The Kitchen Presents Lines of Distribution, November 21–January 25
In a Cross-Institutional Dialogue with Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF (Lofoten, Norway) and Its Organizer North Norwegian Art Centre, The Kitchen Reanimates Aspects of Past Programming That Promoted the Distribution and Circulation of Art
Exhibition Features New Work by Artists—Including a Video by Wong Kit Yi Co-Commissioned for LIAF 2024 and Lines of Distribution, and Extensions of Projects Presented at LIAF 2024 by Viktor Bomstad, Elise Macmillan, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed—and Materials from The Kitchen Archives that Contextualize the Cross-institutional Initiative Within the Institution’s History
The Kitchen presents Lines of Distribution, an exhibition at The Kitchen at Westbeth (163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft) that engages the institution’s history of presenting and disseminating avant-garde art for over fifty years (November 21–January 25). Lines of Distribution asks: In what ways can experimental practices from previous eras springboard new strategies for the dissemination of art across today’s global and digital circuits? Taking up this question, the exhibition reanimates aspects of The Kitchen’s past programming through a cross-institutional dialogue with Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF (Lofoten, Norway) and its organizer North Norwegian Art Centre. Lines of Distribution brings together new works by Viktor Bomstad, Elise Macmillan, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Wong Kit Yi that have emerged from or been shaped by the artists’ engagements with both LIAF 2024 and The Kitchen’s local and institutional contexts. The exhibition presents these works in tandem with materials from The Kitchen Archives in sections that bring to light the ways this cross-institutional exchange falls within a lineage of The Kitchen’s rich programmatic history and that reveal how the individual artists reflected on the New York art center’s traditions through their own research processes.
Lines of Distribution is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, The Kitchen, with Curatorial Advisor Kjersti Solbakken, Curator, LIAF 2024 and Director, Bergen Kunsthall. The exhibition will be on view November 21, 2024–January 25, 2025, with holiday closures: November 27–30, 2024; December 25, 2024–January 4, 2025. Gallery Hours are Wednesday–Saturday, 12–6pm. Opening programs will take place live in the gallery on November 22 and 23, and additionally will be livestreamed on TK ON AIR (thekitchen.org), with recordings subsequently screening online and in the gallery throughout the run of the show. Friday, November 22 will feature an opening reception with a performance by Elise Macmillan and other artist presentations to be announced (7pm). On Saturday, November 23, an artist roundtable will see select artists from the exhibition in conversation with the exhibition’s organizers (4pm). In a precursor to Macmillan’s participation in the November exhibition, Live from Sørvågen Radio, a recording of a concert the artist performed in Lofoten on September 7, will broadcast on October 23 at 1pm on Montez Press Radio —a New York-based broadcasting and performance platform formerly in residence with The Kitchen for a year between 2022 and 2023. See below for additional details on public programming.
Lines of Distribution marks the culmination of a long-term exchange between The Kitchen and LIAF 2024, which revolved around shared research and curatorial investments in revisiting historical processes for disseminating information, ideas, and art. The exhibition locates The Kitchen’s institutional ties to this subject in a subset of programming that flourished primarily from the 1970s through 1990s: programs that extended beyond the institution’s New York space to distribute the art forms it supported throughout the United States and abroad. Focusing on examples from the first two decades of the The Kitchen’s endeavors, Lines of Distribution’s archival sections spotlight a range of the program frameworks the institution developed: initiatives to create print materials such as artist-designed posters, monthly programming calendars, and annual publications aggregating program documentation; television programming that spanned from experiments with live cablecasting to made-for-television artworks; a video distribution program that made artists’ works available to museums, educational institutions, and broadcasters; and touring programs that brought artists on the road nationally and internationally to stage presentations of music, dance, performance, and video. The exhibition showcases rarely seen objects from The Kitchen Archives related to these programming areas, laying the groundwork to consider the extent to which contemporary collaborations like the one with LIAF 2024 might carry forward or adapt such traditions.
For its part, LIAF 2024 (on view at various venues in Lofoten from September 20–October 20, 2024) found impetus in local history to reexamine the channels through which information is distributed, taking as its starting point the Lofoten Line—a regional telegraph system between nine sites in Lofoten that became the second in the world to support wireless communication in 1906. Titled SPARKS, LIAF 2024 derived inspiration from the Lofoten Line to initiate a present-day, international network of relationships, projects, and presentations through which artists and institutions could transmit signals.
Drawing on the resonances between LIAF 2024 and The Kitchen’s historical references and contemporary aims, North Norwegian Art Centre and The Kitchen partnered to establish a temporary distribution channel for art and artists between Lofoten and New York. A guiding aim for this collaboration has been to reimagine modes of artistic and cultural exchange that go beyond the model of one-way transmission to spark reciprocal relations between participating institutions and artists. Centering this goal, North Norwegian Art Centre and The Kitchen conceived a method for working together with artists that not only would invite them to travel their works between the exhibitions SPARKS and Lines of Distribution, but also would create opportunities for them to develop or evolve their projects in dialogue with the specificities of each presentation context.
The contemporary works in Lines of Distribution resulting from this partnership include Wong Kit Yi’s new video Made for Telefishion (2024), co-commissioned by The Kitchen and LIAF 2024/North Norwegian Art Centre and pulling from the artist’s experiences studying The Kitchen Archives and conducting research visits to sites associated with the Lofoten Line. Charting a network of speculative associations, the video links The Kitchen to Lofoten by way of Wong’s family home of Hong Kong. Tapping into questions around television as a mode of communication and distribution, Made for Telefishion takes shape as an experimental TV episode that blends elements of (soap) opera and karaoke while exploring the intersections of domestic life, politics, art, and mass media. Following its premiere in Lofoten as part of SPARKS, Made for Telefishion appears in New York alongside a display of materials from The Kitchen's Archives that reveals the work’s ties to specific examples from The Kitchen’s past programming—including the made-for-television “arts and entertainment special” Two Moon July (1986), directed by Tom Bowes and produced for The Kitchen by Carlota Schoolman, and “Young American Artists” (1980) a European tour produced by The Kitchen in cooperation with the United States International Communication Agency that comprised twenty presentations of music, dance, performance art, and video across Stockholm, West Berlin, Paris, and Holland.
Works in Lines of Distribution by Viktor Bomstad, Elise Macmillan, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed further reflect the range of ways The Kitchen and North Norwegian Art Centre collaborated to foster conditions under which artists could connect with cultural and institutional histories in Lofoten and New York. These artists’ projects are represented in the gallery display in forms such as documentation, ephemera, notes, and works on paper. These forms make visible the artistic processes through which the artists evolve or expand upon the projects they presented at LIAF 2024, iterating or creating new works to appear at The Kitchen. Lines of Distribution also extends outside the physical space of the gallery, taking up The Kitchen’s commitment to using print material as a mode of distribution through a commissioned print project by Rasheed that will be posted throughout New York City. Similarly, aspects of the exhibition transmit online through livestreams of performances and public programs and subsequent screenings of these recordings on The Kitchen’s broadcast platform, TK ON AIR (thekitchen.org).
Taken together, the archival and contemporary elements of the exhibition coalesce to illuminate historical traditions while simultaneously enacting new possibilities for how artworks can travel across different networks in the present. Against the backdrop of a landscape in which the distribution and circulation of art occurs at ever-increasing speeds across globalized exhibition circuits and in digital space, Lines of Distribution endeavors to slow down these processes to consider the role institutions play in setting artworks into motion and the ways the meaning and associations of artistic projects evolve as they move through different cultural and institutional contexts.
Public Programming Schedule and Details
Montez Press Radio Broadcast, in collaboration with Lofoten International Art Festival 2024 and The Kitchen Elise Macmillan Live from Sørvågen Radio October 23, 1pm ET Online
It would take 46 days to row a boat nonstop from Sørvågen, Norway to New York City. This is the amount of delay of the live broadcast on Montez Press Radio of a concert by Elise Macmillan that took place on September 7, 2024 at Sørvågen Radio, the former telegraph station in a remote fishing village far west in the Lofoten Islands of Northern Norway.
For the performance at Sørvågen Radio, Macmillan played long fiddle bows made from magnetic tape, instruments made from walkmans and answering machines, and bows made from the hair of an unusually tall horse. This concert was a central component of Macmillan's project for Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF 2024: SPARKS (on view in Lofoten, Norway September 20–October 20, 2024). Following this event in Sørvågen, the artist performed with a tape bow ensemble in Svolvær, Norway as part of the opening program for LIAF 2024. Macmillan will continue to evolve the work for inclusion in the exhibition Lines of Distribution at The Kitchen in New York.
Live from Sørvågen Radio features Kjell Alf Øye, Carl Schrecongost, Kaja Krakowian, Joseph Helland, Jonatan Nilsson, Today's Favorite Singers, Kjersti Solbakken, and Dávvet Bruun-Solbakk.
Lines of Distribution Performances, Featuring Elise Macmillan
Friday, November 22, 2024, 7pm ET
In-person at The Kitchen at Westbeth (Free, RSVP required) and livestreamed on TK ON AIR
In a program celebrating the opening of Lines of Distribution, Elise Macmillan performs a new iteration of Surprised Everytime (2024), a sonic work developed and presented in stages through the artist’s collaboration with LIAF 2024 and The Kitchen. Reflecting on the kinds of information held in different man-made and natural materials and the possible means of communicating such data, the performance features a suite of instruments made by Macmillan and her collaborator Carl Schrecongost including long fiddle bows made from magnetic tape, devices made from walkmans and answering machines, and bows made from the hair of an unusually tall horse. Surprised Everytime animates the instruments in an enigmatic chorus while weaving associations to choreography, mythology, choral singing traditions, acoustic dampening techniques for noise pollution, radio shows, and the history of signal transmission.
Macmillan first performed Surprised Everytime solo as part of LIAF 2024: SPARKS on September 7 at the former telegraph station, Sørvågen Radio, in Lofoten; a recording of that concert will be broadcast on Montez Press Radio on October 23 at 1pm (see description above). With a tape bow ensemble, Macmillan staged a second iteration of the work in Svolvær in Lofoten as part of the opening program for LIAF 2024. For the performance at The Kitchen, Macmillan and Schrecongost add new layers to Surprised Everytime by engaging with audio recordings in The Kitchen Archives. Stitching together these archival sonic materials, the artists create a composition that they dub onto magnetic tapes and play as bows in the performance with an ensemble featuring Kaja Krakowian and Joseph Wolf Helland.
The evening will include additional artist presentations to be announced, with a reception to follow.
Opening Reception and Artist Roundtable
Saturday, November 23, 2024. Opening Reception at 12–4pm ET; Artist Roundtable 4–6pm ET
In-person at The Kitchen at Westbeth (Free, RSVP required)
Artist Roundtable livestreamed on TK ON AIR
Continuing the opening weekend celebration for Lines of Distribution, The Kitchen hosts an Opening Reception and Artist Roundtable on November 23. Following the reception, the roundtable conversation begins at 4pm with select artists featured in Lines of Distribution engaging in dialogue with the exhibition’s organizers about their contributions. Taking up questions around what artistic and cultural exchange means today and how institutions can work together to foster opportunities for engagement across contexts, the speakers discuss the artistic and curatorial processes that unfolded as a result of the cross-institutional collaboration between The Kitchen and LIAF 2024.
About the Artists
Viktor Bomstad is a traditional joiker and experimental guitarist from the north of Sápmi/Norway. He is the current regional joiker of the two northernmost counties in Norway, a one-of-a-kind employment in Norway that seeks to promote exciting joikers in the region. Bomstad is passionate about exploring different sonic traditions and pushing the boundaries of how joik can be heard in new contexts and mixed with different genres. He is regularly seen on the Norwegian experimental scene in different constellations both as a solo artist and in different bands. In 2022, Bomstad released his first solo album Sámi Noise on Nice Things Records. The album is an exploration of how joik can shape improvisation on instruments and includes guitars, synthesizers, and sampled archive materials of joik-performances and interviews with traditional joiker Per Hætta. Bomstad’s music tends to be gritty, trance inducing, and feverish, with a heavy emphasis on improvisation. His band Sex Magick Wizards has garnered a cult following in psychedelic rock clubs in Norway and Germany, with their third album Death Grip being released in August 2024 on Nice Things Records.
In September 2024, Bomstad’s new project Devil’s Kin premiered at Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF 2024. The work is an audiovisual performance exploring old colonizers’ myths and representations of Sámi people, mixing them with references to genuine local Sámi folklore and important places.
Elise Macmillan is a violinist, artist, and musician. Since moving from the US to Norway in 2015 to play Hardanger Fiddle, she has composed music for wandering choir, string ensemble, and percussionists. Her projects range from sculptural installations to sound works accessible as a telephone hotline. In the Shade of the String (Breton Cassette, Oslo) is a song cycle she mixed in a car stereo and released on endless loop tape.
Her music has been presented by the Lofoten International Art Festival, UKS, Kunstnernes Hus, nyMusikk, Music Norway, Landmark at Bergen Kunsthall, KAFÉ HÆRVERK, Destiny's, Haus der Kunst, Shedhalle Zurich, CCRMA, and Land, Kansas City. Recent collaborations include Niilas, Quatuor Bozzini, and the Norwegian percussion ensemble, Pinquins. As Emacs, she has opened for William Basinski, Vilde Tuv, Astrid Sonne, and Tomoko Sauvage, and her music has aired on radio stations including NTS, IDA Radio, and The Lake.
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation.
Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Her works have been included in projects organized by The Kitchen (New York, 2023); M+ (Hong Kong, 2023); 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 in the Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence program (Marfa, 2021). She received an MFA from Yale University. She has taught university courses about performance, video art, and new media and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (New York) in the MFA Fine Arts program. Even when not teaching, she can’t quit lecturing people, and continues to do so 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).
About North Norwegian Art Centre and Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF
North Norwegian Art Centre, Northern Norway's regional center for contemporary art, founded in 1979 by the region's artist associations, is a key player in North Norwegian art life and a professional resource for artists, our audiences, public and private organizations.
North Norwegian Art Centre runs a gallery in Svolvær, a residency house for artists, on the island of Svinøya in Svolvær. The centre develops productions, public art, and collaborations with artists and cultural institutions in the region. Every other year North Norwegian Art Centre organizes Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF. North Norwegian Art Centre is funded by the Arts Council Norway, the Counties of Finnmark, Nordland and Troms and the Municipality of Vågan.
Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF is the longest-running art biennial in Scandinavia. Presenting works by local and international artists in a location-conscious context, LIAF seeks to be an open and experimental meeting place for artists, contributors, collaborators and audiences. LIAF does not have a set venue but takes place at different locations in Lofoten each time it is held. LIAF is organized by North Norwegian Art Centre in collaboration with LIAF Artistic Advisory Board.