Co-curated by Neven Lochhead + Nicole Burisch
Knot Project Space, in collaboration with SAW Gallery and Arts Court Theatre, hosted a performance by New York-based artist Autumn Knight to conclude its 2019 programming year, and my tenure as its Director of Programming. Situated within an empty wood-panelled Courtroom in the Arts Court, this iteration of Knight’s speech-driven performance work, Documents, responded to the weight and force of a former space of legal proceeding. Knight’s presentation was the third and final action in a short series of events and workshops that were coordinated by Knot Project Space in the Courtroom from December 10-12, each reflecting in some way on the gravities and world-making potentials of individual and collective speech in a site so directly tethered to the languages, processes and force of law.
Documents
Documents uses dialogue, gesture and the voice of both the artist and the audience to uncover and critique structures of power. Troubling the division of labour between the performer and the audience, Documents involves a public reading of the documentation that serves to authenticate or legitimize citizenship. Central to this work is a filing cabinet that both holds the props required for the performance, while also serving as a portrait or trace of the artist. The interactive reading of the documents in the files addresses the embodied specificities of race, class, gender, sexuality to contest whether these categories accurately reflect the bodies they are meant to represent—while underlining how different audiences and relationships to power may influence this reading.
Autumn Knight
Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including Krannert Art Museum (IL), The Institute for Contemporary Art (VCU), Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) and Akademie der Kunste, (Berlin). Her performance and video work is held in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial as a performance and video artist.
Related Programming
Workshop: Second Tongues, Serena Lee. Courtroom, Arts Court. Nov. 23, 2019.
Performance: Kempelen’s Breath, VOR. Courtroom, Arts Court. Dec. 10, 2019.
Workshop: Cold Read, Andrea Oliver Roberts. Courtroom, Arts Court. Dec. 11, 2019.
Residency: Expanded Practice, Shani K Parsons. Knot Project Space. Dec. 2-14, 2019.