Stuck at the office: Kate Mohanty

Saturday, March 18th, at 6pm, 2023 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow evil dentist (Alice Gerlach and David Farrow) present “stuck at the office,” a durational office space installation featuring performances by Kate Mohanty and FRANK/ie CONSENT. This is their first program in Corporate Retreat, a curated series of performances appropriating the banality of office space to reimagine the relationship between artistic practice and community building. The event takes place in an office space at NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Downtown Brooklyn. 

​​Due to limited capacity, audience is encouraged to enter and exit at any time during the 6pm -10pm durational performance. Admittance will be staggered to accommodate as many guests as possible throughout the performance. 

Statement from evil dentist: 

What has the office become? As cramped cubicles have emptied throughout the pandemic and bosses now struggle to coerce workers back to their desks, the office has emerged as a liminal space between the corporate conformity of the past and the technological dystopia of our distributed work-from-home present. Property owners, city governments, and corporate accountants fret over what will become of this once valuable real estate. Leases continue to expire without renewal; directives to return to the office are defied; some economists raise concerns over an urban doom loop where empty offices topple rents and take down surrounding businesses in their decline. 

To these apocalyptic prognostications, evil dentist replies, “GET BACK TO WORK!” The office will be open from 6pm-10pm at 370 Jay St on March 18th to demonstrate the wonders of the workplace. Phones ringing off the handle, fax machines sputtering away, water cooler talk resonating through the conference room, meetings called last minute, emails, emails, EMAILS! The remnants of office tech will be transformed into sound installations to turn the office into a humdrum fun house.  

And, if this isn’t enough to convince our b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l employees to return to the office, we are calling some ringers — top dog corporate types, fortune five hundred fellas, musky members of the 1% — to conduct some corporate restructuring. Through improvisational performances drawing on the offerings of the office, experimental saxophonist Kate Mohanty and multi-disciplinary artist FRANK/ie CONSENT will convene team building exercises through sound. These sonic explorations of the office will illuminate a different corporate culture, one in which creative passions overwhelm the blank office space. 

What if all those empty offices were overflowing with sound?  

How do you fold time in on itself? For experimental saxophonist and improviser Kate Mohanty, the length of breath, the subtlety of a flicked valve, or a precise contortion of the body all swirl and confuse the passage of time. A drone becomes a flurry of notes, a sighing hold transforming into an exclamation, a moment's pause in between another passage stretching to populate the listener’s mind with reflection. A longtime member of the Brooklyn diy scene and collaborator in many outfits, Mohanty is respected as both an emotionally captivating player and advocate of the diy ethos. Their debut tape, “the double image”, finds them effortlessly exploring the saxophone’s palette. As the listener collapses in-between the instrument’s rhythmic, melodic, ambient, and noisy flourishes, Mohanty remains as a consummate guide to sonic exploration.