Elliott Reed is joined by Ron Athey Feb. 20, 2021 between 1 and 2 pm, broadcast cctv throughout the museum and online

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/6874

Duets is a series of four improvised performances by Elliot Reed, the score for which calls Reed to invite a single guest for a unique hour-long encounter. Reinterpreting COVID-19 precautions as a formal challenge, Reed and his guests occupy an audience-less physical space at a distance from one another, navigating institutional public health guidelines. The performances are filmed in a private location within MoMA PS1 inaccessible to the public, and streamed live to a monitor onsite at PS1 and also to this webpage. In tandem, live footage of the monitor, as well as the visitors watching it, will be broadcast to PS1’s instagram. This tangle of multiplied feeds reflects the doubling of bodies in digital space, a conceptual extension of Reed’s work in This Longing Vessel.

Duets is presented in conjunction with This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019–20, The Studio Museum in Harlem’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition, held at MoMA PS1 while the Studio Museum constructs a new building on the site of its longtime home on West 125th Street.

Queer Communication: A Conversation with Ron Athey and Friends

Wednesday, February 17, 2021|7:00 pm EST

https://tisch.nyu.edu/performance-studies/events/ay-2020-2021/-queer-communication--a-conversation-with-ron-athey-and-friends

Celebrating “Queer Communion,” a retrospective of the work of Los Angeles-based performance artist Ron Athey at New York’s PARTICIPANT INC., Zackary Drucker and Arshia Fatima Haq will discuss Athey’s work and influence with the artist. Malik Gaines and Lia Gangitano will introduce the conversation.

Ron Athey has been working in performance for 40 years. Self-taught and motivated by the club-era performances of Johanna Went, his work developed out of post-punk/pre-goth scenes and begins with Premature Ejaculation (PE), an early 1980s collaboration with Rozz Williams. In the 1990s, Athey formed a company of performers and made Torture Trilogy, a series of works that addressed the AIDS pandemic directly through memorializing and philosophical reflection. In the 2000s, Athey developed genre-stretching theatrical works like Joyce and The Judas Cradle, and a series of major solo performances such as The Solar Anus, Sebastiane, Self-Obliteration Solo and Incorruptible Flesh, that reflect Athey’s collaborations with the late Lawrence Steger. Gifts of the Spirit: Prophecy, Automatism and Discernment is Athey’s vision for an automatic writing machine brought to life in collaboration with composer and opera director Sean Griffin. Athey has been writing Gifts of the Spirit since 1980 when he moved away from the Pentecostal and Spiritualist practices in which he was raised. These writings describe his experience of growing up as a “living saint” within an environment of abuse, vibrating with the energy of the otherworldly and doing so without faith.  Currently Athey is presenting Acephalous Monster, a performance with projections, readings, lectures, appropriated text and sound. The work is an attempt to make sense of a current reality where neo-fascism is mutating, creeping, and marching. Upcoming showings will be a special August 2021 showing at REDCAT with Opera Povera accompaniment, in conjunction with Queer Communion at ICA LA. Athey is also currently working on editing a monograph of the artist Johanna Went, and collaborating with Hermes Pittakos on a new work, The Asclepeion. Athey is the recipient of Art Matters, CCA, American Academy of Religion and Artadia, and Harpo Foundation grants.

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, filmmaker, and cultural producer. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMa PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others. Drucker is an Emmy nominated producer for the docuseries This Is Me, and was a producer on the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Amazon show Transparent. The Lady and The Dale, her directorial debut for television, premieres on HBO in January 2021.

Arshia Fatima Haq works across film, visual art, performance and sound. She is interested in counter-archives, speculative documentaries, and the blurred lines between fact and fiction. Her body of work stems from the complexities of inhabiting multiple personas – woman, Muslim, immigrant, citizen – and is conceptualized in feminist modes outside of the Western model. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project working with cultural production from the SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) region. Haq's work has been featured at Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Broad Museum, LACE, Toronto International Film Festival, MOMA New York, Hammer Museum, LAXART, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the Pacific Film Archive. Currently, she hosts and produces monthly radio shows on Dublab and NTS, and recently released an album of field recordings from Pakistan on the Sublime Frequencies label. She received her MFA in Film and Video from California Institute of the Arts in 2005, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship, the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and the Onassis AIR Fellowship.

Malik Gaines is associate professor of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch.

Lia Gangitano is Director of PARTICIPANT INC., New York.

FAR & Away Conversations starts 2021 with a livestream featuring performance artists Elliot Reed and Ron Athey in a virtual discussion. In this live-streamed event the collaborators have the platform to talk about topics that they feel are pertinent in the moment and you as the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions via the chat.

Tuesday February 9, 2021 @7pm EST
Register Here: https://bit.ly/2TSsJJF

Elliot Reed is a performance artist and director based in New York. Working in realtime, Elliot creates solos, ensemble performances and video centering the live subject. His projects exist between people, leveraging candid interaction amongst performers and audience. Utilizing a choreographic lens, Elliot assembles bodies, movement prompts and narrative within exhibition space. As viewers move through his work, the narrative arc moves through them, unfurling itself in actual time.

Elliot is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019-20 Artist In Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Exhibitions include a commission with JACK Quartet (2020), MoMA PS1 (upcoming), The Getty Museum (2018),  The Hammer Museum (2016), The Dorthy Chandler Pavilion (2018) The Broad (2017), University of Southern California (2016), and performances at MoonStep Tokyo (2017),  MNSKTM Osaka (2017), VFD London (2017), and MOOI Collective Mexico City (2017).

Ron Athey was born on a submarine base December 16th, 1961. Having spent most of his life in Los Angeles, his first performance project was Premature Ejaculation, a collaboration with Rozz Williams, 1981-83, which included abject body rituals, costume, noise and glossalalia. Athey’s work is closely associated with the AIDS pandemic: from 1990-1999, he performed and toured internationally a trilogy of works with a core group of 8 performers. 1999 kicked off the first solo performance, The Solar Anus (after the same-named Georges Bataille essay), which was seen in over 20 venues including LACE, Gallerija Kapelica Slovenia, Hayward Gallery London, NGBK Berlin. After the 2018 Gifts of the Spirit opera in the Cathedral of St. Vibiana (developed and produced with funds from the Mike Kelley Foundation and Broad Museum, Athey and his collaborator composer/director Sean Griffin (Opera Povera), continue work in experimental opera forms. Back to solo/multi-media work: Acephalous Monster, commissioned by Performance Space New York in 2018, has went on to tour 11 euro and uk venues. January 2021 is the Participant Inc. opening of Ron Athey: Queer Communion, a retrospective show that travels on the June at the ICA-LA, then September Arnolfini Gallery Bristol. The show and accompanying monograph are edited/curated by art historians Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell.

https://artsresearch.fsu.edu/far-away-conversations-elliot-reed-and-ron-athey/