The Indeterminacy Creative Labs invite audiences into the unpredictability of the creative process. In this public forum guest artists will drop us into a current project and share work that is still in development. The intention is to provide artists and audiences the opportunity to enter into a space of play and experimentation as new work is still evolving.
2023/2024 INDETERMINACY CREATIVE LABS
Performance Workshop "Are the Birds Happy"
Monday, October 2nd
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Eve Sussman is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker who works independently and collectively with her partner Simon Lee and Rufus Corporation, founded in 2003. Along with Rape of the Sabine Women, 2004, and 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2007 that debuted at the Whitney Biennial, the company has collaborated on other projects including Yuri’s Office, 2009, and whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, 2011. Rufus Corporation’s works have been exhibited and screened internationally and are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Margulies Collection, Miami; Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Sussman is a 2010 recipient of the Anonymous was a Woman Award and 2008 Creative Capital grantee.
Simon Lee works in photography, video and installation. His work is said to often be “a powerful metaphor for the random flow of history and a low tech formal tour de force” (Holland Cotter, New York Times). His 2010 film collaboration with Algis Kizys, Where is the Black Beast? (2010) was shown at the Sagamore Collection in Miami, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlin, IFC Center in New York, and was an official selection at the 2011 Rotterdam Film Festival. Together with Sussman, he co-founded the “Wallabout Oyster Theater,” a micro theater space run out of their studios in Brooklyn. Lee has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Berkshire Museum, MA; Roebling Hall, New York; the Moscow International Film Festival; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal; Poznan Biennale, Poland; The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn NY; Tinguely Museum, Basel, Switzerland; Espace Paul Ricard, Paris, France; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Growing up in Vienna (Austria) Volkmar Klien spent his childhood engulfed in the city’s rich musical life with all its glorious traditions and engrained rituals. Working from this background he strives to extend traditional practices of composing, producing and listening far beyond the established settings of concert music. As a composer and visual artist he works in various areas of the audible and inaudible arts navigating the manifold links in-between the different modes of human perception, the spheres of presentation and the roles these play in the communal generation of meaning.
His works have been widely recognized: He has received commissions from institutions truly varied in nature. For the Volksoper Wien, he composed music to a ballet, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) (Troy, USA) invited him to produce multi-channel electronic sound works and for Transitio_MX (Mexico City, MX) he produced a mixed media installation acoustically surveying landscapes. In his installation Aural Codes he turned the radio sphere over London into his exhibition space inviting residents to tune in and also interact.
You Can’t Spell Indeterminacy Without Intend and Intermedia
Wednesday, October 18th
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Lili Maya and James Rouvelle have been collaborating for over 10 years. Their works have been exhibited nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions/performances at the Tektonics Festival in Glasgow, the BBC, New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Shanghai’s Mercedes Benz Area, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. They work with a variety of digital and traditional media. They come from different art backgrounds, and their work is a fusion of media and an ongoing interplay between intentionality and indeterminacy.
Many Happy Returns
Wednesday, November 15th
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Monica Bill Barnes is a dancer and choreographer. Since MBB&CO.’s founding in 1997, her choreography has been seen in many places such as New York City’s Bowling Green public fountain, on stage at Carnegie Hall, throughout the galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and in Greta Gerwig’s film “Little Women.” The company has been presented in over 50 cities and internationally in venues ranging from The Kennedy Center to the Sydney Opera House in a collaboration with Ira Glass in Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. Barnes started collaborating with Robbie Saenz de Viteri in 2013 at which point the company adopted the motto of “bringing dance where it doesn’t belong.” Recent collaborations include a national tour of The Running Show, a site specific show in a mall - Days Go By, and two online works created during the pandemic - Keep Moving and It’s 3:07 Again. They are currently developing a new show, Many Happy Returns, through a residency at Berkeley Repertory this fall.
Robbie Saenz de Viteri, Artistic Director writes, creates, produces, and performs live theater. He has created performances and toured production throughout the world with the Obie Award winning Nature Theater of Oklahoma and worked with genre redefining artists such as Anna Deavere Smith, Stew, and Ira Glass. He has collaborated with Monica Bill Barnes to create Happy Hour, The Museum Workout, One Night Only (Lilly Award), Days Go By (Bessie Honoree), The Running Show, Keep Moving, It’s 3:07 Again, and Many Happy Returns. He grew up in New Jersey, holds a BA from Muhlenberg College where he studied writing with David Rosenwasser, and lives in Greenpoint Brooklyn which he believes is best reached by bicycle.
Loose Parts
Wednesday, January 24th
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When children approach artwork created by adults, they are expected to look, not touch. What if, instead, they were allowed to play with and even to transform what they see? What if they didn’t realize the material they were engaging was intended as “art”? Corin Hewitt will discuss his recent "play actions" experimenting intersections of contemporary art and children's play. You can find an introduction to this project here.
Wednesday, March 13th
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Choreographer Catherine Galasso speaks with veteran performer Sheryl Sutton about the legacy of the 1970s downtown dance & theater scene, and happy accidents in the creative process. A muse for Robert Wilson in his abstract theater productions from the 1970s, and an icon in her own right, Sutton will discuss her experiences in creating collaborative, multidisciplinary, epic works for stage. Galasso will show and discuss excerpts from various site-specific dances, and share elements from her current collaboration with Sutton: CITY OF WOM_N. Galasso and Sutton will also co-lead a participatory improvisational score, open to all levels of experience.
Catherine Galasso has been creating multidisciplinary dances for 17 years, for apple orchards, bank vaults, and opera houses. Her works revolve around the inherent architectural and narrative qualities of the dancing body, granting equal influence to light, sound, and space. She embraces historical renderings and inspirations in a collaborative approach that values intuition and co-authorship. Galasso has personal roots in the avant garde through her artist parents, evident in her unique style that is steeped in postmodern abstraction, combined with a pop sensibility that is playfully self-aware. Her work has been featured in the Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, and she has been commissioned by Danspace Project, River To River Festival, Arts Brookfield, ODC Theater and the Kohler Arts Center, a.o. Her 2015 collaboration with Andy de Groat was nominated for a ‘Bessie’ Award and her 2018 Alone Together was awarded a San Francisco “Izzie.” Born in New York, raised in Italy, and currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), Galasso holds a European Bac. in painting from Venice, IT & a BA in Film from Cornell.
Sheryl Sutton began her career as a performer with theater director Robert Wilson in the 1970s, starring in a number of productions including Deafman Glance (1971), A Letter For Queen Victoria (1974), Einstein on the Beach (1976, 1984) and Zinnias (2013), among others. During this period she toured the world with Wilson’s company, performing at venues like Shiraz Festival, Brooklyn Academy Museum, Festival d’Avignon, Kennedy Center, Metropolitan Opera, Opera Comique, Spoleto Festival, and Théâtre de la Musique. She danced with Andy de Groat’s red notes company from 1978-1983. She recently performed with Big Dance Theater in The Road Awaits Us at NYU Skirball Center (2019) and Carolina Performing Arts (2023), and with Paul Lazar in Cage Shuffle Marathon at La MaMa (2022). She is also the subject of a play by writer and critic Hilton Als, Lives of the Performers.
Wednesday, April 17th
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Verena Paravel is an anthropologist and filmmaker. Her academic and artistic interests encompass the ecology of urbanism, the environment, and the poetics and politics of the body. Her works include 7 Queens (2008), Foreign Parts (2010), Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with a Hook? (2012—2016), Ah humanity! (2015), somniloquies (2017), Commensal (2017), and Caniba (2018). 7 Queens is an anti-ethnographic video that documents ephemeral encounters that occurred during a walk beneath the elevated tracks of the Number 7 subway line in New York City. Foreign Parts (with J.P. Sniadecki) is a film that portrays the neighborhood of Willets Point, a hidden industrial zone fated for demolition in the shadow of the New York Mets' new stadium, where wrecks, refuse and recycling form a thriving commerce. Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan with a Hook? (with Lucien Castaing-Taylor) is a four-part project about humanity and the sea, and our plundering of marine resources. Ah humanity! (with Ernst Karel and Castaing-Taylor) is an installation that takes the 3/11/11 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Fukushima as its point of departure and reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the so-called Anthropocene. somniloquies (with Castaing-Taylor) is a film about dreams and desire based on the sound archive of Dion McGregor, who is considered the world’s most garrulous sleep talker. Commensal is an installation, and Caniba a film, that both engage the ontology of cannibalism and sibling rivalry through the prism of Issei and Jun Sagawa. Paravel is currently working on a film (with Castaing-Taylor) about anatomy, medical imagery, and the politics of healthcare in Paris’ welfare hospitals. Her work is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and has been exhibited at Venice Biennale (2017), documenta 14, Tate, Barbican, Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1, MoMA, MASS MoCA, MAMM Medellín, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, Berlin Kunsthalle, Shanghai Biennale (2014), and Aichi Triennale (2017). Her films and videos have screened at Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, Vienna, Venice and other film festivals.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor is an anthropologist whose work seeks to conjugate art's negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life. His work is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the British Museum, has been exhibited at the Tate, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Berlin Kunsthalle, PS1, Whitechapel Gallery, and London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, and has formed the subject of symposia at the Smithsonian Institution, the Musée du quai Branly, and the British Museum. His films and videos have screened at Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto and other film festivals. Recent awards include the Alpert Award in the Arts (2013), and, with Véréna Paravel, the True Vision Award (2013), Los Angeles Film Critics' Circle Douglas Edwards Independent and Experimental Film Award (2012), and FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) Award (2012).
