This Week’s Must-See Art Events: LOLs & Other Post-Internet Feels

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (of Pussy Riot fame) will present two performances by Moscow-based performance artist Viktoria Naraxsa tonight. The first, at 6 p.m., will take place at various locations around Manhattan and be live-streamed to the audience at e-flux. The second piece will be performed in the venue, and will be followed by a talk with Tolokonnikova. There’s not much more info, but our interest is piqued.

Writer and artist Malik Gaines, best known for his work with the experimental theatre My Barbarian, discusses the legacy of Sylvester. While the 1970s “Queen of Disco” will always be connected in the same breath with the tour de force that is “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real”, Sylvester was also a member of the Cockettes troupe, and left an imprint that remains. (See any song that Prince has done.) Conveniently enough, Gaines’s talk draws from his forthcoming book, Excesses of the Sixties: Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, and is part of Hilton Als’s season at the Institute.   

Olga Balema’s material processes—working in a variety of media including resins and latex—feel equally polished and visceral. Her objects are a little seductive, but not something you necessarily want to touch. In this latest series, she’s manipulating obsolete didactic cartography, obscuring data and affixing fake boobs to giant maps. According to the press release, “these highlight the limits of a cartographic impulse to capture a world constantly in flux.”

Now in its sixth year, the two-day conference focusing on thinking conceptually and critically about the internet is back. And, bonus: it’s accessible, since registration is PWYC. Expect 17 daytime panels to choose from on subjects ranging from posthuman nature to screengrabbing. One of the evening’s keynote panels includes professor Dawn Shepherd, artist Faith Holland, and writers Eye Peyser and Alana Massey discussing intimacy via screens (Chill Theory, 6-7:30p.m.).

This opening features performances from Terry Boyd, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, Carlos Martiel, and Puppies Puppies… which we’re expecting to be delightfully inscrutable (the last Puppies Puppies piece we saw comprised a bathroom with a peephole in an art fair and copious amounts of hand sanitizer). The exhibition is curated around the search for joy in an increasingly unstable, accelerating cultural-technological landscape and features over twenty artists and seven SVA grad students as curators working under the leadership of Mark Beasley.

Artists: Antenes, Andrea McGinty (pictured), Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, Brian Wondergem, Calori & Maillard, Carlos Martiel, Christopher Lin, Great City (Jon Shapiro of Data Garden), Hannah Black, Institute for New Feeling, Ioanna Pantazopoulou, Jo Shane, Kiichiro Adachi, LARAAJI, Max C Lee, Puppies Puppies, Shana Moulton, Terry Boyd, and The Lot Radio

Curators: Sanna Almajedi, Valerie Amend, Patrick Jaojoco, Rebecca Nahom, Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, Vera Petukhova, Jovanna Venegas

Devin Balara grew up in Floridian suburbia, land of obsessive landscaping and mediated nature. This informs her current body of work, in which textiles become surrogates for green space in the built environment. Here, a series of site-specific interventions might suggest an aerial view of the mediated rural landscape—a patchwork of different greens—or the quizzically useless islands of grass that find themselves afloat in the asphalt sea of the suburbs.

Curated by Will Hutnick

A group show organized around humor—what’s not to love? Bonus, it’s right around the corner from Ortega y Gasset.

Artists:
Nadine Beauharnois, Todd Bienvenu, Caroline Chandler, Ari Eshoo, Seth Kaufman, Christina Kelly, Jen Nista, Archie Rand, Kameelah Rasheed, Michael Scoggins, Emilie Selden, Petra Valentova, Daniel Wiener, Crys Yin

Curated by Rhia Hurt and Katerina Lanfranco

Is there anything more stress-inducing than packing art? Sure, all your art handler friends play it all cool — it’s like wrapping a gift! — but, come on, let’s get real. If you don’t put painters tape on that glass frame, or wrap foam around the corners, it’s game over. Anyways, not to bring back any harrowing install memories gone awry, but this art handling workshop led by artist Alex Branch promises a thorough overview of packing art for safe shipping and storage.

Here’s another exhibition that seeks sentimentality among “rapid transformations within the contemporary techno-political climate.” Young artists Alex Ito and Masami Kubo both play with image/object relations and the effect of the camera/screen on perception, but here their concerns seem to transcend the ontological—this show promises moments of sincere reflection on topics such as memory and spirituality. Coming from most artists, I’d guess that would be pretty schlocky. But this show looks to be smart. Definitely the must-see of Saturday night.

Yatta Zoker, a digipoet and jazz singer, is currently in the midst of a residency at Flux Factory for a one-woman show exploring psychosis, spirituality and colonization. She’s organizing a showcase for QTPOC artists focusing on questions regarding identity and technology. Performers include Tabita Rezaire, marcelline (#ATMDATA), YATTA, mothertongue.m3u and MALLRAT.