With our curatorial series OSMOSIS we aim to build a decentralized platform with a series of pop-up events for artists to create solo or collaborative performances open to all. We are especially motivated to connect local businesses with the create community that should be natural allies in the face of runaway gentrification and relentless pressure from rising rent.
For the Inaugural event of the series, we have chosen our favorite neighborhood bar, Bodeguita, with its first floor, roof deck and sidewalk providing a multitude of spaces and various possibilities for site-specific performances.
First of a series of performance events assembled by Ming Liu & Joseph Sledgianowski & others along the line.
~Performances~
Alex Bienstock (health/beauty)
Jacob Cohen (cello) & Ūla Kinder (violin)
Erik Hokanson
Jana Astanov + Concetta Abbate (violin)
OMNI (Storm Willow Hartley & Kennie Zhou)
Neneng
Myk Henry
Ronit Levin Delgado
Goddess of Georgia
———————
~DJs~
Very J
cabraxxis
Zack
———————
7pm – 8pm: Happy hour with live music and a special cocktail created for this event
8pm – 11:30pm: Performances (will start at 8pm sharp)
11:30 – 2:30: Afterparty with DJs
_____________
About the artists:
Alex Bienstock
Alex Bienstock is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer and musician, but he is more interested in life.
alexbienstock.com
Jacob Cohen
Jacob Cohen is a Brooklyn-based experimental cellist. Since 2011 he has been performing in the subways and has developed a unique style of improvisation that came from playing between the trains. His music has lead him to travel the world performing in India, Japan, Thailand, China, Poland, Cyprus, Newfoundland and Tobago and he is continuing to travel and perform. He created the program Cello Without Walls to bring live music and art to Rikers Island and worked with incarcerated youth from 2014-2018. His program was disbanded in December 2018 and he was banned from working at Rikers Island for life due to his work helping a young man who claims innocence to create a fundraiser for legal services. Recently he has been working on a series of electric cello experiments titled the Basement Sessions.
jacobgcohen.bandcamp.com
Ūla Kinder
Ūla Kinder is a Brooklyn based baroque violinist, who performs regularly as a soloist and a member of many prominent groups throughout the US and Europe. They have toured extensively, played live for WQXR and BBC Radio 3 broadcasts and performed in many international music festivals, including Boston Early Music Festival, Bachfest Leipzig and Lucerne Festival. Last year they performed on Broadway for the award-winning ‘Farinelli and the King’ production.
Ūla is an alumnum of the Juilliard School and the Royal Academy of Music (London), specializing in Historical Performance. Through the last few years they had the pleasure to work with some of the most notable musicians in the early music world, including Masaaki Suzuki, Rachel Podger, William Christie, Laurence Cummings, Lars Ulrik Mortensen, Ton Koopman, Richard Egarr, Nicholas McGegan, Nicolette Moonen, Robert Mealy, Cynthia Roberts, Elizabeth Blumenstock and Stephen Stubbs, among many others.
Ūla is also a keen contemporary music player and improviser. They aspire to explore and experiment with new ways of staging performances and to make classical music more accessible to wider public.
about.me/ula.kinderyte
Erik Hokanson
Erik Hokanson is the co-director of Grace Exhibition Space, the nonprofit organization in NYC devoted exclusively to performance art with over 300 US and international performance artists presented since 2006, such as Ron Athey, Guillermo Gomez Pena (with La Pocha Nostra), Marilyn Arsem, Rocio Boliver, Arahmaiani Feisal, Non Grata and VestAndPage. In addition, he and Jill McDermid-Hokanson, the cofounder of Grace Exhibition Space, have turned their Upstate New York farm the Rosekill into a summer destination for performance art events and workshops, featuring such renowned artists as Linda Montano, Martha Wilson, Annie Sprinkle and María Chellet. He has participated in many festivals around the world as a performance artist, such as Venice International Performance Art Week, Art Infr’Action – Festival International d’Art Performance (France), Transmuted International Festival (Mexico) and KoPAS International Festival (South Korea). He is also an accomplished luthier, a permaculture advocate, beekeeper and Beatles enthusiast.
Jana Astanov
Jana Astanov is a multidisciplinary artist, a poet and an independent curator living in New York. Born in Poland she studied anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics in France, and arts in the UK. She is a founder of CREATRIX Magazine: www.creatrixmag.com, portal for creative expression focused on art, activism and spiritual practice. Her work includes photography, poetry, performance art, sound art, and installation. She describes her performance art practice as “mythology vs ideology” referring to her two main interests the political & economic foundations of our civilization and mythological/ religious values. In her work, she utilizes elements of hypnosis, spirituality, dance movement derived from the Grotowski technique, sound art, ritualistic theatre and astrofeminism, term she has developed through her character Yannanda The One Who Speaks With The Stars. She has started three feminist performance groups JeDeive (Self Proclaimed Goddess), Red Temple (also a publishing house) and W.I.S.E. focused on ecological emergency. Astanov encourages other women to create and write their own stories that she often includes in her performances with an aim to portray the female world. Together with her partner Niko van Egten she co-created an electronic music group ASTRALOOP featuring her poetry in dark electronic arrangements. She is also the author of five collections of poetry: Antidivine, Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox.
janaastanov.com
Concetta Abbate is a NYC based violinist and composer. She released her first solo album entitled Falling in Time in February 2015 on Waterbug Records. The album was written for mixed ensemble and included original art songs inspired by natural science, folk tales, poetry and everyday objects and sounds. Her upcoming album titled Mirror Touch is written for solo 5 string violin and voice.
She was a visiting composer in residence at TAKT gallery in Berlin both in 2014 and 2016 and a composer in residence at the Rauschenberg Foundation in 2019. In 2018 she co-composed a dance composition for the Wendy Osserman Dance Company and in 2016 was commissioned to write a piece for Arch Contemporary Ballet. As a performer she regularly plays violin and sings with a plethora of ensembles in the New York area. Concetta is most known for her collaborative work with poet Cornelius Eady (Kattywompus Press), musical instrument builder Skip La Plante, photographer Vera Comploj and Latin music band Inti and the Moon (Intiluna Records).
Concetta is the musical director of a music education non-profit called “Teacup Music”. She holds an undergraduate degree in Cultural Anthropology from Smith College and a masters degree in Music and Music Education at Columbia University. She has received grants from the Rauschenberg Foundation, Department of Cultural Affairs, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Charles Mayer Foundation as well as The Roothbert Fund.
concettaabbate.com
OMNI
OMNI is a newly established artist collective that investigates the concept of time, interconnectivity, and the human body’s role in relations to these two concepts. This collective primarily consists of Chinese artist Kennie Zhou and South African artist Storm Willow Hartley whose collaborative works have been exhibited or performed (under their names instead of OMNI) in La Mama Galleria, The Knockdown Centre, Flowers for All Occasions, and NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Kennie Zhou works primarily with movement, digital media, and installation, and Storm Willow Hartley’s exposure to performance art since moving to New York City has clashed with her typical fine art and theatrical performance background, manifesting into a body of work that oscillates between ritualized performance and the investigation of the presence of the female body in foreign spaces..Together they have performed in the Judson Memorial Church, The Glove, and H0l0.
Myk Henry
Myk Henry is originally from Dublin, Ireland and moved to New York in 1984. From 1989-1992 Henry was part of the immersionism movement which instigated the birth of several warehouse art events involving hundreds of artists and thousands of spectators. In 1994 he moved to Geneva, Switzerland where he graduated with both a BFA and MFA at Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels. As a performer Henry investigates the audience’s sense of social and political awareness and engages them in a transformative process. Investigating the thin divide between private and public space, his work is provocative, edgy and slams the viewer into the center of political issues, social conditioning and human taboos.
Henry regularly receives funding from Culture Ireland, which enables him to showcase his work at various International and national festivals and venues. He has exhibited work at ARCO in Madrid, UNHCR in Geneva, the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, the World Expo in Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vaasa (Finland), Fountain, Miami Basel and the Armory Show in New York. He won “La Bourse Federal”, (Young Art Basel, Switzerland), Le prix Contonal Geneva (Switzerland) and was the first foreigner to win Le Prix Providencia, (Swizerland).
mykhenry.com
Ronit Levin Delgado
Ronit Levin Delgado (born Tel Aviv, Israel), is a multi media artist and a Fulbright scholar, lives and works in NYC. Levin Delgado is a graduate (2013) of the MFA Studio Art program at MSU, NJ, and holds a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (2008). Levin Delgado has won multiple awards and honors, including the 2011-2013 Fulbright Scholarship, American-Israel Cultural Foundation, Asylum Arts, Jewish Art Salon Fellowship, Daughters of Troy Residency in Governors Island, COJECO Fellowship, the Israeli Ministry of Culture Scholarship, Bezalel Academy Award for Excellence and on 2014 she was chosen to be the recipient of the First Annual Prize for Bezalel Alumni.
Levin Delgado has had Solo and Two-person exhibitions, including at Raw Pop Up (Art Basel Miami 2018), Spring Break Art 2018 (NY), Gallery Sensei (NY), the Frame Gallery (PA), Guttman Museum (Tel Aviv) and has been included in numerous international group exhibitions in Israel, Europe and the US, including, The Queens Museum (NY), Museum of Russian Art (NJ), Magnan Metz Gallery, and Trestle Gallery (NYC), Index Gallery, Aferro Gallery (Newark), Cardiff, Wales and Leeds (UK) and Hertzelilinblum Museum in Israel.
As a performance artist, Levin Delgado has performed at Grace Exhibition Space, House of Yes, Paper Box, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, EFA in NYC and participated in many international collaborations.
ronitlevindelgado.com
Goddess of Georgia
Maria Mars, aka Goddess of Georgia, is a performance and visual artist and a host of CULT 23! Performances are part of a conceptual project that aim to reinterpret goddess stories in modern day context. Having performed in many local venues like the Glove, Rockbar, House of Yes, Bizarre Bar, Wild Embeddings, Cult Party, Gamba Forest, The Keep and impromptu outdoor shows at Herbert Von King Park, Riis Beach and Times Square. Maria has a degree from the Fashion Institute of technology in Fine Arts, and has showcased her work in numerous galleries all throughout NYC. The energy of the NYC has nightlife brought her close to drag, burlesque, noise, DJ, rock and roll and rap musical talents that have shaped her community. An avid life painter, photographer and videographer, Maria’s interests lie in showcasing artists mid performance.
Having been born in the Republic of Georgia, her international upbringing has given her a special interest in bringing people together of diverse backgrounds, and connecting artists together as a promoter and host. Mars is an artist who works as a hairstylist @gogohairbymaria and created an up-cycle brand of designer clothes @paintersclothes.
