“I knew two weeks into the program,” she said. It didn’t take long for her mind to change. ![]() She had attended New York University for her master’s degree in drama therapy. Initially, Knight didn’t have ambitions of becoming a performance artist. Photo Rachel Papo/Courtesy Performance Space New York I remember leaving the performance thinking that if church was more like Sanity TV I would actually consider going.”Īutumn Knight, NOTHING#122: a bar, 2023. “The audience stopped being an anonymous group. “The show was simultaneously funny, intelligent, absurd, critical, and uncomfortable without being cringy,” Schlenzka wrote. In an email, Jenny Schlenzka, the outgoing director of Performance Space New York, described Sanity TV, the faux TV show piece Knight produced for the Whitney Biennial, as something of a religious experience. Last year, Solange even threw her support behind Knight, saying, “I’m in awe of the way she marries theater, raw expression, psychology, and choreography to evoke feelings of Black feminine interiority.” Knight landed a coveted spot in the Whitney Biennial in 2019, the same year that the Studio Museum in Harlem acquired one of her works, making it the first piece of performance art to enter the collection. That kind of nothing has drawn plenty of admirers. “But I’m still attempting to do some kind of nothing.” “It’s part of my practice, failing to do nothing,” she said. Then she paused and noted that, in attempting to do nothing, she actually had done quite a lot-a contradiction she embraces. (It’s part of a grouping of three new works making their debut at Performance Space this month the last, dealing with the space’s architecture and titled NOTHING#122: a bluff, will be staged tonight and Saturday.) Sitting on a couch in an otherwise unfurnished room, Knight said nothingness interests her because “it has particular politics around it that have to do with labor, who can do it, etc.” Few props are necessary.Īptly, many of her pieces are part of a series titled “Nothing,” of which the Performance Space work, NOTHING#122: a bar, is but one example. It’s a testament to Knight’s abilities that they often involve little more than herself, her collaborators, and the audience. Always, they are unpredictable, fraught with racial and gendered dynamics. As you watch them, they can feel dangerous, thrilling, possibly even sexy in some strange way. ![]() ![]() These are pieces in which power dynamics are inverted, upended, and entirely reorganized. Past works have taken even more outré forms: a group therapy session in which spectators became unwitting participants and a mock TV show in which viewers acted as the cast, for example. At Frieze, Dastan Gallery Presents an Intergenerational Grouping of Female Iranian Artists Spanning 100 YearsĪny of this would have seemed odd were it not for the fact that Knight has been staging performances such as this one for roughly the past decade.
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