Founded in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1971, The Kitchen both emerged from and created a hub for a local community of artists working with new art forms. While operating as part of a concentrated downtown arts scene that nurtured experimental activities, the institution in its initial years began to confront the limited opportunities available for artists to showcase this kind of work across broader cultural circuits. Lines of Distribution takes as its starting point a subset of programs The Kitchen developed in the interest of widening these networks—programs that ventured beyond the institution’s New York space to distribute and circulate art throughout the United States and abroad. These endeavors, which flourished largely between the 1970s and 1990s, included print initiatives, television programming, video distribution, and tours of live performances. Reflecting on The Kitchen’s past engagements with distribution as intentional experiments in creating alternative models for disseminating art, Lines of Distribution asks: how can these historical strategies serve as springboards for new methods of working within today’s changed landscape, wherein artworks traverse a proliferating array of physical and digital platforms with ever-increasing speeds?

To put this inquiry into practice, the exhibition reanimates aspects of The Kitchen’s programming through a cross-institutional dialogue with partners that share investments in examining the role institutions play in setting artists and artworks into motion: Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF and its organizer, North Norwegian Art Centre (both based in Lofoten, Norway). The partners collaborated to establish a temporary distribution channel between the 2024 edition of LIAF, titled SPARKS (on view from September through October 2024 in Lofoten), and Lines of Distribution at The Kitchen. Going beyond an invitation to present work in both exhibitions, this framework created avenues for four artists—Viktor Bomstad, Elise Macmillan, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Wong Kit Yi—to develop their projects via the exchange between two distinct local and institutional contexts.

In the gallery, materials from The Kitchen Archives documenting the institution’s past efforts with distribution appear alongside new works created for the exhibition that draw from and extend this lineage. An introductory archival section focuses on examples from the first two decades of The Kitchen’s endeavors, highlighting the variety of program frameworks it developed to disseminate art outside its space. Additional displays of archival materials spotlight the exhibiting artists’ engagements with records of the institution’s programming history. United by their explorations of art’s possibilities as a mode of communication across multiple types of boundaries, works by the exhibiting artists take on varied forms that entail distinct models of presentation and distribution, both within and beyond The Kitchen’s walls: a video by Wong screens in a bespoke viewing room within the gallery; performances by Bomstad and Macmillan take place live during the opening weekend and then circulate as recordings, viewable on a monitor in the gallery and online through The Kitchen’s broadcast platform, ON AIR; and a print by Rasheed travels as a poster displayed in public space in areas surrounding The Kitchen.

Building on historical traditions to bring about new opportunities for artworks to chart unexpected paths across contemporary circuits, Lines of Distribution experiments with the potential for art’s distribution to spark reciprocal relations between artists and institutions beyond the model of one-way transmission.

Lines of Distribution is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, The Kitchen, with Curatorial Advisor Kjersti Solbakken, Curator, LIAF 2024 and Director, Bergen Kunsthall.

Public Programming Schedule and Details

Montez Press Radio Broadcast, in collaboration with Lofoten International Art Festival 2024 and The Kitchen

Elise Macmillan, Live from Sørvågen Radio

October 23, 1pm ET

Online at https://radio.montezpress.com/

It would take 46 days to row a boat nonstop from Sørvågen, Norway to New York City. This is the amount of delay of the live broadcast on Montez Press Radio of a concert by Elise Macmillan that took place on September 7, 2024 at Sørvågen Radio, the former telegraph station in a remote fishing village far west in the Lofoten Islands of Northern Norway.

For the performance at Sørvågen Radio, Macmillan played long fiddle bows made from magnetic tape, instruments made from walkmans and answering machines, and bows made from the hair of an unusually tall horse. This concert was a central component of Macmillan's project for Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF 2024: SPARKS (on view in Lofoten, Norway September 20–October 20, 2024). Following this event in Sørvågen, the artist performed with a tape bow ensemble in Svolvær, Norway as part of the opening program for LIAF 2024. Macmillan will continue to evolve the work for inclusion in the exhibition Lines of Distribution at The Kitchen in New York.

Live from Sørvågen Radio features Kjell Alf Øye, Carl Schrecongost, Kaja Krakowian, Joseph Helland, Jonatan Nilsson, Today's Favorite Singers, Kjersti Solbakken, and Dávvet Bruun-Solbakk.

Lines of Distribution Performances, Featuring Elise Macmillan

Friday, November 22, 2024, 7pm ET

In-person at The Kitchen at Westbeth (Free, RSVP required) and livestreamed via ON AIR

Please note that the exhibition Lines of Distribution will be closed from 5-7pm in preparation for the performances.

In a program celebrating the opening of Lines of Distribution, Elise Macmillan performs a new iteration of Surprised Everytime (2024), a sonic work developed and presented in stages through the artist’s collaboration with LIAF 2024 and The Kitchen. Reflecting on the kinds of information held in different man-made and natural materials and the possible means of communicating such data, the performance features a suite of instruments made by Macmillan and her collaborator Carl Schrecongost including long fiddle bows made from magnetic tape, devices made from walkmans and answering machines, and bows made from the hair of an unusually tall horse. Surprised Everytime animates the instruments in an enigmatic chorus while weaving associations to choreography, mythology, choral singing traditions, acoustic dampening techniques for noise pollution, radio shows, and the history of signal transmission.

Macmillan first performed Surprised Everytime solo as part of LIAF 2024: SPARKS on September 7 at the former telegraph station, Sørvågen Radio, in Lofoten; a recording of that concert will be broadcast on Montez Press Radio on October 23 at 1pm (see description above). With a tape bow ensemble, Macmillan staged a second iteration of the work in Svolvær in Lofoten as part of the opening program for LIAF 2024. For the performance at The Kitchen, Macmillan and Schrecongost add new layers to Surprised Everytime by engaging with audio recordings in The Kitchen Archives. Stitching together these archival sonic materials, the artists create a composition that they dub onto magnetic tapes and play as bows in the performance with an ensemble featuring Kaja Krakowian and Joseph Wolf Helland.

The evening will include additional artist presentations to be announced, with a reception to follow.

Opening Reception and Artist Roundtable

Saturday, November 23, 2024. Opening Reception 12–4pm ET; Artist Roundtable 4–6pm ET

In-person at The Kitchen at Westbeth (Free, RSVP required)

Artist Roundtable livestreamed via ON AIR

Continuing the opening weekend celebration for Lines of Distribution, The Kitchen hosts an Opening Reception and Artist Roundtable on November 23. Following the reception, the roundtable conversation begins at 4pm with select artists featured in Lines of Distribution engaging in dialogue with the exhibition’s organizers about their contributions. Taking up questions around what artistic and cultural exchange means today and how institutions can work together to foster opportunities for engagement across contexts, the speakers discuss the artistic and curatorial processes that unfolded as a result of the cross-institutional collaboration between The Kitchen and LIAF 2024.

BIOS

Viktor Bomstad is a traditional joiker and experimental guitarist from the north of Sápmi/Norway. He is the current regional joiker of the two northernmost counties in Norway, a one-of-a-kind employment in Norway that seeks to promote exciting joikers in the region. Bomstad is passionate about exploring different sonic traditions and pushing the boundaries of how joik can be heard in new contexts and mixed with different genres. He is regularly seen on the Norwegian experimental scene in different constellations both as a solo artist and in different bands. In 2022, Bomstad released his first solo album Sámi Noise on Nice Things Records. The album is an exploration of how joik can shape improvisation on instruments and includes guitars, synthesizers, and sampled archive materials of joik-performances and interviews with traditional joiker Per Hætta. Bomstad’s music tends to be gritty, trance inducing, and feverish, with a heavy emphasis on improvisation. His band Sex Magick Wizards has garnered a cult following in psychedelic rock clubs in Norway and Germany, with their third album Death Grip being released in August 2024 on Nice Things Records.

In September 2024, Bomstad’s new project Devil’s Kin premiered at Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF 2024. The work is an audiovisual performance exploring old colonizers’ myths and representations of Sámi people, mixing them with references to genuine local Sámi folklore and important places.

Elise Macmillan is a violinist, artist, and musician. Since moving from the US to Norway in 2015 to play Hardanger Fiddle, she has composed music for wandering choir, string ensemble, and percussionists. Her projects range from sculptural installations to sound works accessible as a telephone hotline. In the Shade of the String (Breton Cassette, Oslo) is a song cycle she mixed in a car stereo and released on endless loop tape.

Her music has been presented by the Lofoten International Art Festival, UKS, Kunstnernes Hus, nyMusikk, Music Norway, Landmark at Bergen Kunsthall, KAFÉ HÆRVERK, Destiny's, Haus der Kunst, Shedhalle Zurich, CCRMA, and Land, Kansas City. Recent collaborations include Niilas, Quatuor Bozzini, and the Norwegian percussion ensemble, Pinquins. As Emacs, she has opened for William Basinski, Vilde Tuv, Astrid Sonne, and Tomoko Sauvage, and her music has aired on radio stations including NTS, IDA Radio, and The Lake.

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation.

Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Her works have been included in projects organized by The Kitchen (New York, 2023); M+ (Hong Kong, 2023); Tate Modern (London, 2023); FRONT Triennial (Cleveland, 2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2021); Public Art Fund (New York, 2020); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019); Surplus Space (Wuhan, 2018); the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga, 2017). She was a resident in the Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence program (Marfa, 2021). She received an MFA from Yale University. She has taught university courses about performance, video art, and new media and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (New York) in the MFA Fine Arts program. Even when not teaching, she can’t quit lecturing people, and continues to do so in her signature karaoke-inspired lecture format. She is the co-chair of LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Hong Kong, and a die-hard member of KFC (kombucha fan club).