Kahn and Michahelles - Processional Arts Workshop (PAW) | Artists in Residence | Kamov Residency

Photo: Piotr Redlinski

• Biography
• The Project
• Organized by

• Processional Arts Workshop (PAW)

  → www.superiorconcept.org

  Processional Arts Workshop (PAW), led by principal artists Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, creates site-specific performances, processions, and Carnivalesque interventions worldwide. PAW's performances involve local communities in every stage of production, integrating pageant puppetry, mobile architecture, shadow and projection, and mask and costume, to reflect on distinctively local themes, issues, and narratives. The resulting works bring together hundreds of volunteers and have appeared at New York’s Socrates Sculpture Park, the High Line, Trinidad Carnival, the PEN World Voices Festival, the EON Festival in Istanbul, the Henson International Festival of Puppet Theatre, the NY Architectural League’s Beaux Arts Ball. Since 1998 (under the name “Superior Concept Monsters”) PAW has created large-scale performances to lead New York’s renowned Halloween Parade each year for an estimated live audience of 1.5 million spectators. PAW recently had the honor of performing some of its Halloween creations at the White House for President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

  In addition PAW, has worked in locales worldwide to create performances in non-traditional public spaces, ranging from the streets of Kiev and NY’s South Bronx; to remote villages in the Italian Alps and rural Texas. Some of these projects have gone on to become annual neo-traditions, continuing to act as evolving platforms for local narratives. PAW’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship to Trinidad, a CEC Artslink Grant to Ukraine, and a Roman Witt Artist Fellowship at University of Michigan. Kahn and Michahelles have lectured on Carnivalesque performance art at Columbia University, The New School, Bard College, Maine College of Art, and University of the West Indies. 

• Processional Arts Workshop (PAW)

  01.-28.02.2017.

  Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, founding directors of Processional Arts Workshop, plan to explore how both village and urban Carnival traditions can inform and inspire contemporary public performance. As artists who work in the genre of procession, Kahn and Michahelles draw inspiration from vernacular performance forms worldwide, in particular Carnival masquerades. In 2006, they explored Trinidad on a Fulbright Fellowship to examine socio-political and artistic structures embedded in Caribbean Carnival. More recently they have become interested in how European Shrovetide processions comingle rural fertility rites, historical allegories and contemporary issues to construct complex localized cultural narratives.

  During their residency, Kahn and Michahelles plan to document and creatively deconstruct regional processions of traditional bell-ringers, or Zvončari, noting variations in costume, narrative roles, choreography, ritual and iconography from village to village, while interviewing local performers and scholars of Croatian Carnival. Channeling their research into preliminary sketches, studies, and notes for future and/or hypothetical performances, they seek to inform their own ongoing work in community-built performance through re-interpretations of these unique, ancient, and semiotically-layered masquerade characters. They hope to return to Rijeka in 2020 (as part of its celebration as European Capital of Culture) with plans for a full-scale community-built performance that draws from essential structures in Zvončari performance, modulated and mutated to create a new yet familiar work of Carnivalesque art. They look forward to sharing images from PAW’s recent performances and interventions in a public conversation with the Rijeka arts community on February 11.

• Museum of modern and contemporary art

  → www.mmsu.hr

  Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka (HR) - MMSU

   

  MMSU in Rijeka founded in 1948, in its long tradition offers a committed support to innovative ways of approaching, producing and presenting art. From its very beginning the Museum has been building reputation of one of the most prominent visual art institutions in Croatia, entrusted with presentation of Croatian artists at prestigious international art events such as: Venice Biennial 1962, 1997, 2007, 2010, Sao Paolo Biennial 1967, 2004 etc. 

  The Museum rounds its programming around visual art education, parallel to different modes of exhibition concepts that address new discursive possibilities and transform it into a place of inspiration, idea exchange and active participation. Under the motto openness, creativity & engagement, together with artistic, cultural and community organizations, Museum furthers visual arts research, collaboration and exchange within the region and internationally, while aspiring to reach increasingly diverse audiences and to work in a close relationship with the community.

  Museum’s collection offers a diverse range of artistic visions with over 8,000 artworks dated from the end of the 19^th century to the present day. From 2017 Museum is located at new address, Krešimirova 26c, in ex-industrial complex Rikard Benčić. Since then, some important exhibitions were organized at MMSU in the framework of the pre-program and program of Rijeka 2020 - European Capital of Culture, i.e. Tomislav Gotovac: Crisis Anticipator - Don't Ask Where We're Going (2017), Vlado Martek: Exhibition with Many Titles and Goran Petercol: Don't Worry About Poetics, They Will Arrive on Their Own in 2019 and David Maljković: With the Collection in 2020..