Sharmi Basu's #HOWDOIFINDYOU? to be Presented at The Kitchen This Month

The Kitchen will present Sharmi Basu's #HOWDOIFINDYOU?, the culmination of the multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, and arts organizer's participation in the The Kitchen's 2021 Research Residency, and the first public event stemming from the residency (October 27 at 7pm at The Kitchen's temporary "home away from home" at Westbeth, 163 Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft. Tickets: sliding scale $5-15 to be released on October 14). Featuring the artist performing as Beast Nest along with invited guest Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, DJ, and producer Jesús Hilario-Reyes (also known as MORENXX), the event centers experimental sound artists of color coming together in a present-day intervention into the archive. #HOWDOIFINDYOU is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, with Daniella Brito, The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation Fellow.

As a complement to the performances of #HOWDOIFINDYOU, Basu presents a new piece of printed ephemera for takeaway that locates the event within a lineage of Kitchen programming. With this material, Basu calls attention to questions of representation and searchability within the archive, reflecting on possible ways to identify artists who come from marginalized experiences within collections of materials that do not include identitarian tags or metadata. Copies of this ephemera will be added to the artist's folder in The Kitchen's archive, thereby inserting into the collection a new resource that offers a corrective to the absence of materials that specifically highlight artists of color who have presented work at The Kitchen.

Together, Basu and Hilaro-Reyes's performances, along with the accompanying ephemera, invite audiences to think critically about what it means to "find" artists of color whose names and records may not be immediately visible within The Kitchen's archive-but who have been making significant contributions to the organization across its history. Basu asks: Who is archived starting when? Who is left out and who is fighting to be seen? If the folks who are creating work as a means of fighting for survival are left out, what purpose does the avant-garde serve?

This fall season, 2021 Research Residents Tyler Morse and Nia Nottage of Steph Christ Collective and Will Lee will also present new projects that engage with The Kitchen's archive. Throughout the fall, Morse and Nottage will conduct oral histories for the NYC Performance Archive 1980-2005, a forthcoming open source platform that will house the oral histories and digitized ephemera of artists and collectives involved in performance practice during a particular period of the discipline's evolution in NYC. The archive will center the voices of LGBT individuals, women, and artists of color.

In November, Lee will present a new videogame in The Kitchen's Video Viewing Room that draws on his exploration of selected videos, exhibitions, and performances presented at The Kitchen since the 1970s. The game, All it does is turn, is a short necro-drama where the player investigates a string of historical misadventures. Throughout, the player aids denizens of a zone of decomposition known as the Mulch.

About Sharmi Basu

Sharmi Basu (they/them) is a multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, and arts organizer born and based in the unceded territories of Chochenyo Ohlone peoples, also known as Oakland, CA. They create sound and performance pieces that address vulnerability, accountability, and experiences of diaspora by creating new narratives for decolonial thinking toward individual and collective liberation. Their primary performance project, Beast Nest, shows us that the abstract and immaterial experiences of trauma can be transformed through the process of creation in art and sound. They believe that transcending the emotional landscape through active presence is the key to accessing multidimensionality and work with these ideas in their Sound and Liberation workshops, their curatorial projects, and their BIPOC improvisation group, the Mara Performance Collective. They received their MFA from Mills College and have hosted a number of workshops internationally that center on sound healing, decolonization, and conflict & accountability, as well as technical skill-shares. They have performed for SFMOMA, YBCA, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Cluster Festival, Ableton Loop, the International Symposium of Improvised Music, Soundwave SF, Human Resources LA, and many other spaces throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. They have exhibited work at Coaxial, Southern Exposure, SOMArts, Counterpulse, Gray Area, and the Smithsonian. http://www.sharmi.info/

About Jesús Hilario-Reyes

Jesús Hilario-Reyes (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist with a Bachelor's in Fine Arts Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a recent recipient of the Drawing a Blank Artist Grant, the Leslie Lohman Fellowship, the Lighthouse Works Fellowship (2022), and the Bemis Center Residency (2022) program. Hilario-Reyes has exhibited/screened both nationally and internationally, most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Star Film Festival, and Mana Contemporary. While situating their practice at the crossroads of sonic performance, land installation, and expanded cinema, their iterative works examine carnival and rave culture throughout the West to take on a necessary satirical approach to undermine the systems at play. jesushilario.com

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