Codex, coding, coda, coded. To begin with a few words, we can trace the ways language is at the center of our constructed identities, and the images created by them. Language is plastic; as is the organization of sexuality, and race. The ways we categorize, keep, care, and recall are collections of codes held in our bodies informed by practices of habit…

Featuring Neta Bomani’s Dark matter objects: Technologies of capture and things that can’t be held (2018–present), a storybook for children and adults about computational history and technology.

Featuring Neta Bomani’s Dark matter objects: Technologies of capture and things that can’t be held (2018–present), a storybook for children and adults about computational history and technology.

Featuring a new multimedia work by Ilana Harris-Babou, Coral Gardens (2021), which brings together video, archival documents, and contemporary correspondence.

The Kitchen’s partnership with Liberty High School Academy for Newcomers has been running for over two decades, bringing together teaching artists from our community with students at this public school in Chelsea. In a typical year, The Kitchen’s teaching artists work with English classes over the course of twelve-week residences and lead separate after-school programs. However the 2020–2021 academic year was anything but typical…

Featuring a work-in-progress video by artist Jen Liu, Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Electropore (2021), alongside excerpts from the video recording of the sci-fi opera from which this new work draws inspiration: Warrior Sisters: The New Adventures of African and Asian Womyn Warriors by composer and musician Fred Ho and librettist Ann T. Greene, staged at The Kitchen in 2000. Writing by Liu, archival materials related to Warrior Sisters, and reference materials for Electropore accompany the videos.

The Archival Highlight project was conceived as a platform for The Kitchen’s Curatorial interns to develop their own lens through which to consider The Kitchen’s vast archive and share their findings with its audiences on Instagram. From July 22–September 8, 2021, we (Maryam Rahaman and Noa Rui-Piin Weiss) formed a project thesis, researched events from The Kitchen’s history, gathered archival materials, and prepared highlights for social media..

In the midst of accelerating ecological ruination and global warming anxieties, the turn to the nonhuman has been of ever growing concern in artistic practice and institutional presentation. It was with this initial thought that I began searching through The Kitchen’s archives. Given the anthropocentrism of performance and theater—and those forms mediated by video—such methodologies seem apt to reimagining what it means to be human…

Kenneth Tam has been artistically invested in men’s social spaces for years, exposing themes that have floated unnamed through national conversations. His work follows men’s behavior and points out the patterns that exist at the intersections of race and social intimacy. Tam’s projects engage with the reality that America’s masculinity crisis is ongoing, and Asian American men are not exempt…

In November 1980, Debbie Harry, calling in on the telephone, introduced the first rap performance to happen at The Kitchen—or anywhere in downtown Manhattan—when the Funky 4 + 1 closed one installment of a three-night “extravaganza” called Dubbed In Glamour, organized by the art critic Edit deAk. Harry couldn’t be there in-person that night (she wished she had known it was happening sooner), so instead a recording of the telephone conversation between her and deAk played over the PA…

Featuring new writing by artist fields harrington that responds to three works represented in The Kitchen’s archive: Kerry James Marshall’s Doppler Incident (1997), Butch Morris’s Current Trends in Racism in Modern America: (A Work in Progress) (1985), and Tracie Morris’s Sonic Synthesis (1999). Excerpts from performance recordings and ephemera are also included.

Featuring a text by Matthew Lyons and selections of video stills and archival ephemera related to the 16mm film by Elaine Summers, Windows in The Kitchen (1981).

Featuring an interview between Steffani Jemison and curator Cindy Sissokho about the artist’s series of works titled Recitatif. Jemison and Sissokho discuss the series and their collaboration on the performance Recitatif: Never saying anything at all (2017), at Nottingham Contemporary in 2017.

From March 16–20, 1976, The Kitchen presented an exhibition of Barcelona-born multimedia artist Antoni Muntadas’s video installation titled The Last Ten Minutes. The piece was part of “Accion/Situacion: Hoy. Proyecto A Través Latinoamérica,” a larger constellation of Muntadas’s works that explored the symbiosis between art and life in relation to the public and the private…

Featuring a new video by Ian Andrew Askew, SLAMDANCE TV (2021), accompanied by writing by the artist and archival material from a 1986 performance by The Black Rock Coalition at The Kitchen.

When an artist becomes part of an art institution, they often bring in other artists with whom they have established connections in the past. For instance, Robert Longo served as Acting Video Curator at The Kitchen from fall 1977 to spring 1978 and, during that time, was able to organize programming with artists from his own communities…

Featuring a video that revisits ROOM, a 2005 installation and performance by Tracy + the Plastics and Fawn Krieger at The Kitchen. An introductory text, images, and ephemera accompany the video.

On April 16th – 18th, 2021, Efraín Rozas presented Still, the culmination of his residency hosted by The Kitchen at Queenslab. Rozas is a Peruvian artist—equal parts composer, performer, and software developer—who works on ideas of body, mind, and technology. Extending and stretching these ideas, the sound installation Still interrogates the structures of time…

Featuring a new video by Woody Sullender, Four Movements: Live at the Kitchen (2021), which expands on the artist’s music album constructed in video game space, Four Movements (2020). A text by the artist accompanies the video.