From today, June 25 to August 1, The Kitchen will present The Rehearsal, a group exhibition in which Courtesy the Artists, Discoteca Flaming Star and Georgia Sagri revisit an unreleased film by blacklisted, American film maker Jules Dassin. Filmed 40 years ago in the building that is now The Kitchen, Dassin's film, also tilted The Rehearsal, is a cinematic indictment of the Greek military junta (1967-74) and features Dassin, his wife, Greek actress Melina Mercouri, along with Laurence Olivier, Olympia Dukakis, Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman, among others. For this exhibition, the artists will engage the themes, resonances and Brechtian structures of Dassin's work placing them in conversation with recent narratives of collective action for autonomy on the global stage.
Curated by The Kitchen's Matthew Lyons, The Rehearsal is free and open to the public June 25-August 1 at The Kitchen. The exhibition will open at 8pm tonight, June 25 with a free one-night only performance by Discoteca Flaming Star that continues until the morning of June 26. Ongoing exhibition hours are Monday-Friday, 12-6pm. From July 7-11, Courtesy the Artists will be in residence in the gallery rehearsing scenes and filming video for their work The Shoot. Performances by Georgia Sagri will take place at 7pm on July 17 and 31. The Kitchen is located at 512 West 19th Street in Manhattan. Please visit thekitchen.org or call 212.255.5793 x11 for more information.
Made in the spring of 1974, Dassin's The Rehearsal was produced on a shoestring budget in just 11 weeks. The film documents the rehearsal of a play that is a reenactment of the notorious November 17, 1973 student uprising and massacre at Athens Polytechnic University. Living in exile in the U.S., Dassin and Mercouri brought together a cast of amateurs and professionals who offered their services for free in support of the film's political message against the Greek junta. Just as the film was completed, the Greek junta was overthrown and the film was never commercially released.
In their participation, Courtesy the Artists present The Shoot, a video to be produced on site at The Kitchen that contrasts the 1973 students uprisings in Athens with the November 2011 pepper-spray incident against students participating in an Occupy movement demonstration at the University of California, Davis. With scripted and improvised performances using theater, music and choreography, The Shoot explores the links between these two events through the public figure of UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, who not only was chancellor during the 2011 pepper-spray incident, but was also a student at the Athens Polytechnic University during the 1973 uprising, tracking her transformation from protester to enforcer.
For their contribution, Discoteca Flaming Star present Sticky Stage, a three-channel video installation and a performance that includes a sleepover. The performance will take place on June 25 at 8pm and continue until the morning of June 26. In addition to Dassin's The Rehearsal, Discoteca Flaming Star's source material includes Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1966 Italian film The Hawks and the Sparrows along with footage of a desolate 66-acre lot located inside a former military barrack south of Madrid, Spain.
Greek-born, New York-based artist and activist Georgia Sagri will exhibit a remake of her 2008 cement sculpture Square, as well as Athens Toy, a PowerPoint slideshow featuring photographs of locations in Athens that have historical or personal significance to the people in Dassin's film and the artist. On July 17 and 31 at 7pm, Sagri will present Long Live the
Lions Wolves, a performance that relocates the political climate of contemporary Greece to that of 1973 through voice and sound.
About the artists
Courtesy the Artists is a collaboration between Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade founded in New York in 2012, that includes a shifting network of writers, performers and visual artists. The project follows years of performances and exhibitions Gaines and Segade has made with collaborator
Jade Gordon as the Los Angeles-based group My Barbarian, which most recently participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Gaines and Segade initiated Courtesy the Artists to develop a new model of continued collaboration upon moving to New York. Their first project in 2012, The Meeting at MoMA PS1, invited participants to respond to the 1968 agitprop album by singer and Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown. Their second project Trad, (2013) was conducted over a two-month residency at Recess in SoHo. The residency included 24-Hour Ballad, in which 24 participants interpreted the song "Black Is the Color (Of My True Love's Hair)," which resulted in a video included in When the Stars Begin to Fall at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as a full-scale performance Songs of the Civil War, which responded to American music from the 1860s as means of unraveling the politicized debates around American-ness today. Courtesy the Artists participated in Jeanine Oleson's Hear, Here, a series of performances exploring the use of voice in art, at the New Museum. Segade and Gaines will be residents at both BOFFO on Fire Island during the Summer of 2014, and LMCC in the Fall of 2014.
Discoteca Flaming Star (DFS) is an interdisciplinary collaborative art group, a group of people that uses songs and other forms of oral expression, understanding them as a personal response to historical events and social and political facts. Through conceptual, visual and musical transfers, they create performances, sculptures, drawings, stages and situations whose foremost intention is to question and challenge the memory of the public, transforming old desires and finding invented pasts, or pasts which never occurred. DFS exploits their knowledge and lack of knowledge, working slowly, inspired by Anita Berber, Warhol's wig, ghosts with no home, Rita McBride's "Arena", Greg Bordowitz,
Mary Shelley, Karl Valentin & Lisl Karlstadt, the Vienna Group, Alvaro,
Joey Arias and David Reed's paintings and dialogues. DFS present wonderful songs of love, consumption, fervor and feminism, carpets that help to cross burning bridges, fragile essays as drawings, and things that go together even though they shouldn't. They act directly in the gap between action and documentation, generating and finding documents that can be used to articulate strange tongues and languages that incite action and argument. Cristina Gómez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer have been the base of Discoteca Flaming Star since 1998.
Georgia Sagri is an artist who lives between Athens and New York whose performance pieces, installations, writing and drawings have been shown internationally. Sagri was recently included in the 2013 La Biennale de Lyon, Lyon and the 2012 Whitney Biennial. She has developed new performances and installations for Relaunch, KW, Berlin (2013), and ProBio, MoMA, PS1, New York (2013). Her most recent solo exhibition MONA LISA EFFECT was on view at the Kunsthalle Basel in Basel. Articles and interviews about her practice have appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, Flash Art and Art Papers, among other publications. She is represented by Andreas Melas & Helena Papadopoulos, Athens; Anthony Reynolds, London; and Lars Friedrich, Berlin.
Funding Credits
The Rehearsal is made possible with support from The
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and with 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 Governor
Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Discoteca Flaming Star's participation is made possible through the support of Stiftung Kunstfonds.
About The Kitchen
The Kitchen is one of New York City's most forward-looking nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. Our programs range from dance, music, performance, and theater to video, film, and art, in addition to literary events, artists' talks, and lecture series. Since its inception in 1971, The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country, and has helped launch the careers of many artists who have gone on to worldwide prominence.
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