PEREMOGA Closing Performances January, 8, 2023 5-7 PM

Curated by Katya GrokhovskyIn partnership with The Immigrant Artist Biennial

Artists: Elly Clarke, Kathie Halfin, Bob Holman, Lesya Verba, Chin Chih Yang

Elly Clarke is an artist interested in the performance as well as the burden (‘the drag’) of the physical body in an increasingly digitally mediated world.

Clarke works with analogue and digital photography, video, music, curating and community-based projects – and #Sergina, a border-straddling, a multi-bodied drag queen who, across one body and several, sings and performs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. In this format, #Sergina (plural) has performed in queer, art & theatre venues in the UK, Europe, Canada and the USA – including The Lowry, Salford Quays; Marlborough Theatre, Brighton; Kulturni Centar GRAD, Belgrade; Shout Festival, Birmingham; Secret Project Robot, Brooklyn; Monster Ronson’s Ichiban Karaoke, Berlin; ONCA, Brighton and The Knot in Ottawa, Canada. Clarke is based in the UK. They are also in the final throes of their practice-led PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, looking at ‘The Drag of Physicality in the Digital Age.’

Kathie Halfin (b.Crimea, Ukraine), is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working in textile, installation and performance art.

Halfin earned her MFA in Fine Arts from the School Of Visual Arts, (NY) and was awarded national and international residencies and fellowships. In 2022, Kathie was an Artist-in-Residence at The Icelandic Textile Center in Iceland. The same year she was invited to present her work and to collaborate at the WWWoW project sponsored by the city of Munich, Germany. In 2022, Halfin was an artist in residency at A-Z West (CA). In 2021 Kathie was an artist in residency at Cha North (NY). In 2018, Halfin had two months of full Educational Fellowship at Wassaic Project Residency (NY). In 2017, Halfin was an AIM fellow at the Bronx Museum Of Art (NY) and received a full Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. Halfin presented her projects and performed at the solo and group exhibitions at the Domagk Ateliers Halle 50, Munich, Germany, the Ely Center Of Contemporary Art, New Heaven, (CT), Bronx Museum AIM Biennial, Bronx, (NY), the A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, (NY), Itinerant Performance Festival in Smack Mellon, Brooklyn,( NY), Knockdown Center: Sunday Series, Brooklyn, NY, Art In Odd Places Performance Festival, (NY), Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, NY, and the Immigrant Artist Biennial, (NY) among others.

Bob Holman is the Founder of the Bowery Poetry Club and the author of 17 poetry collections (print/audio/video), most recently The Unspoken (YBK/Bowery), Life Poem (YBK/Bowery), The Cutouts (Matisse) (PeKaBoo Press) and Sing This One Back To Me (Coffee House Press).

Bob Holman has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. As the original Slam Master and a director at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, creator of the world’s first spoken word poetry record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, and the Artistic Director of the Bowery Poetry Club, Holman has played a central role in the spoken word, slam and digital poetry movements of the last several decades. All told, he has performed well over 1,000 times, around the globe, from Madison Square Gardens and rock stadiums to church basements and Ethiopian Tej Bets (honey wine bars). Co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, Holman’s study of hip-hop and West African oral traditions led to his current work with endangered languages. He is the producer/director/host of various films, including The United States of Poetry (International Public Television Award) and On the Road with Bob Holman. His film about language loss and revitalization, Language Matters with Bob Holman, winner of the Berkeley Film Festival’s Documentary of the Year award, was produced by David Grubin and aired nationally on PBS. Holman traveled for the film and led workshops at language revitalization centers across Alaska and Hawaii, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. His short film, Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues, has lines of poetry in 50 languages, and premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival. In 2018, Holman was awarded the Chambra d’Oc Premio Ostana Award for his work in language revitalization. His roots are in Harlan, KY, and he currently lives on the Bowery in New York City.

Lesya Verba (Odesa, Ukraine – New York, USA)is a singer, actress, artist-designer, songwriter, bandura player, muralist, who easily changes images and plunges into the atmosphere from the music of the Art Deco era, progressive nude urban jazz and a feminine mixture of cultures in the spirit of the Berry Sisters.

In 2020, the album of author’s songs “Gold” was released in alliance with the poetess Marianna Kijanowska (winner of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine). For more than 30 years she has been reconstructing the rituals of the south of Ukraine, soloist of the ethno-theater “Zoretsvit” (Odesa, Ukraine) Emigrated to America in 2021. Since 2021, Lesya has been a member of Yara Arts Group, (La MaMa theater) director Virlana Tkacz. Since 2022 Member of an international theater group “Anomalous Co.” director Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva (performance “beyond Doomsday Scrolling”). In May 2022 Lesya Verba (USA-Ukraine) has been awarded a Public Organization Grand Ratings and Nominations and Charitable Organization “committee on the public award of Ukraine – Diploma of worldwide cultural diplomacy award.” Lesya Verba is an academician of the International Academy for the Development of Literature and Art – MARLI. 

Chin Chih Yang was born in Taiwan, and has resided for many years in New York City. He is a graduate of Parsons School of Design (BFA, 1986) and Pratt Institute with a Master of Science in 1994.

Yang received a fellowship from The New York Foundation for the Arts; as well as many other awards and commendations from prestigious organizations and institutes. Among his recent accomplishments are the Kill Me Or Change project show at MOCA Taipei and a residency at MASS MOCA. A retrospective documentary about the past 30 years of his work, Chin Chih Yang: Face the Earth, won the Best Documentary award at the 2018 Southampton International Film Festival in the UK. Yang’s work addresses society’s efforts to protect itself, physically and psychologically, against catastrophe resulting from pollution, surveillance, isolation, and religious/political/social intolerance. Yang perceives the modern world as a mixture of anxiety and entrancement. 21st-century products can do wondrous things, but producers and consumers alike want only discarded waste.

Special Guest: Oleg Kulik was born in Kiyv, graduated from Shevchenko State Art School (1979) and Kiev Geological Survey College (1982). He has lived and worked in Moscow since 1986.

As a sculptor he began to work under the influence of Alexander Archipenko, later developed his own style. He was awarded a scholarship by the Berlin Senate in 1996. For his performances, Kulik creates a symbolic set of parameters to define the environment which he will inhabit in the persona of a dog, and then devises a series of actions that unfold as a response. The artist describes the dialogue within his practice as “a conscious falling out of the human horizon” which places him on hands and knees. His intention is to describe what he sees as a crisis of contemporary culture, a result of an overly refined cultural language which creates barriers between individuals. Thus, he simplifies his performance language to half of the basic emotional vocabulary of a domestic animal.

In 2007 “Oleg Kulik: Chronicle 1987–2007, a retrospective of Kulik’s work, was exhibited at the Central House of Artists, Moscow. It was also exhibited at Rencontres d’Arles festival, France in 2004.

As curator of the Regina Gallery, Kulik became known for his unorthodox approaches such as putting paintings on wheels and hiring people to carry the artworks.

Kulik considers his best curatorial endeavor to be “Leopards Bursting into a Temple” by Anatoly Osmolovsky in 1992. In this exhibit, two naked people were put into a cell with live leopards walking around them. He had said that he thought the exhibition was a “metaphor for everything new and lively that appears in our life”.

In 2009, Kulik curated the “Kandinsky Prize in London” at the Louise Blouin Foundation.

In 2012 in Kiyv Kulik curated with Kostyantyn Doroshenko and Anastasia Shavlokhova project “Apocalypse and Renaissance in Chocolate House”, branch of the National Museum “Kyiv Art Gallery”. At that exhibition 43 artists from Ukraine and Russia presented the metaphor of modern times. Andrey Monastyrsky, Arsen Savadov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dmitriy Gutov, Zhanna Kadyrova, Oksana Mas and other artists were among the participants.

In 2022, Kulik was questioned and faced possible prosecution for “rehabilitation of Nazism” after his 2015 sculptural work ‘Big Mother’ was shown at Art Moscow. Militant pro-Kremlin politicians claimed that the work mocked The Motherland Calls, a monument to soldiers at Stalingrad. Kulik said “If I could imagine at least 10% of the interpretation that is now being made of my work, I would not only not show it, but I would not even have started it”; it was inspired by “a painful recovery from the trauma associated with splitting up with my beloved wife.”