“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