Jan 19, 2017

Dear Friends, Describing The Kitchen’s very beginnings, founders Woody and Steina Vasulka once recalled how an informal gathering among like-minded individuals devoted to video quickly grew into a venue for artists of all stripes, working in music, dance, performance, literature, and art: “Basically, The Kitchen became a place for everybody who didn’t have a home.” It’s something casually said, yet with incredible implications. Such a premise extends to the fundamental concept of nonprofit and alternative organizations as they came into being during the past half century: that there is a living need for institutions whose very existence is defined through our recognizing, accommodating, and sustaining the value of diversity and difference. And this idea continues to guide the organizat... Read On

Dec 13, 2016

Dear Friends, The Kitchen is proud to announce its Winter 2017 season, which presents remarkable new works and premieres by artists from New York and around the world. Opening the year, Philippe Quesne’s singular La Mélancolie des dragons makes its New York debut (January 10–14), featuring a band of travelers whose car breaks down in the forest, prompting them to create a heavy-metal-themed amusement park. Also in January, artists Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina collaborate on their exhibition, “Asymmetrical Response,” which traces the Internet’s cultural shift from a military technology to a platform for the free exchange of information, and, finally, the ambiguous “content delivery system” we know today. And Paulina Olowska teams with choreographer Katy Pyle and composer Sergei ... Read On

Oct 26, 2016

“To turn our private grief at the loss of friends, family, lovers and strangers into something public would serve as another powerful dismantling tool. It would dispel the notion that this virus has a sexual orientation or the notion that the government and medical community has done very much to ease the spread or advancement of this disease.” - David Wojnarowicz in October, 1989 Still from We Interrupt this Program (1991), directed by Charles Atlas and produced by Robin Schanzenbach, Mary Ellen Strom and Barbara Tsumagari in conjunction with The Kitchen and Visual AIDS. Pictured: Lucy Sexton of DANCENOISE. By 1991, New York was rocked by AIDS. Many artists recall that it seemed one either knew-someone or knew-someone-who-knew-someone who had died of the epidemic. Lucy Sexton ... Read On

Aug 29, 2016

If we define “analog” as a continuous variable which has no “truth” function, no negative, and no zero, and, “digital” as information composed of discrete values or states, then, moving from analog to digital requires not merely difference, but distinction. One is not equal to zero, human is not equal to machine, and there is nothing in between. Moreover, in so far as language involves digitizing our analog experience, whether we scratch a word on a stone tablet or “process” it with software, we have always been digital. In We Have Never Been Modern , Bruno Latour argues that modern civilization has secularized rituals of purification to create boundaries between “nature” and “culture,” “human” and “thing,” even as we construct hybrid systems that mix politics, art, technology, and bi... Read On

Aug 18, 2016

In the current retrospective of experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner at the Museum of Modern Art, the film A Movie is the first work the viewer encounters. In 1980, during a festival entitled Filmworks , Conner's films were presented at The Kitchen for the first time. As part of this series, Bruce Conner (1933-2008) showed four of his works: A Movie (1958), Report (1963-1967), Mongoloid (1978), and Valse Trieste (1977), among which the first two are currently on view at MoMA. Filmworks introduced the work of nineteen other experimental filmmakers, including David Hazton with Painting Room Lights (1980), Janet Stein with God’s Police (1980), Yvonne Rainer with Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), and Peter Wollen with Riddles of the Sphinx (1976) among many others. The Filmworks series wa... Read On