The AKA Autonomous Social Centre will host a co-presentation of Corridor Culture, radio613 and OPIRG Kingston.
Empathic Maneuvers (dimensions not to scale) is an experiment in displaced global protest, renovating standard spaces into improvised recording studios for rabble-rousing. Katz invites the public to join her in selecting from an array of protest chants from the US/Mexico border wall, and the Apartheid Wall in Palestine. Participants then rehearse and mimic their chosen chants, learning their inflections and emotions as if they were song lyrics. This displaced duet becomes a lament against architectures of power, and a moment of empathic democratization. Through cover and spectacle, Empathic Maneuvers (dimensions not to scale) brings the passions, questions and concerns of civil societies across the planet to AKA Autonomous Social Centre. Q & A session with the artist to follow.
Reena Katz works at the intersection of sound, space and social engagement. Her interventionist projects explore technology and architecture as generators and artifacts of social and political relationships. By reconfiguring sound machines, circuits, and found materials from institutional and consumer-based contexts, she evokes histories of human aggression while simultaneously proposing their overthrow. Pairing installation with participatory performance, Katz’s projects invite audience interaction with utopian discourses of desire, discomfort and ultimate transformation. She is currently an MFA Candidate at the School for Art, Media and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design in New York.
radio613 is a collective and radio broadcast dedicated to Jewish politics, culture, and religious life. Diasporic tones find auditory homes through featured interviews, music, readings, discussion, and documentaries. radio613 presents Jewish perspectives on religious/spiritual thought and practice, race and racism, gender and feminisms, anti-semitism, identity politics, colonialism and resistance and more! radio613 is a working group of OPIRG Kingston and a show on CFRC 101.9 fm. We can be found online at http://radio613.wordpress.?com/
The Corridor Culture collective builds social connectivity in Kingston and region’s cultural sector; we do this by aiding cultural producers’ travel along Eastern Ontario’s rail corridors and connecting visiting scholars and artists with diverse audiences here and along the corridor. Between Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 we present six discrete projects: talks by artist, Reena Katz, and by the curator of the Havana Bienal, a performance by two Canadian aboriginal artists, and a sustainable art-making workshop for youth. We are supported by the Kingston Arts Council. Thanks also to Theatre Kingston.
