Stanya Kahn

“All of this was made with a lot of pleasure despite various feelings
of terror, grief and worry. El Niño never came, the cops shot over 500
people, demonization of the other is at an all-time high, the planet is
choking, my mom died. And now Trump. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. No more icebergs. This is just the tip of death’s boney middle finger. If I could say one thing, I’d tell you that scientifically speaking, snakes only ever eat their own tails when they are having a severe anxiety attack due to heatstroke. They are self-destructing in a hot panic. While the image of a snake eating it’s tail has been used to refer to the cyclical nature of life and death, to eternity and the infinite in many cultures—from Greek, Indian, Norse and South American mythology to systems of thought in Alchemy and Yoga — the ancient Egyptian idea of a circling “formless disorder that surrounds the orderly world and is involved in that world’s periodic renewal” seems to most closely reflect the wildness of worry, especially that which is brought on by hostile environmental conditions. Severe drought; the unregulated heat of citizen disempowerment in a two-party system seemingly air-locked with no
cross-stream; love and family in late capitalism atomizing the body-mind
connection faster than you can say dialectic. It’s getting hot in here. Tail in mouth, we are eating the wrong thing.” —Kahn

Weiss Berlin is pleased to announce the first solo show of Stanya Kahn
in Berlin. New and recent works in video, animation and on canvas continue Kahn’s practice of using allegory and metaphor to complicate spaces between humor and anxiety, irony and awe, dejection and concern. In exuberantly colorful drawings and paintings, land, water, animals and barely embodied humans staring into their devices, linger at the edge of exhaustion. In the two animations, “For the Birds,” (2013) and “Yes and No,” (2016), power and muted yearning cycle in dialectical loops. Two birds exchange deadpan desires for escape amidst endless danger. A witch covered in penises jumps over and over. Did she cast a spell to get rid of all the dicks? Or a spell to have one? Dismantling power is complicated. Meanwhile, in the final room of the gallery, the feature-length experimental narrative video Don’t Go Back to Sleep (2014), showing for the first time in Berlin, forms the darkly humorous core of the exhibition. With a run time of 74 minutes, Don’t Go Back to Sleep is a haunted tragi-comedy that functions as much as a symbolic meditation on citizen resilience as a metaphor for the violence of the state and the First World’s rapacious impact on the earth, driving the planet itself towards impending death. As medical professionals perform haphazard triage, mostly on each other, in vacant housing, we realize the protagonists may be some of the only people left: workers (The People) vs. the danger outside: the state (police/military/clampdown). In the tenuous relations between strangers collaborating under pressure, darkly comedic resilience and regenerative energy rise in small, understated human exchanges.

Shot in Kansas City, Missouri, in newly built homes left uninhabited
and unfinished in the economic crash, Don’t Go Back to Sleep follows roving groups of frontline emergency workers adrift in nearly empty, end-times urban and suburban landscapes. In a series of uncanny scenes, dark joking emerges alongside efforts at cohesion and collectivity. Squatting empty suburban developments and luxury high-rises, depressed with the aura of so many displaced by the U.S. housing market catastrophe, nurses and doctors establish make-shift treatment centers within the architectural mundane: fixtures and countertops, carpet pads and exposed wiring, fireplaces and crown molding. Untouched appliances glow dully in the market’s wake. Time alternately slows and speeds as the characters recalibrate their stress responses, suspended in the in-between of waiting, activated by uncertainty, disasters already underway and the reverberations of decades of distress. Alcohol, cake and lunchmeat provide sub-par sustenance as the workers labor, sleep and bury their dead. Further extending a video practice that allows fluid boundaries between the real and the fictive, between narrative and abstraction, Kahn directs an ensemble cast of mostly non-actors to perform both scripted and improvised scenarios in which their agency becomes central to the film’s construction as they create candid dialogue. Her sound design, anchored here with original compositions by Kahn and musician Keith Woods (of Hush Arbors and Chelsea Light Moving), holds a central role in the language of the film. The edits and the cameras’ movements and fixations play with reconfigurations of space, time, materiality, alienation and the overworking of Nature. A quieter humor of anxiety seeks out the edges of despair while trying to connect.

Don’t Go Back to Sleep, 2014 TRT: 74 minutes
Written, directed, shot, edited and sound designed by Stanya Kahn. Includes original sounds/music by Kahn and Keith Wood (Hush Arbors, Chelsea Light Moving). B Camera by Ignacio Genzon, Mike Soltz and Chiara Giovando. The cast contributed primary dialogue.
Made with the support of Grand Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

“People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep!”
–Rumi

“When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold.”
—Brian Massumi, (translator, “A Thousand Plateaus”), from interview:
Navigating Movements

Biography
Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video with a practice that includes drawing, writing, performance and sound. Humor, pathos and the uncanny emerge as central modes in a hybrid media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, satire and sincerity, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse.
Recent solo exhibitions include: The Pit (LA), Marlborough Chelsea (NY),
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Pigna Project (Rome), The New Museum (NY), Grand Arts (KC,MO), Galleria Perdida/Recess (NY) and a survey of works from 2008-2012 at Cornerhouse (UK). Her 2014 experimental narrative feature Don’t Go Back to Sleep, had a New York premiere Brooklyn Academy of Music with Migrating Forms Festival; UK premiere at Cornerhouse. Her work has shown at MOCA/SD; in The California Biennial (‘10); Fernley Astrup (Oslo); Rodeo Gallery (London/Istanbul); Future Gallery (Berlin) among others. Kahn’s collaborative works with Harry Dodge have shown at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, the Hammer Museum, Sundance Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial (‘08), MOCA/LA, PS1, and MoMA/NY among others. She was a contributing writer, actor and costumer for the feature film By Hook or By Crook with Dodge and Silas Howard. Recent publications include a monograph, It’s Cool, I’m Good (Cornerhouse) and Die Laughing (2nd Cannons) and contributions to the anthologies Abstract Video (ed. Gabrielle Jennings, UC Press) and Moving Image (ed. Omar Kholeif, Whitechapel). Kahn won a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video among other grants and fellowships. Her work is in the collections of MoMA/NY; the Hammer Museum/LA; the Goetz Collection in addition to private
collections.

Stanya Kahn

Born 1968 in California, United States
Lives and works in Los Angeles, United States

Education

  • 2003

    MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Red Hook, New York, United States

  • 1992

    BA, Magna Cum Laude, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, United States

Solo Exhibitions

  • 2017

    Museum of Modern Art/PS1, New York, United States
    Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2016

    Heartstroke, The Pit, Glendale, Unites States
    Stanya Kahn, Berlin, Germany

  • 2015

    Stanya Kahn: Die Laughing, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, United States

  • 2014

    Don’t Go Back To Sleep, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, United States
    Stanya Kahn, Grand Arts, Kansas City, United States
    Blood, Paper, and Mud (leave your slippers at the door), University Galleries, University of Illinois, Normal, United States

  • 2013

    Downer (but your ass looks huge from down here), Pigna Project Space, Rome, Italy

  • 2012

    I can clearly see yer nuts, The New Museum, New York, United States
    Its Cool, Im Good, Cornerhouse, Manchester, United Kingdom
    A cave walks into a bar, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2011

    Galleria Perdida/Recess Activities, New York, United States

  • 2010

    Its Cool, Im Good, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2008

    Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, United States

  • 2007

    No Ins and Outs, Carlier | Gebauer Gallery, Berlin, Germany

  • 2006

    Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, United States

Group Exhibitions

  • 2017

    Triggered, New Museum, New York, United States
    Teeter, Carl Louie Gallery, London, Canada
    Videos, Anonymous Gallery, Armory Fair and Mexico City, Mexico
    Seasick in Paradise, Depart Foundation,Los Angeles, United States/Rome, Italy
    Mutual Admiration, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, United States

  • 2016

    LA is a Fiction, Fernley Astrop Museet. Oslo, Norway
    Future Ruins, Naughton Gallery, Belfast, Ireland
    Teen Choice, CNP, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2015

    Looking Back / The 9th White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York, United States
    Stand Up!, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
    Laugh-In: Art, Comedy, Performance, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla (CA), United States

  • 2014

    Real Emotions: Thinking in Film, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
    Cherub, 2nd Cannons, Los Angeles, United States
    Artadia’s 15th Anniversary exhibition, Longhouse Projects, New York, United States
    Special Madness: Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Stanya Kahn, Chloe Seibert, Jesse Stecklow, and Ian Swanson, David Shelton Gallery, Houston, United States

  • 2012

    Between a Run and a Cascade: Constraint, Desperation, and Optimism in Water, CA, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (CA), United States
    Sunday @ 4, Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University, Bakersfield (CA), United States

  • 2011

    Two Schools of Cool, FOCA, Los Angeles, United States
    Suelto, La Central, Bogota, Colombia
    Keren Cytter, Stanya Kahn, Dafna Maimon, and Shana Moulton, Future Gallery, Berlin, Germany
    Electromediascope: Inside/Out curated by Gwen Widmer, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, United States

  • 2010

    California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (CA), United States
    Ludicrous!, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, United States
    Virtuoso Illusions, MIT, Cambridge, United States
    45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, PS1, New York, United States
    45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, Wiels, Brussels, Belgium
    Slightly Unbalanced, Harnett Museum, Richmond (VA), United States
    Queer Voices, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

  • 2009

    Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, United States
    Code Share: 5 continents, 10 biennales, 20 artists, CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania
    Videonale 12, Kunstalle Bonn, Bonn, Germany
    Unusual Behavior
    , Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara (CA), United States

  • 2008

    Desert Shore, Luckman Fine Arts, Cal State, Los Angeles, United States
    Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, United States
    California Video, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, United States
    Laughing in a Foreign Language, The Hayward, London, United Kingdom

  • 2007

    Between Two Deaths, ZKM/Center for Art and Media, Karlsrhe, Germany
    Edens Edge, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States
    Shared Women, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2006

    Defamation of Character, PS1, New York, United States
    Locale Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, United States
    VIDEO MARATHON 2006, Art in General, New York, United States
    Fair Exchange, Millard Sheets Gallery, LA County Fair, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2005

    Marking Time, Getty Museum and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, United States
    Sugartown, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York and Angstrom Gallery, Dallas, United States
    The Early Show, White Columns Gallery, New York, United States
    Films/Stills, New Langton Arts, San Francisco, United States

  • 2004

    Backyard Invitational Video Competition, Hollywood Hills House and Lazy-J, Los Angeles, United States
    Pilot: 1, Old Limehouse Town Hall, London, United Kingdom
    LTTR Show: Fail More, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, United States
    Inside of Inside, The Lab, San Francisco, United States

  • 2003

    Fail Better, Ocularis, New York, United States
    Soft Machines, Brewery Gallery, Los Angeles, United States

Video Screenings

  • 2016

    The Closer I Get to the End…, Human Resources, Los Angeles, United States
    Night Transmissions, Icelandic TV, TV/Internet

  • 2015

    Its Cool, Im Good, TOTAL WORK, Los Angeles, United States
    Don’t Go Back To Sleep, HOME, Manchester, UK
    Winner (w/Dodge) at Human Resources, LA

  • 2014

    Don’t Go Back To Sleep, Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States
    Stanya Kahn, selected works, Electronic Arts Intermix, New York, United States
    The Expansion of the Instant, X-tra at Archive Books, Berlin, Germany

  • 2013

    Always Worried, Institute for Contemporary Art, London, United Kingdon; Temple Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
    Happy Song For You, New Museum, New York, United States

  • 2002

    Winner, Slamdance, New York; Best of Slamdance, Los Angeles; Mix Festival, New York; Los Angeles Film Festival; New Festival, New York; Slamdance Film Festival, Utah; London Lesbian/Gay Intl Film Festival; OUTFEST Film Festival, Los Angeles; Silverlake Film Festival, Los Angeles; Hallwalls Art Space, Buffalo (NY), Flaming Festival, Minneapolis, United States

  • 2001

    By Hook or By Crook (Contributing writer, actor, performance consultant: Independent feature film, written and directed by Harry Dodge and Silas Howard.) Selected Film Festival Screenings: Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; South by Southwest, Austin, TX; OUTFEST, Los Angeles, CA; New Festival, New York, NY; San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay, CA; Cleveland International, OH; Paris International Lesbian and Gay, Paris, France

Performances

  • 2016

    Die Lauging, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles, United States

  • 2006

    Jimbo Cherry and Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2005

    Lois Live Sundown Salon, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2004

    Let the Good Times Roll, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2003

    Ballad of Crappy and Seapole, Diverseworks, Houston, United States

  • 2002

    Delirium, production of 1996 one-person play Yale School of Drama, United States
    Nobble Reading series, Los Angeles, United States

  • 2001

    The Ballad of Crappy and Seapole, National Queer Arts Festival, San Francisco, United States; Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, United States; Stromereien Festival of Performance, Zurich, Switzerland; University Settlement, New York, United States

  • 2000

    The Ballad of Crappy and Seapole Performance Space 122 (P.S. 122), New York, United States, Performance Space, New York, United States

  • 1999

    Rank Stranger Dixon Place, New York, United States; Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Philadelphia, United States; Mad Alex Presents, New York, United States; Links Hall, Chicago, United States

  • 1998

    Specimens, collaborative work w/ P.S. 122, New York and Christ Church Philadelphia, United States
    Ishmael , Houston-Jones
    Delirium, SUSHI Performance Space, San Diego, United States; Cleveland Performance Art Festival, Cleveland, United States; Default Propaganda, HERE Space, New York, United States
    This is Not Enough P.S. 122, New York, United States
    Movement Research, Judson Church, New York, United States
    Entertainment for the Apocalypse, Pfefferberg, Berlin, Germany
    collaborative work, Performance Fabrik, Potsdam, Germany
    company CORE, Lot Theater, Braunschweig, Germany
    Various Excerpts, Sister Spit Spoken Word Tour, 30 Venues, United States

  • 1997

    Delirium Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, United States; The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas, United States; WOW Caf, New York, United States; P.S. 122, New York, United States; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, United States
    New Work, Brooklyn Museum, New York, United States
    Entertainment for the Apocalypse, P.S. 122, New York, United States; Highways, Los Angeles, United States; SUSHI Performance Space, San Diego, United States; Brady St. Dance Center, San Francisco, United States

  • 1996

    Delirium New Langton Arts, San Francisco, United States; Dixon Place, New York, United States, Climate Theater, San Francisco, United States
    Entertainment for the Apocalypse, Bay Area Dance Series, Lainey College, Oakland, United States
    Utility Beast, P.S. 122; WOW Caf, New York, United States

Prizes, Grants and Residencies

  • 2015

    San Francisco Art Institute Artist in Residence

  • 2014

    Investing in Artists Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation

  • 2013

    Artadia Award, Los Angeles Awardee

  • 2012

    Guggenheim Fellowship, Film/Video

  • 2011

    ARC Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation

  • 2010

    Jury Prize: Best Short, Narrative Fiction, Migrating Forms Film Festival

  • 2009

    Durfee Foundation, Artists Resource Grant
    Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, nomination

  • 2008

    United States Artists Fellowship, nomination
    Durfee Foundation, Artist’s Resource Grant

  • 2007

    Rockefeller Film/Video Fellowship Nomination
    California Community Fund Fellowship for Mid-Career Artists

  • 2006

    Durfee Foundation, Artist’s Resource Grant

  • 2004

    Winner, Backyard Invitational Video Competition, sponsored by Lazy-J, Hollywood Hills House, and the Believer Magazine