The Kitchen Announces Upcoming Programming in Its Video Viewing Room
Featuring Recent Work by Jiajia Zhang (November 13 - December 10, 2024) and Patricia Domínguez (December 11, 2024 - January 8, 2025)
The Kitchen announces two upcoming offerings in its Video Viewing Room, The Kitchen’s On Screen platform for recent video works and archival recordings. The free, online program revives The Kitchen’s series of the same name that existed between 1975 and the early 1990s, then as a dedicated space within its buildings.
Video Viewing Room’s upcoming programs, in conjunction with The Kitchen’s fall season programming, begin with Social Gifts (November 13 - December 10, 2024), a handheld, single-channel video by Zürich-based digital media and video artist and photographer Jiajia Zhang. Filmed in Rome and Milan, Social Gifts captures facets of urban planning, touristic herd mentality, and influencer culture around heavily trafficked cultural attractions.
Tres lunas más abajo (Three Moons Below), on view December 11, 2024 - January 8, 2025, is an ambitious feature-length film from Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez, finding communion between spiritual and quantum realms (through access to experiments at CERN as well as the ESO astronomical facilities in Chile), and advocating an expansion of our vocabulary around what we cannot see or understand. Before becoming available in The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room, the film made its U.S. premiere at MoMA on November 11.
Functioning at first as a resource facility where visitors could watch their own tapes or view videos from The Kitchen’s archive and collection, in fall 1978 the Video Viewing Room began to feature curated programs of artists’ videos. In keeping with The Kitchen’s continued dedication to seeking new modes of distribution for interdisciplinary art, this newer digital iteration offers a version of The Kitchen untethered from any specific location, with works viewable everywhere.
About the Video Viewing Room Films/Artists
Jiajia Zhang: Social Gifts (2023) The Kitchen On Screen November 13 - December 10, 2024
Video Viewing Room presents a recent, single-channel video by Swiss artist Jiajia Zhang. Filmed in high-traffic zones in Milan and Rome, Zhang’s handheld footage zooms in on details of urban planning as well as the herd instincts on display in the crush of mediatized tourism and commerce. Alongside this, two textual elements unfurl simultaneously: the onscreen text culls from corporate and academic writing related to the social media influencer today, while the voiceover reads excerpts of Gertrude Stein’s 1936 essay "What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them?” The recitation of Stein’s slippery prose about malleable concepts such as identity, history, and time jockeys against and bleeds into the more familiar descriptors of the role of the content creator and their new, nebulous forms of creative labor and self-surveillance.
Jiajia Zhang works across different digital media, video, and photography, which she presents in spatial installations. Based in Zürich, she studied architecture at ETH, Zürich; photography at the International Center of Photography, NY; and art at ZhDK in Zürich. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at Istituto Svizzero, Milan; Giorno Poetry Systems NY; Kunsthaus St.Gallen; Fluentum Berlin; Swiss Art Awards, Basel; FriArt, Fribourg; Kunsthaus Glarus; and Fondation d'entreprise Pernod Ricard, Paris, among others.
Patricia Domínguez: Three Moons Below (2024) The Kitchen On Screen December 11, 2024 - January 8, 2025
Exploring and expanding on her ongoing investigation into the intersections of ecology, technology, and art, Patricia Domínguez’s feature length film Three Moons Below (2024) captures the scope of her artistic practice that ranges from ethnobotany and astronomy to ancestral knowledge and scientific innovation. The artist produced Three Moons Below during her Simetría Residency that was split between two locations – CERN in Geneva and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomy facilities in Chile: Antofagasta, La Silla and the ALMA observatory (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO). Created with the goal to establish a cadence of interdisciplinary exchange between artists and scientists working or living in Switzerland and Chile, the Simetría Residency enabled Domínguez to produce her most ambitious project so far: an urgent yet playful invocation for a more harmonious relationship between technology and nature. The film captures these locations as varying realms traversed by Domínguez’s protagonist and her animatronic bird as they encounter fantastical and natural environments populated by living, spiritual, and mechanical forms. Reflecting on the relationships between ritual, art, and science, Three Moons Below draws viewers into a space of discovery that ultimately advocates for a more enlightened and sustainable mode of existence between technological and natural worlds.
Patricia Domínguez was born in Santiago, Chile in 1984, and lives and works in Puchuncaví, Chile. Through a wide variety of media, Domínguez draws upon myths, symbols, rituals and healing practices, combining artistic imagination with experimental research on ethnobotany. Domínguez works with watercolors, ceramics, sculptural assemblages and video installations to create shrine-like imagery derived from a visual vocabulary that spans from plant life, mass market goods, corporate wellness schemes and the digital world. Her multilayered artistic approach is informed by the wide scope of her education and research; her MFA from Hunter College, New York is supplemented by a Botanical Illustration Certificate from the New York Botanical Garden, a residency at CERN to learn about quantum physics, non-locality and entanglement, and time spent in Peru learning from a plant healer and researching beliefs around interconnectivity and multi-species spirit in the plant world. Dominguez is also the founder of Studio Vegetalista, an experimental platform for ethnobotanical research based in Chile.
Funding Credits
Video Viewing Room was initiated with the support of the NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund in The New York Community Trust; annual grants from Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation and Howard Gilman Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
The Kitchen’s programs are made possible in part with support from The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, The Kitchen Global Council, Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council, as well as through generous support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Cowles Charitable Trust, The James and Judith K. Dimon Foundation, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, New Music USA, The Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, Ruth Foundation For The Arts, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Simons Foundation, and Teiger Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts; and in part by public funds from the Manhattan Borough President, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
The Kitchen acknowledges the generous support provided by the Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY). As a coalition of small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts organizations, CANNY is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of arts nonprofits throughout New York. For more information about CANNY, please visit https://can-ny.org/.