Language is an ambivalent term. It is both a vehicle for communication and a divider between the knowers and the not.

When the words “alternative” and “facts” are joined together in an official statement it becomes apparent that words can become a layer, a thick skin over meaning. Sometimes, to get to their root words need to be peeled away.

This performance evening will explore notions of language, bridges, borders and meaning with durational works by 5 artists.

"I am/I will (The Future is Bright)", is a multimedia durational performance, which investigatesintergenerational formation and de-construction of female migrant self through the language of gesture and movement with found and hand-made objects in space and time. Part of ongoing research project into Grokhovsky’s family history and based on the narrative of her only surviving 93 year old grandmother, a World War II veteran and an immigrant to Australia from Ukraine, "I am/I will (The Future is Bright)" attempts to build a bridge between the past and the future, through exploration of survival, trauma, displacement, belonging and re-discovery. By interpreting her grandmother’s words via repetitive live actions and on-site creation of installation, Grokhovsky produces her own chronicle of agency, hope, humanity and legacy. * Supported by Asylum Arts

Katya Grokhovsky was born in Ukraine and is based in New York City. She is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator and a founding director of Feminist Urgent. Grokhovsky holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, Australia and a BA (Honors) in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. Grokhovsky has received support through numerous residencies and fellowships including Wassaic Artist Residency, NY, Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL, Studios at MASS MoCA, MA, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, WY, SOHO20 Gallery Lab Residency, NYC, BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, NYC, VOX Populi AUX Curatorial Fellowship, PA, Residency Unlimited, NYC, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, NE, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, NY, NARS (New York Residency and Studio Foundation), NYC, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, NM, Watermill Center International Summer Residency, NY, PAF (performing arts forum) residency, France and more. She has been awarded the Asylum Arts Grant, NYC, Dame Joan Sutherland Fund, NYC, APT (Artist pension trust) Membership, Australia Council for the Arts ArtStart Grant, NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, NYC, Chashama space to create grant, NYC, Freedman Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artists, Australia, Maude Glover Fleay Award, Australia and others. Her work has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally.

The Same Song is repeated silent singing of the song New York, New York. With Dalius Naujokaitis (drums, etc.), Jonathon Haffner (guitar, synth & keys).

Camila Cañeque (b. Spain, 1984) is a Spanish conceptual performance artist who lives and works in Girona and New York. In her practice, she temporarily becomes someone or something else to reflect on and escape from the finitude of a human body, dwelling in the grey area between fiction and fact, character and self. The personas repeatedly involve a passive time, with no beginning or end, but a permanent standby. Her "horizontal pieces" have been performed at The Kitchen (NY), Vermelho Gallery (São Paulo), Microscope Gallery (NY), Fabra i Coats (Barcelona), Glasshouse Project (NY), The Queens Museum of Art (NY), Lázaro Galdiano Museum (Madrid), Kulturhuset Museum (Stockholm), among others.

KILLING YOU EQUALS SAVING ME (and other insane stories) is a looping piece exploring the lines defining our perception of ourselves and the world. What is defense and what does it do? What are the traces we leave behind and what tales are told by the tails we would have if we were animals?

Siw Laurent is a French-Norwegian theatre artist located in Brooklyn, NYC, producing artwork through theatre, art-performances, installations and music. Written, produced and performed Sense Hunger/Do I represent you? (Villa Villplukk), Jørgen Sørensen (Kvernerbyen Scene) and Still Reverberation (Glasshouse, Brooklyn). Uses her background in Vocal Therapy and inspired by the art of Cantadoras to device her work.

Ino Badanjak is an actor, writer, and improviser based in New York City. She has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Triskelion Arts, Columbia Stages and recently co-created and starred in Ino Badanjak: Private Eye (Reckless Theater). Inspired by the edge of the absurd and the real, with the central focus being the body and the architecture of image.

Rock, Peppa, Scissors is a performance piece in which language, race, and power are at the heart, as two characters of different backgrounds engage with each other in a non-verbal communication. Through various objects, text, pictures, a printer, and pre-recorded as well as live video projections, the conversation of the two is constructed. The conversation becomes absurd and eventually emerges itself onto a pictorial and tangible language. The artists and the audience together create a wall of stories filled with humor, nonsense, and irony that challenges the definition and the weight of the language we use everyday.

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow (b. Jamaica, 1975) is an interdisciplinary artist with a BFA from New World School of the Arts, University of Florida, and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. Her work has been shown internationally in numerous group exhibitions and performance art festivals. Through installation and performance, Lyn-Kee-Chow uses the symbols of her unique hybrid culture to critique the effects of the global economy on history and the present time. In her work the nostalgia of growing up in the Caribbean entails the continued investigation of the commodified imagery of primitivism, folklore, fantasy, consumerism, spirituality and nature’s ephemerality. Lyn-Kee-Chow is a Rema Hort Mann nominee and a 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art. Her work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Washington Diplomat, Daily Serving, Hyperallergic, Artinfo, The New York Art World, Super Selected, and Newsday. Exhibitions of note include the ‘’10th Open International Performance Art Festival’’ (2009) at Open Contemporary Art Center, Beijing, China, “Guangzhou Live 5” (2014) Guangzhou, China, a solo exhibition, “Knots Landing” (2015) at Boston Children’s Museum, Boston , M.A., the landmark exhibition, “Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora” (2016) at the Royal West Academy of England, Bristol, U.K., and a special project at Jamaica Biennial (2017), at The National Gallery in Kingston, J.A. She currently teaches MFA Studio at School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Inmi Lee is an artist based in Pennsylvania and New York whose work explores multifarious aspects of language and its relationship to power by studying our collective history, social systems, and capacity and limits of our culture. Inmi has exhibited at ACM Siggraph, Digital Art Biennale in Seoul, Boston Cyberarts Festival, International Performance Art Festival in Beijing, and in Madrid Abierto, Spain. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Visual Communication from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Inmi is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Digital Art and Experimental Media at the University of Washington.

Lital Dotan (b. Israel, 1979) is an immersive artist & curator working with performance, video and installation art; her works are dedicated to creating independent environments for sustainable performance practice, presentation and preservation. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Glasshouse in Brooklyn an art-house dedicated to performance in the domestic sphere, where she organizes and produces festivals, exhibitions, thematic performances, collaborations and residencies. In 2015 Dotan founded Que sal mah, a bespoke dressmaking studio that merges performance art, choreography and fashion design, where clients book a one-to-one performance session culminating in a dress. Her immersive stage play 'Second Floor' is currently under production and planned to premiere in 2018. Her immersive art works and performances have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide such as the Israel Museum, National Museum Cracow, Queens Museum, Haifa Museum, Jewish Contemporary SF to name a few and was featured in magazines such as DNA Info, NY Mag, Paper Mag, ArtSlant, Haaretz, Huffington Post, VISION China, TAR Magazine and many more. Since early in her artistic career, she has collaborated with photographer Eyal Perry who is responsible for the photography in the majority of her work.

ABOUT GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE

Opened in 2006, Grace Exhibition Space is devoted exclusively to Performance Art. We offer an opportunity to experience visceral and challenging works by the current generation of international performance artists whether emerging, mid career or established. Being a Brooklyn loft, our events are presented on the floor, not on a stage, dissolving the boundary between artist and viewer. This is how performance art is meant to be experienced and our mission is the glorification of performance art.

Grace Exhibition Space presents over 30 curated live performance art exhibitions each year, showcasing new work by more than 400 performance artists from across the United States and the world since 2006. Grace Space received fiscal sponsorship through Fractured Atlas in 2007.

Grace Exhibition Space is Directed by Jill McDermid-Hokanson and Erik Hokanson.