KinoSaito Theater presents its spring artist in residence Deville Cohen and his Hand to Mouth dance company in “DE-SUICIDE,” a performance and multichannel installation, on Saturday, June 18, with two showings offered at 1 and 3 p.m.
Deville Cohen is a New York City-based nondisciplinary artist who studied sculpture at KHB in Berlin and received his M.F.A. in film/video from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. His videos and installations have been shown in museums and galleries such as (the Museum of Modern Art) MoMA PS1, SFMoMA (the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); the (Center for Contemporary Art)CCA Tel-Aviv-Yafo; P.S. 122 in Queens; and The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik. In 2020, he founded the Hand to Mouth company with support from P.S. 122. Cohen developed this new work while serving a six-week spring residency at KinoSaito.
“DE-SUICIDE” occurs within a sculptural video environment made by human and nonhuman collaborators. The objects, movements, language and video materials are the outcomes of a series of in-person and remote workshops with four dancers, two dramaturges and a musician in three cities – Johannesburg, Berlin and New York – between August 2020 and November 2021. This residency at KinoSaito is the first time all collaborators will be in the same place to share a live performance of the project. Objects and gadgets are not just instruments or props in the work. They are equal partners forming a coalition with human performers. According to the press release, “to ‘DE-SUICIDE’ is to become with, rather than own or dominate, the sculptural sensibility of crafting materials into objects. Whether in the studio or in a video, bodies, objects and gadgets hybridize in the act of co-inhabiting the scene.”
The free event takes place at 115 7th St. in Verplanck. For more, visit kinosaito.org.
