions from her audience members through ritualistic chants, meditative movements, and sonic sound explorations.
Kurdi was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023 as well as the American Composer Forum. She was awarded a Roulette Intermedium 2020 commission and 2022 artist residency (with support from Jerome Foundation), and is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC.
Performance highlights include Poetry Project, Roulette Intermedium, Center For Performance Research, Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, Cafe OTO, Chicago Cultural Center, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia, Fridman Gallery, Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, and Judson Memorial Church as well as exhibitions and film screenings (solo and group works) at VIERTE WELT, Trieze Gallery, Knockdown Center, Queens Museum, Spectacle Theatre, and Anthology Film Archives. She taught workshops in movement and voice most notably in Portugal at Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, Bilgi University and Culture in Istanbul Turkey as well as a MoMA PS1 in NYC.
Eve Tuck is Professor of Indigenous Studies and James Weldon Johnson Professor at Steinhardt, in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, at New York University. She is the founding director of the new Provostial Center for Indigenous Studies at NYU.
Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska. She grew up outside of her community, living in Pennsylvania as a child, and New York City as a young adult. She earned a PhD in Urban Education from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York in 2008.
Presented with support from Anonymous Was A Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts, and from the Mid Atlantic Folk and Traditional Arts – Community Projects program of Mid Atlantic Arts with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.