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Kearra Amaya Gopee, video still from "Ca(r)milla," 2023 (working title). Image courtesy of the artist.

Fall 2023 Video Viewing Rooms

Credits:

By The Kitchen

June 14, 2023

Announcing Our Fall 2023 Video Viewing Rooms

On Screen as part of the ongoing Video Viewing Room series, which makes new and recent video works and archival recordings available online, the season’s offerings begin with a collaboration with The Millennium Film Workshop, founded in 1966 to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios. This June, The Kitchen teams up with the organization to present both archival and contemporary materials reflecting on their overlapping institutional histories. Later in the season, Video Viewing Room features work from troizel and Buffy (July 2023), Kearra Amaya Gopee (September 2023), and Wong Kit Yi (December 2023).

Millennium Film Workshop: Open Screenings
June 2023

Since its founding in 1966, The Millennium Film Workshop has maintained a mission to make the tools and practice of moving-image art accessible for all. These efforts historically have included educational workshops; low-or-no-cost equipment rentals; and, importantly, exhibition opportunities for burgeoning, radical, and unsung talents. For this Video Viewing Room, Millennium and The Kitchen collaborate on a presentation of archival and contemporary materials that explores the overlapping histories of these two institutions' efforts to support experimental video art and film practice. Centering on a program format that was central to both The Kitchen and Millennium's founding ethos—the “Open Screening” model that invites artists to screen their work without any barriers to submission—this Video Viewing Room looks at The Kitchen and Millennium's shared investments in open access and resource sharing as modes of promoting advancements in artistic practice.

Video Viewing Room: Millennium Film Workshop is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, The Kitchen, and Joe Wakeman, Executive Director, Millennium Film Workshop.

troizel and Buffy: waves
July 2023

troizel xx is black and alive and the queerness of this fact means much more than even these words can express. On the whole, their praxis wrestles with the laborious and spectacular nature of blackness, limitations of the body, and queer socialities and intimacies. For The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, troizel enters into dialogue with Buffy, The Kitchen’s 2022–2023 Curatorial Fellow, to present a selection of video, media, and text engaged with the concept of waves—the ebbs and flows of the transitive, transitory, transmissional, transdimensional, transatlantic, transpoetic (im)materialities of trans life.

troizel and Buffy: waves is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, and Angelique Rosales Salgado, Curatorial Assistant.

Kearra Amaya Gopee: Ca(r)milla
September 2023

Kearra Amaya Gopee is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago, currently based in New York. Gopee works across video, installation, and text to investigate the reverberations of coloniality and historical anti-Black violence in the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas. In doing so, the artist unearths embodied practices of maroonage, speaking to legacies of Black resistance, rage, and catharsis. For The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, Gopee will premiere a new video work that converges archetypes from Trinidadian folklore with logics of speculative fiction to process grief.

Kearra Amaya Gopee: Ca(r)milla is organized by Daniella Brito, The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation Fellow.

Wong Kit Yi
December 2023

Wong Kit Yi is an artist who explores biological answers to metaphysical questions, dealing with odd scientific findings and the dysfunctional relationship between what is considered science and pseudoscience. Wong also investigates the contractual relationship, working with such ideas as patron collaboration through ninety-nine-year leases for her artworks. Her interests are always subject to change. For The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, Wong will present a selection of video and media related to her explorations of The Kitchen’s archival holdings.

Video Viewing Room: Wong Kit Yi is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator.

BIOS

The Millennium Film Workshop was founded in 1966 by a group of filmmakers with a vision to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios. Millennium has put on countless educational workshops, artist-hosted screenings, printed our renowned publication The Millennium Film Journal, served as a production hub kickstarting the careers of many prominent filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Todd Haynes, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneeman, Michael Snow, Barbara Hammer, and Nick Zedd; and has played a large role in dismantling the monetary and educational barriers separating the art and craft of filmmaking from the general public.

troizel xx (pronouns: troizel/they) holds a bachelor of art in theater studies from emory university and a master of art and master of philosophy and Ph.D. in performance studies from nyu. They held a teaching fellowship position at New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC and are an alum of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics New York Emerging Performers Program (EMERGENYC). They currently serve as managing editor of women & performance: a journal of feminist theory.

Buffy is an artist and writer. She produces and researches live performance and digital media. Buffy reads and writes about sex, science, fiction, and language. She composes text, dance, video, music, image, installation, and public programs. Her work examines embodied experiences of movement and sound in procedural settings, horror, and medical technology, usually with a spatter or a gush of transsexual glamour and gore

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and atemporal--leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present, and possible afterlives. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place—after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. They hold an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (Interdisciplinary Studio); BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University, and are an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently, they are a fellow at Queer|Art. In 2023, they will participate in residencies at MacDowell and The Center for Photography at Woodstock.

Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Her works have been included in projects organized by Tate Modern (London, 2023); FRONT Triennial (Cleveland, 2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2021); Public Art Fund (New York, 2020); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019); Surplus Space (Wuhan, 2018); the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga, 2017). She was a resident at the Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence program (Marfa, 2021), received an MFA from Yale University, and has been teaching university courses about performance, video art, and new media. When she is not teaching, she loves lecturing people in her signature karaoke-inspired lecture format. She is the co-chair of LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Hong Kong, and a die-hard member of KFC (kombucha fan club).