A staircase to the roof. A drinking fountain. Just inside the fence. Evening.
Karolina Kubik with Gio Kusanagi

Since water can't absorb you back, artists Karolina Kubik and Gio Kusanagi invite you to engage more strategically with the force of liveliness and vigorous materiality of the unknown situation; they lead with the belief that matter is no longer a passive occurrence, but an active and dynamic agent that is unyielding, generative, resistant, vibrant, vigorous, resonating, suffering and becoming.

Karolina Kubik is a daughter of Bogumiła, sister of Katarzyna, granddaughter of Irena and Czesława who is a native of Poland. She is a visual performance poet and anti-fascist speculative researcher who makes use of repetition, laughter, new materialism and pro-peace activism, which supplies models for new behaviors. But first of all, she believes that abstract is revolutionary and that we must encourage the growth of the abstract rather than make a liberation theology of a cause and through that stand for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion, property, and government. What she believes is social order based on the free grouping of individuals. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (MFA, 2010) now, as the recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Student Grant, she is attending Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) in their MFA in Performance and Performance Studies. Kubik is also the recipient of the three-year-long scholarship for young researchers awarded by Polish Ministry of Science (2018).

Gio Kusanagiis a Japanese contemporary dancer/choreographer and holds a MA in Kinesiology, a Ph.D. in Psychology (Dance Therapy), and is a Certified Evans Method Modern Dance Instructor. He studied Butoh with Yoshito Ohno, Yukio Waguri, Seisaku & Yuri, and various other Butoh masters; Japanese sword dance with Kensei Namiki; American Modern Dance with Bill Evans, Angela Dennis, Kristina Isabelle, and Pilobolus Dance Company, Jazz Dance with Liz Rossi; Eurythmy with Akira Kasai and Jolanda Frischknecht, and Central Asian Dance with Narah Bint Durr. He integrates all these movement-arts and performs originally choreographed interpretive dance. Recently, he was an Artist in Residence at Center for Remembering and Sharing as well as at Leimay @ Cave from January 2016 through June 2016, an Artist in Residence at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance in June 2012, and a commissioned choreographer for the Asian American Dance Festival in Lower Manhattan in 2012.

Esther Neff is the founder of Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL), a flexible collective, thinktank, and lab site. Working across a spectrum between cultural organizing, institutional critique, collective ideation, discursive art, opera-of-operations, and performance art, Neff's work researches and directly practices social gathering, patterns of belief, and modes of communication. Projects have been performed at/through Momenta Art, The Kitchen, The New Museum, Abrons Arts Center, Glasshouse, Dixon Place, chashama, and The Wild Project (to name a few in NYC) and across the USA, via performance art festivals Rapid Pulse (Chicago), INVERSE (Fayetteville, AK), Tempting Failure (London), MPA-B (Berlin), Hitparaden (Copenhagen), WAKE (Folkstone, UK), New Genres (Tulsa, OK), Pittsburgh Performance Art Festival, ITINERANT (NYC), and in other contexts across visual arts, dance, theater, philosophy, and activism. Neff is the instigator of Brooklyn International Performance Art Foundation (BIPAF) and the organizer of the platform PERFORMANCY FORUM. Her writing on performance art has been published on culturebot, cultbytes, Hyperallergic, Peri0d, ICE-HOLE, Ohio Edit, etc and is forthcoming in a Routledge anthology.

www.estherneff.tumblr.com     www.panoplylab.org      www.estherneff.wordpress.com

Waqia Kareem is a black queer non-binary interdisciplinary artist from Baltimore, currently based in Brooklyn New York. They are a first year student in the MFA Performance and Performance Studies department at Pratt Institute.

Their work includes archival research, discourse analysis, theory, performance, text, sound and video and is centered around the black queer body: detailing the ways in which the black body is and has historically been subjugated, commodified and silenced, as well as imagining new and radical ways to reclaim and (re)inhabit such a body.

This body explores wounds; showing them and healing from them. Manifesting strength wrought from the fires of exhaustion and endurance- a form of compassionate resistance. Currently, enok is exploring displacement and orientation. Where does an invisiblized body belong? How do we create a sense of home within in our bodies while living in a society that wishes to dissapear us? How can we explore our bodies as authors of the future?

enok is a transgender performance artist and activist from Montreal Canada, and has performed during the Venice International Performance art week as well as during the most recent Venice Bienalle. Enok will be performing and teaching this June in Wiemar, Germany as part of Kaffee Kuchen - Action Art III festival.

Daniella LaGaccia is a transgender writer, editor, and artist. She has contributed to publications like BOMB, Interview, artnet News, and she is the editor of INCIDENT Magazine, an online magazine dedicated essays, reviews, and artist interviews on performance art.

Curation by Christin Clifford, Dixon Place NYC

Photo Credit: Kim Doan Quoc

NERISA DEL CARMEN GUEVARA [PHILIPPINES]

Poetry became vital in her life. Every time she writes, she gives it her all, throwing herself to the art and coming up with her very own masterpiece. There is a certain kind of feeling that engages her to create more, as if a new world was welcoming her. “I love everything that had descriptions and I also aim for that in my own work, that kind of three-dimensional portal,” she says.