Event

Social Health Performance Club II: Dark Diction

The Brooklyn-based performance art group Social Health Performance Club presents nine performance artists with works that investigate resistances, regulations, and relationships between public speech, vocabularies of image and symbol, diction, and construction of identity.

The two evenings are curated and organized by Ayana Evans, Esther Neff, and Elizabeth Lamb, who will also be performing framing texts and raising questions as emcees throughout the two nights. Info about the line-up for the two nights can be found here.

THE LINE-UP:

FRIDAY, January 16, 7:30-10:30pm
Nyugen Smith (pictured)
Lorene Bouboushian
Ian DeLeon
Ivy Castellanos

SATURDAY, January 17, 7:30-10:30pm
Whitney Hunter
Maria Hupfield
Mary Valverde and Leyna Marika Papach
Geraldo Mercado

The term "Dark Diction" is taken from Kanye West's Crack Music. The term is a paradox, on one hand it describes optimistic views of speech in which the voices of oppressed groups and individuals can shape and reify history and potentially overthrow imperialist culture and systemic oppressions. But on the other hand, because West sees becoming wealthy and culturally powerful (like a crack dealer) as the only way to be free within current cultural paradigms, identity expressed via speech is only valuable as an addictive cultural commodity that maintains capitalist modes of production and valuation of human beings. This exhibition debates this paradox, asking: how free are our very forms of speech (diction) and what are the processes by which speech is given power? Even if diction (our actual words and the way we say them) is free, do the modes of production by which they are valued keep everyone, even those who are authorized to speak, addicted and enslaved?

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