Nov 20, 2018

Leila Bordreuil is a composer and cellist whose current work is based in noise music and improvisation. In 2012, Bordreuil received her BA in Electronic Music and Electronic Arts from Bard College, where she studied with Marina Rosenfeld and Richard Teitelbaum. Bordreuil has previously performed at The Kitchen with Eli Keszler. She now returns to present her own composition, Piece for Cello and Double Bass Ensemble II, the debut of this iteration in her most recent series. This piece will feature Leila’s largest ensemble yet, using six bassists to create dense texture and physical sensation. We had the opportunity to ask Leila a few questions regarding her influences and thought processes surrounding her upcoming performance. Leila Bordreuil will perform Piece for Cello and Double Ba... Read On

Aug 28, 2018

For decades at The Kitchen, artists have challenged habits and convention through art, reweaving and reorienting our culture–often while bringing together, with a nearly utopian impulse, under-recognized histories and the most urgent contemporary issues. This season is no exception, opening with a solo exhibition by Chitra Ganesh, who takes up turn-of-the-century social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat's sci-fi novel Sultana's Dream (1905) to reimagine the roles of the individual and the collective during periods of societal turbulence. Following Ganesh in our gallery will be a video and sound installation by Jibade-Khalil Huffman engaging the legacy of black music as a tool of resistance and, as pointedly, considering how societal conditions often ask for a performance of identity e... Read On

Jun 11, 2018

Through your support this season, so many artists at The Kitchen have created and presented incredible artwork, both making history and forging new connections with it: from the warped video of Meriem Bennani to the cavernous sound of Camae Ayewa/Moor Mother and Catherine Lamb, and from the legendary chords of The Raincoats to the giant steps of the Jazz Passengers. And this is to say nothing of an unprecedented performance program celebrating the legacy of Julius Eastman , with an exhibition curated by Tiona Nekkia McClodden; the continually radical choreographies of Sarah Michelson and Stanley Love; and a genre-redefining installation and cabaret by Charles Atlas with Julianna Barwick, The Illustrious Blacks , and IMMA, among so many others. It has been a remarkable season. Ye... Read On

May 15, 2018

Last month, The Kitchen was thrilled to celebrate artists Nan Goldin and Lydia Lunch at our 2018 Spring Gala. During the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, icons Goldin and Lunch were vanguards of post-punk New York. Both women have presented their work at The Kitchen throughout the years, consistently returning to premiere new works that went on to exemplify their careers. Nan Goldin’s portraiture of her close-knit circle of friends in New York became emblematic of a generation’s grappling with the social issues of the time, from the epidemic of drug addiction to the AIDS crisis. Lydia Lunch is revered as a radical progenitor of No Wave music, fronting the influential Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and collaborating with acts like JG Thirlwell, Birthday Party, and Sonic Youth. Lunch has a broad ar... Read On

May 4, 2018

By now we know that the future is most definitely femme, but the question still remains: what is feminine and who decided what it should be? Since her invention in 1959, Barbie has served as a body onto which ideas of womanhood and femininity have been mapped. As cultural critic and journalist M.G. Lord wrote in her book Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (Walker & Company 1994), "At worst, Barbie projected an anomalous message; at best, she was a sort of feminist pioneer. And her meaning, like her face, has not been static over time." Some of Barbie's many reconstructions include her 1967 twist-able waist and a swath of mascara, and her 1971 post-sexual revolution, Malibu edition, whose painted-on eyes, for the first time in Barbie's history, gazed outward... Read On