October 24, 2020
11:50AM-12:00PM: Ye’ela Wilschanski, Catchment Basin
12:00-12:30PM: Ye’ela Wilschanski, Bat Levi
12:30-2:30PM: Xirin, White House
2:30-2:45PM: Ye’ela Wilschanski, Catchment Basin
Location: A.I.R. Gallery, 155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
View the livestream at A.I.R. Gallery’s (@airgallery) + Xirin’s Instagram (@xirin.ok)
Ye’ela Wilschanski, Catchment Basin, 2020.
A.I.R. is pleased to present an afternoon of performance featuring new works by Xirin and Ye’ela Wilschanski, developed in partnership with A.I.R.
Xirin’s 2020 durational work White House is a live performance that utilizes various domestic objects—all painted white—as props for collaborators Xirin and her partner Sebastian Chacon to use as they play house. Costumed in oversized, white clothing, the performers carry out a series of household tasks while exploring concepts of age, gender, shared consciousness, torture, isolation, and role-playing. White House incorporates Chacon’s experience with performance in theater and Xirin’s ongoing investigations on themes such as romance and optimism. The performance includes references to the Iranian prison technique known as “White Torture,” quarantine as a result of COVID-19, and the 2020 Presidential Election.
Ye’ela Wilschanski’s Bat Levi, which premiered at A.I.R. in September 2020, depicts a generational progress of forms. Across the performance, Wilschanski adapts her wearable sculptures to represent a series of characters, related but distinct, that are tied by the materials that bind them. In Jewish orthodox communities, like the one in which the artist grew up, recitation and ritual play a key role in public and at home—however, leading these ceremonies is not a role that belongs to women, whose singing voices are thought to be as private as their bodies. Herself hailing from an ancient tribe of performers—”Ha Levi” or The Levi—Wilschanski has only ever been “Bat Levi”, or the daughter of a Levi, amongst her family and people. The artist is swayed by an unwitting conflict between the parts of her history to which she is heir: her chosen and inherited vocation standing at odds with the strictures of her religion and the way of life she has always known. In an irreverent twist, Wilschanski’s choreography dramatizes her own path and the difficult balance between following her ancestor’s footsteps and repurposing these rituals to construct her own performative language. Read more about Bat Levi here.
The event will close with a screening of Catchment Basin, 2020, a video composed by Wilschanski during her residency on site at A.I.R. from March through September 2020.
Photo: Maya Baran
Xirin is an Iranian, New-York based multidisciplinary artist whose work reclaims romantic tropes, emphasizing the ways idealistic notions of attachment cause pain. Xirin has performed at the Jewish Museum, Knockdown Center, and Pioneer Works. Her writing is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been featured in publications such as Pitchfork, Vestoj, and PAPER magazine. Alongside Kembra Pfahler, she frequently organizes performance art events in New York, known as Incarnata Social Club. Xirin received her BA from Sarah Lawrence and her MFA from Columbia University.
Ye’ela Wilschanksi earned a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel (2014) and MFA from Hunter College, NY, USA (2019). She has performed at Movement Research at the Judson Church and Spring/Break Art Fair. She has been an artist resident at institutions in Israel, Germany, and Poland—and now, A.I.R.