Alive At Satellite NYC 2019 - A Photo Recap

Wild Actions in performance at Alive at Satellite, Satellite Art Show NYC 2019. Photo by Rachel Rampleman

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Earlier this month, we presented the work of 40 international performance and video artists at Satellite Art Show NYC located in Brooklyn's Pfizer Building. It was truly an explosive program during which no two moments were the same. The performers transformed the energy of the fair whether they were within the Performance is Alive space or roaming within the context of the fair itself. In addition to our live performances, we presented the work of 23 video artist with special screenings of Barbara Rosenthal and Rachel Rampleman. 

We are pleased to share the documentation of #AliveAtSatelliteNYC with you and look forward to seeing you at our upcoming programming at Satellite Art Show Miami 2019!
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live performance documentation Alive at Satellite NYC

Live performances by Thomas Albrecht (New York, NY), Christie Blizard (San Antonio, TX), Mairead Delaney (VT), Vyczie Dorado (New York, NY), Rebecca Fitton (NY/England), Kathie Halfin (NY/Ukraine), Markus Holtby (Larchmont, NY), Amanda Hunt and IV Castellanos (Brooklyn, NY), Amanda Kleinhans (Tallahassee, FL), SUNGJAE LEE (Chicago/Korea), Stephanie McGovern (Brooklyn, NY), Butch Merigoni (Brooklyn, NY), Matthias Neumann (NY/Germany), Christopher Unpezverde Núñez (NY/Costa Rica), Alison Pirie (Brooklyn, NY), Sandrine Schaefer (Boston, MA), Wild Actions - Patience, Carley McCready-Bingham, Ginger Wagg (Chapel Hill, NC)​

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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3

Amanda Kleinhans (Tallahassee, FL, USA), performs Fitting XV, Performance Is Alive at Satellite Art Show NYC 2019 | Photo by Rachel Rampleman

Amanda Hunt and IV Castellanos (Brooklyn, NY, USA), Unidentifiable Intimacy
Unidentifiable Intimacy circles around and into ideas of athleticism/physical rigor, productivity culture, futility, and the objectification of one's body as a terms of survival. By making work that redefines the 'hyper' and 'anti' hero, we aim to interrogate structural binaries between self-sustainability and clearly displayed acts of needing support, physically and psychically. We wonder what it would feel like to 'resist the attention economy' from a space of neither fully refuting it nor fully complying with its demands - but rather inhabiting another space, between or beyond, these two ideas (Jenny Odell). What does this space maneuver like when it is a slow burning, a steadfast yet diligent, even gentle, aversion? How do we reclaim language that once stood as pillars in the place beyond, the place we named for ourselves, now utilized in complex marketing schema packaged and sold back to us? This performance proposes a grainy intimacy, one whose edges can not be fully traced, as a potential restoration of a deliciously unnameable relation.
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Amanda Kleinhans (Tallahassee, FL, USA), Fitting XV
Fitting XV , a live performance, is Amanda Kleinhans’s most recent work. Housed in the middle of a sheet of wood is a silhouette of a body. The body represented is one that is the same height as the artist, but is the “average” body weight of a person that height- something Kleinhans is not. She attempts to fit her body through the opening to fit the standard that is placed against her body on a daily basis. As she squeezes her flesh through the silhouette, it’s reminiscent of the seats her body has to squeeze into and small sidewalks she has to walk down before ultimately colliding into others. The ultimate goal of this piece is for the artist’s body to fit through (within) the wood (society) and its harsh, non-budging parameters.
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Alison Pirie (Brooklyn, NY, USA), Prisoners of the Strange Organ That Dwells Within Them (roaming)
Prisoners of the Strange Organ That Dwells Within Them is a wandering, durational performance in which I drag a uterus-shaped sculpture on the floor from my crotch, while blindfolded in a public space. The title of the performance is an adaptation of a quote by Michelle Perrot from A History of Women in the West: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes.

In this performance I make the invisible visible, and the private public, embodying and visualizing the pain and symptoms of reproductive health issues that are often pathologized or ignored. The labored act of pulling the uterus outside of my body emphasizes the weight and stress of these varied issues that often go unseen. The men’s tie blindfold implicates the patriarchy for the detrimental lack of informed, safe, and effective reproductive healthcare and education. By blindfolding myself in a public space, I endanger my physical body and force viewers to ensure the safety of my person and my uterus.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4

Stephanie McGovern (Brooklyn, NY, USA), Unhinged Showgirl, Performance Is Alive at Satellite Art Show NYC 2019 | Photo by Rachel Rampleman

Wild Actions - Patience, Carley McCready-Bingham, Ginger Wagg (Chapel Hill, NC, USA), Frivolous Artist: Sculpture Garden
Wild Actions presents “Frivolous Artist: Sculpture Garden, ” a durational performance installation that exists somewhere between a construction zone, a wrestling ring, and a museum style sculpture garden. What might happen when meticulousness, recklessness, care, and violence inhabit the same space? At the heart of “Frivolous Artist” there is not one subject but a quicksand of questions, interrogations, and dualities considering what makes art and artists worthwhile and meaningful. Wild Actions believes it’s critical to not just ask these questions in the creation process but present the labor of answering these questions publicly, in order to purposefully inspire a dialogue with audiences.

Rebecca Fitton (Queens, NY, USA), GOLD STANDARD
Using gold paint to transform herself into an "Ornamental Oriental," GOLD STANDARD allows Fitton to ask in what ways the model minority stereotype has dissuaded the Asian female body to be present physically. Model minorities are considered mentally virtuosic and valuable, while their bodies are considered irrelevant and firmly situated within institutionalized racism. In a painting and washing ritual, Fitton situates her own body to be scrutinized as she moves in and out of poses associated with what the Asian female body can and can’t “do,” such as poses of power and submission. A QR code projected on her body flickers in and out, sometimes revealing the words “GOAL GOLD.”

Stephanie McGovern (Brooklyn, NY, USA), Unhinged Showgirl
Unhinged Showgirl is an exercise in gender exertion, exploring the conflict between conventional female allure and the authentic self. We witness the artist looping against exterior qualities, presenting hyper feminine spectacle that does not and will not produce any tangible results or definitive female victory. Thus, we begin to speculate the aesthetic metaphor which has perpetually defined “the meaning to exist as female.”

In Frenchy Lunning’s essay Allure and Abjection: The Possible Potential of Severed Qualities, she surmised Julia Kristeva’s definition of abjection as “a denial of an aspect of the self, a denial that appears desirable within a regime that expects it.” How may the artist break the looping of metaphor that has beenestablished before her authenticity was even conscious? She must lean into exhaustion and allow a liberation through psychosis. This space is explored to be the Psychotic Breakthrough, where things begin to break apart and something real happens.
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Barbara Rosenthal Screening "Words Come out Backwards, and Other Shorts" at Performance is Alive at Satellite Art Show NYC 2019

Barbara Rosenthal (New York, NY) - FEATURED SCREENING AND DISCUSSION
"Words Come out Backwards, and Other Shorts"
A native New Yorker, Barbara Rosenthal is a prolific, idiosyncratic, Media and Performance artist. Her major books are Clues to Myself, Sensations, Homo Futurus, Soul & Psyche and the new novel Wish for Amnesia. She has made 130 video shorts since 1976, often combining photography, text, philosophy, and performance. Her existential work explores the intersection of the individual, the greater aggregate, and the concept of communication. A 1960s pioneer in intermedia, she has been referred to "Media Poet" by The Village Voice and elsewhere since the 1980s. At her recent performance at Waterloo Action Center, London, she was introduced as “Old Master of New Media.” 

"Words Come out Backwards, and Other Shorts" is a 45-minute compilation of twelve video short-shorts by "Old Master of New Media," Barbara Rosenthal, who has been creating in the cross genres of performance, photography, and text since 1976. 

This compilation comprises the following:
1.  Boggle, 1990 1min 4sec.
2.  Words Come out Backwards, 2003, 1min 25sec.
3.  I have a NY Accent, 1990, 1min 27sec.
4. This is A, 1984, 1min 31sec.
5.  Postcards, 1992, 1min 54sec.
6.  News to Fit the Family, 1988, 2min 22sec.
7.  News Wall, 1987, 2min 59sec.
8. The Screen Will by Black and Silent for Some Time, 1988, 3min 10sec.
9. Worldview Space and Time Omitted, 1990, 3min 22sec.
10. Whispering Confession, 1995, 3min 40sec. 
11. Secret Codes, 4min 35sec.
12. Toil of Three Cities, 2012, 15min 23 sec.
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5

Thomas Albrecht (New York, NY, USA), Like the Delayed Rays of a Star, Performance is Alive at Satellite Art Show NYC 2019 | Photo by Rachel Rampleman

Sandrine Schaefer (Boston, MA, USA), Pace Investigations No. 11
“Pace Investigations” is a performance art series that asks how one copes with acceleration and deceleration while enduring institutional mediation, shared space, and other external forces. Each iteration of “Pace Investigations” is new. The actions and materials of the performance are site-specific and the duration of the performance is precisely staggered. The same performance repeats multiple times consecutively, daily, or seasonally. Each time the performance repeats, its duration either loses or recovers time. In “Pace Investigations No. 11,” the same performance repeats 8 times consecutively over 4 hours and 15 minutes. In each cycle, the performance duration is decreased by half. What begins as a 128-minute performance incrementally becomes a 1-minute performance. As this constriction of time occurs, the performance must shift. Some actions that make up the performance speed up while others slow down. Some actions become unrecognizable from previous cycles. Some are abandoned while others gain significance. Some actions merge to become different actions altogether. Regardless of how the performance adapts, the tension between mechanical and felt time is palpable.

Matthias Neumann (Brooklyn, NY, USA), 1-hour sculpture (basics)
Over the past 4 years, Matthias Neumann has been engaged with a series of public interventions under the title “Basics”, exploring an abstracted notion of form, space, and temporality in public sculpture. The work wants to be experienced both as an abstract sculptural gesture in dialogue with its environment and a usable and interactive spatial installation in the public realm. Initially conceived as part of a larger museum installation at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, Romania, the series has since had a substantial number of iterations throughout the US. “1-hour sculpture (basics)” condenses the temporality of the sculptural installation through a performative act. A recent iteration of “Basics”, comprised of 52 pieces of 2x4 construction lumber, and currently on view on Governors Island will be installed and de-installed within a 1-hour time frame, re-enacting the 600 lbs sculpture as an ephemeral event. An original score by composer John Moran will accompany the performance (“clock – 1 hour”). 

Thomas Albrecht (New York, NY, USA), Like the Delayed Rays of a Star
"The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography 

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes examines the nature of a photograph by contemplating an image of his mother as a young girl, which he entitles the Winter Garden Photograph. For him, it was an “essential” image of someone he deeply loved, the photograph serving as a focal point for his elegant elaborations about photography and its relationship to death and history. Roland Barthes argued that personal interaction with a single, particular photograph—a remnant of a specific past that is no more, yet is framed and pictured—separates a viewer from the past, a time before we lived, which Barthes summarizes as History. The performance seeks to negotiate this strange, often solitary space between oneself and a world pictured that precedes us, beckoning us to contend with a resurrected past and its collision with our present moment, a longing that we encounter when a body that we once knew living beckons from an image stilled. 

Vyczie Dorado (New York City, NY, USA), CUT
“Hey Nena, can you do me a favor? Ok, Imma need you to go through these tapes and…these little parts where your mom is because _____ gets really upset when… can you do this for me? Thank you”

Mairead Delaney (Vermont, USA), Shelter 
I use a palm sander on a blue tarp to accelerate its deterioration. 
My hand and arm, outside the tarp, visible as flesh, rupture its membrane as the sander moves, following the sander, palm to palm. The tarp can be blue environment, protective-membrane-permeated, limbo. My action can be degradation, reach, rupture, exploration, ultrasound, comfort. 

Christie Blizard (San Antonio, TX, USA), The Bill Hicks UFO Encounter
In the summer of 2015, I had a series of life altering experiences that repositioned my relationship to the world. I went through a death and rebirth and have passed through thresholds that continue to reverberate in me. They have given me insight to the ability to open a door to another time and how a single person can create historical dissonance.

Rachel Rampleman (Brooklyn, NY, USA), Life is Drag | Screening at Performance is Alive at Satellite Art Show NYC 2019

Rachel Rampleman (Brooklyn, NY, USA), Life is Drag
In my new "Life is Drag" video series started earlier this year,  I am collaborating with and creating video portraits of the most singular and innovative emerging artists from alt-drag scenes all across the US.

Born and raised in the suburbs of the Midwest, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Rachel Rampleman creates bodies of work that explore subjects like gender, artifice, and spectacle through the tinge of a very American lens. Part directorial, part curatorial, and part anthropological, she probes into oft-overlooked elements of American culture to reveal an expanded landscape of American life. Rampleman’s work often showcases exuberantly bold and irrepressible personalities who revel in challenging common clichés associated with masculinity and femininity.
 

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6

Kathie Halfin (New York/Ukraine), Labor Of Love, Performance is Alive at Satellite Art Show NYC 2019 | photo by Rachel Rampleman

Markus Holtby (Larchmont, NY, USA), We the People, in Order to form a more perfect union, build a Wall
Walls are built to delineate space, mark territory and protect property. Additionally, they mean to hide and protect man from the environment, animals, and each other. These are unique man-made needs translated into built structures that are imposed upon the earth. In this context, "We the People..." presents a timely American critique and questions the motives and consequences of erecting walls and buildings. 

Butch Merigoni (Brooklyn, NY, USA), Exactly
‘Exactly' is a conversation between two people in which the dialogue is made up of unfinished conversations overheard in public. This stream of claims and proclamations creates a fragmented foundation upon which the performers come together and fall apart. (Performers: Butch Merigoni & Eiren Shuman)

Kathie Halfin (New York/Ukraine), Labor Of Love
Kathie Halfin’s durational performance Labor Of Love reflects on personal and politically charged experiences of immigration associated with identity stereotypes, access, and belonging. In Labor Of Love Kathie explores modes of resistance to oppression through endurance, exposed vulnerability, and personal storytelling.

Through reenactment of daily routines, visceral encounter with the clay, and emotionally charged and often conflicting cultural experiences that she conveys, Kathie reclaims her mixed identity and her immigrant experience. In this performance, Kathie questions how the dominant language and intuitive judgments about the immigrants could be upturned and questioned. 

Christopher Unpezverde Núñez (Brooklyn, NY, USA), The Square
I identify as a visually impaired choreographer. Due to my disability it is impossible for me to determine volume, distance and depth. For 20 years I have worked on developing a set of methods that allow me to explore the human movement and its relationship with space and other bodies in a safe way.

Historically, dance has been appreciated from a visual point of view. New attempts to decentralize the experience beyond the visual has motivated artists and presenting venues to develop tools such as audio description. The audio description consists of a person who narrates, during the performance, what is happening on stage to the audience with visual impairment. These descriptions include important details such as costumes, dance movement or facial expressions of the performers. However, this type of narration tends to be unidirectional; limiting the experience to a single point of view.

This work is my first attempt to understand how dance is perceived by others and how it can be described verbally for people with visual disabilities. I aim for the community to express not only what they see, but what they feel when they encounter my dance. The performance will occur within a square demarcated on the floor with tape.

SUNGJAE LEE (Chicago, IL/Korea), Temporal Chest Hair (inspired by Valie Export) 
"Temporal Chest Hair (inspired by Valie Export)" is an iteration of SUNGJAE LEE’s on-going practice that examines the relationship between hair-fetish, race, and masculinity/femininity by giving a chest hair shaving service to participants and transplanting their harvested hair on his bare chest. Trough the hair exchange of service with mostly male Caucasian participants, the artist probes how personal desire can affect one’s body and mind in conjunction with racial hierarchy. Motivated by Valie Export's performance “Touch Cinema" (1969) where her breasts serve as the set of a small theater, LEE will carry a tray of hair supplies and stroll along the Flushing Ave. He intends to engage with a more diverse range of people asking for hair shaving donations and upon agreement, the exchange becomes an intimate private-public moment.  This action visualizes the desires of a queer Asian male who has been regarded as effeminate and sexless in Western society. 

Videos by:
Carolina Alamilla (Miami, FL), Alex Apostolidis (Montreal), Katina Bitsicas (Columbia, MO), Jeffery Byrd (Cedar Falls, IA), Victor de La Rocque (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Christina M Dietz (Jersey City, NJ), Julha Franz (Porto Alegre, Brazil), Tales Frey (Portugal/Brazil), Edgar Fabián Frías (Tulsa, OK), Igor Furtado (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Rodrigo Gomes (Lisbon, Portugal), 江峰 Jiang Feng (New Taipei City, Taiwan), Maria Del Pilar (PILI) Lopez-Saavedra (New York, NY), Tone Haldrup Lorenzen (Berlin/Denmark), Nadja Verena Marcin (New York, NY), Rachel L Rampleman (New York, NY), Barbara Rosenthal (New York, NY), Monstera Deliciosa (London/Portugal), Sylvain Souklaye (Copenhagen/France), Alison Starr (Dallas, Texas), Natacha Voliakovsky (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Christopher Willauer (Brooklyn, NY), Cherrie Yu (Chicago, IL)

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Check out our digital program for the event on Issuu here. 8.5x11 color print copies are available for purchase.

​Want to purchase a printed copy?
​Contact us at info@performanceisalive.com.