Event Price: $15.00 - Advance tickets LINK
Presenting new works by:
QWEEN AMOR
I am a trans performance artist and activist. My work lives at the intersection of social justice, identity, and liberation, using dance, spoken word, and symbolic visuals to challenge systemic oppression and give voice to marginalized communities. Drawing from my Afro-Cuban heritage and personal experiences with race, gender, and faith, I reimagine the narratives of religious figures to confront contemporary issues like transphobia, religious weaponization, and racial injustice.
My performances are acts of reclaiming space and identity, often unfolding in public spaces—inside churches, atop cop cars, and at protests—where I confront police violence, LGBTQ+ rights, and the broader fight for social justice. I aim to challenge societal norms, dismantle oppressive systems, and invite audiences to reflect on the complexities of identity, love, and liberation.
JAGUAR MARY X
My interests, and the directives that have informed my own art practice, involve black feminist discourse, questions of history, reality and truth as they relate to science and the unknown, and the purpose of the soul/spirit in art. I am influenced by afro-futurist tropes and speech act theory. My performance practice has, at its core, a purposeful and at times, fanciful exploration of notions of freedom and liberation strategies for both sentient and non-sentient beings. I acknowledge my teachers in ritual practice: Kali Maie, White Star, Astrea Aurora, Jane Carleton, Vickie Dodd and Malidoma Some.
My performances are interactive structures that involve movement, narrative and ritual practices like chanting, repeated gestures and gazing, to create a sensate journey that audience practitioners become a part of and are invested in. As a glossolalia vocalist, I use speaking in tongues in addition to previously written lyrics, as elements in a performance score. I am interested in how the archetypes of shaman, healer, activist, muse and storyteller impact the public realm and how they can be used to heal and guide us in times of trouble. No doubt, we are in troubling times now and I believe that it is my role as an artist to activate and be part of a remembering of the transforming power of communal space. I agree with Nina’s Simone’s dictum that the mission of the artist is to “respond to the times in which I find myself”.
KLEDIA SPIRO
Kledia Spiro is a multimedia, interdisciplinary artist and educator creating experiential videos, performances, installations, and socially engaged works. Born in Albania and trained with an Olympic weightlifting team, she uses weightlifting as both metaphor and method to explore migration, identity, collective memory, and women’s strength. Her immersive practice blends psychoanalytic concepts with humor and ritual to question movement, power, and presence.
Spiro explores the connection between strength, weightlifting, and daily life as a new celebratory ritual for understanding the relationship between the artist and the audience, as well as the present and the past. By experimenting with indeterminate methods, Spiro wants the viewer to access the otherwise inaccessible spaces. Her works are based on Freudian and Piagetian behavioral concepts: visions that reflect psycho-analysis, behavioral psychology, and a sensation of indisputability, combined with details of odd, eccentric, absurd, totemic, and humoristic elements. By questioning where one is and the concept of movement, Spiro investigates the manipulation of lifting objects overhead and its effects.
STARDUST CLUSTERS: MEETINGS WITH MEANING, Curated by Marita Isobel Solberg and Jill McDermid
Gathering forces, gathering knowledge, gathering wisdom, gathering hearts. Grace Exhibition Space now starts a series of local, national and international performance art evenings, dinners and talks delving into questions and reflections on our connections with Nature. In this can be culture, agriculture, embodied culture, connection to animals, plants, trees, bodies and the likes. Humans are part of the deep collaboration, but we have a long tradition of abusing, consuming and ruining our connection. How can we connect through our human way of living today? What changes can we make? What life rituals could be different? We gather performance artists with different backgrounds, a mix of indigenous, native, nature people and city dwellers, reflecting on their connection and belonging to the natural world, land and to each other.
The goal is to create soulful and self-searching performance art that blows our minds, conversations that can trigger our inner marrow and meetings that are deep and meaningful. Our mode of communication is Performance Art, a form that is in movement, space and time, that can involve all art forms, including actions and everyday objects, sharing complicated and deep thoughts and ideas.
We will revolve around the loss of the third wall, an imaginary boundary, allowing the artists and the audience-participants to create a direct dialogue between one another. We will be questioning the boundaries that separate us, how the natural world has no walls, while many of the societies that man has created are limiting. Building societies that are collaborative, but include destruction and violence, while emulating a cohesive order and balance. We are encouraging sharing communities that help one another through music, listening, healing, feeding and giving.
Grace Exhibition Space opened in 2006 as a home for International Performance Art. GES has hosted numerous performance artists, participating in multiple international festivals and art fairs. Our hope is to create the appropriate environment and means for collaborative research between the multicultural neighborhoods of metropolitan New York. We work to establish an environment that promotes our mission, as we seek to bring together local and international artists who will be interested in open exploration and collaboration with the members of our community. www.graceexhibitionspace.org / IG