Thursday, September 26th at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room presents Jo Andres’ award-winning film Black Kites (1996), and a unique performance featuring the film’s source text based on the 1992 wartime journals of Bosnian visual artist Alma Hajric, as part of the 2024 Brooklyn Book Festival. The film will be screened at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. limited-capacity theater. Following the screening, several collaborators and friends of Andres including Eszter Balint (actress, vocalist, and violinist), Mimi Goese (actress in the original film) & Hahn Rowe (original music), will offer a modern presentation of the film’s text featuring a live score and reading of the spectral journals. Bringing together experimental artists across generations, 2024 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Katie Porter will join the ensemble.
After Andres’ chance encounter with Alma Hajric in the late eighties, the artists became friends, and exchanged correspondence at the start of the siege of Sarajevo (1992-95), the longest siege of a capital city in modern European history. Focusing on Hajric’s inner landscape, the film reflects the interiority of the survivor’s psyche while taking shelter in an abandoned theater basement. The film skillfully merges reality-based content with interpretive visual material to reveal the simple, sometimes beautiful, yet brutal truth of her existence:
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and wonder, am I dead? Or am I alive?
I have been working every day during this time of blockade, doing a lot of drawings, photographs, paintings, with no idea what for, with no reason
To save my mind
To find sense in this chaos
Non-linear and dreamlike, the visual and textual language developed and utilized by Andres takes from her innovations for the stage–Brechtian, but more aptly an aesthetic style she called “perceptual mischief.” This technique does not intend to alienate the viewer from its range of emotions; instead it hopes to draw them into a surreal sense of being, without delivering guilt.
This Fall, the organization honors the renowned performance & visual artist at our 2024 Gala, recognizing her on the heels of Jo Andres: Before Your Eyes, the first expansive exhibition of the artist’s work spanning 40 years, including ISSUE’S co-presentation of the Liquid TV salon this past Spring.
Jo Andres (1954-2019) first became known on the kinetic downtown New York performance scene of the 1980s for her film/dance/light performances. Her works were shown at the reigning venues of the era, among them The Performing Garage, La Mama E.T.C., P.S. 122, St. Marks Danspace, and the Collective for Living Cinema. Black Kites, Andres’ 1996 award-winning film, aired on PBS, RAI Italian TV and screened in Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, London and Human Rights Watch Film Festivals. Andres directed music and art videos, as well as her own film performance works. Andres was a dance consultant to the acclaimed Wooster Group. She was an artist in residence at leading universities, museums and art colonies, including Yaddo and The Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.
Jo was extremely important to the founding of ISSUE, and an active member of ISSUE's Board of Directors. She was passionate about supporting artists, and played a pivotal role in the realization of the organization’s mission alongside its founder, Suzanne Fiol. She later joined the Artistic Advisory Council, on which she remains a member ‘In Memoriam.’
Eszter Balint is a singer-songwriter violinist and actor, with four critically-acclaimed solo albums. She grew up as a performing member of the avant-garde theater company Squat Theatre. She has had featured or starring roles in films by Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, The Dead Don’t Die), Woody Allen and Steve Buscemi (Trees Lounge), and has co-starred alongside David Bowie (The Linguini Incident). Balint was featured as lead in a six-episode arc in Season 4 of Louis CK’s critically acclaimed TV show Louie. Balint’s songs have been included on compilation albums (Elliott Sharp, John Zorn) soundtracks (Trees Lounge, Lovely and Amazing) and her singing/violin has been featured on albums by other artists including Marc Ribot, Swans and John Lurie. In recent years Balint has been workshopping and developing a live theatrical performance piece she wrote, featuring original songs co-written with Stew (Passing Strange). The show, I HATE MEMORY!, is a musical chronicle of her years as a teen and young adult, growing up in the heart of New York City’s downtown arts community. Jon Pareles of The New York Times has said of her songwriting: "Miss Balint has her own film noir sensibility as a songwriter. She slips inside her characters to project their restlessness and longing."
Mimi Goese has been pursuing divergent aspects of the arts since 1984. Trained as a dancer, Mimi has worked in post modern dance, performance art, theater, film and music. Musical pursuits have included the seminal art band, Hugo Largo, the band Mimi, plus collaborations with Moby, Hahn Rowe, Pearl Thompson (of the band The Cure) and Hector Zazou. More recently Goese has been collaborating with “mutantrumpet” inventor Ben Neill. They have continued to explore the musical and poetic qualities of mathematics and science - working in collaboration with chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham to create new songs that combine the interplay of Goese's captivating vocals and the electro-acoustic explorations of Neill's self-designed mutantrumpet with sounds created from fractal equations for the 2020 release “Life You Are” on Kobalt/AWAL. Soundtrack work includes the experimental films “Anemone Me” (directed by Suzan-Lori Parks) and “Dreaming Out Loud” by Jo Andres as well as vocal work with Joe Arthur in the film “Hell's Kitchen.” A song from the solo album “Soak” appears in the documentary “Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell.” One song “When It's Cold I'd Like to Die” from the collaboration with Moby was used in both The Sopranos and Stranger Things.
Katie Porter is a Brooklyn-based clarinetist, performer/composer, writer, and artist whose work draws from decades of experimental performance practices to create structures for music perception in space and time (over lifetimes or subtle daily increments/abstractions). She is currently a 2024 Artist-In-Residence at ISSUE Project Room. Devoted to collaboration, Katie's current projects include: Phase to Phase a bass clarinet duo with Lucio Capece in Berlin, Malosma a bass clarinet and bass flute duo with Christine Tavolacci in LA, Eternities with noise artist Bob Bellerue in NYC, Red Desert Ensemble, MOONS with Judith Berkson, Laura Cetilia, and Christine Tavolacci, Quartet or Two Duos with James Ilgenfritz, Lucie Vítková, and Teerapat Parnmonkol in NYC, MUD with poet/filmmaker Anne Penders in Brussels, and Greenstone/Hennies/Porter with Sarah Hennies and Madison Greenstone. Passionate about fostering musical communities, she co-founded Listen/Space in Brooklyn, the Listen/Space Commissions in the mountains of Utah, and the biennial VU Symposium for experimental, electronic and improvised music. She has performed in many US & International ensembles, festivals, and venues, both storied and underground such as: Abrons Art Center, American Mavericks, Centre Acanthes, C4NM, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Green Umbrella Series, Ghost Ensemble, Fridman Gallery, Human Resources, Indexical, Issue Project Room, Kenyon College, The Kitchen, KLANGRAUM, KM28 Berlin, L Collective, Lincoln Center, Liquid Music Series, LOLA, NOVA Chamber Music, Ostravská Banda, Piano+, MoMA PS1, Roulette, Rhizome DC, The Stone, SOUND at the Schindler House, and SEM Ensemble. She can be heard on the labels Another Timbre (UK), Gravity Wave / Erstwhile (US), Edition Wandelweiser (DE), FTARRI (Japan), Infrequent Seams (US), Karl Records (DE), Editions Verde (US), Harmonic Ooze Records (US), and her writings are published in the journal Sound American. Katie is working to record a giant multi-year project for solo clarinet in Nancy Holt's land artwork, Sun Tunnels, in the remote Utah desert.
Composer, producer, and performer Hahn Rowe has developed a uniquely personal sonic language, traversing a vast array of musical terrains and weaving them into ever-shifting, polymorphic soundscapes. At home in the studio as well as in the performance arena, he has worked to break down the barriers between traditional musical performance, sound art, and physical theater. As an engineer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist (violin, guitar, electronics) he has worked with Hugo Largo (two albums on Brian Eno’s “LAND/OPAL” imprint), David Byrne, Anohni (Anohni and the Johnsons), Glenn Branca, Swans, R.E.M., and Yoko Ono, among many others. A recipient of three New York Dance and Performance Awards (aka the Bessie), Hahn Rowe has a long history of scoring music and performing for dance and theater. He has been involved in over 30 evening-length dance/theater productions, working globally with the likes of Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods, Benoît Lachambre, Louise Lecavalier, Bebe Miller, John Jasperse, Simone Aughterlony, and Antonija Livingstone. Hahn Rowe is active as a composer for film and television, having created scores for films such as Clean, Shaven by Lodge Kerrigan, Spring Forward and The Cold Land, by Tom Gilroy, Married in America by Michael Apted, and Sing Your Song by Susanne Rostock. Recently, Rowe’s music was featured as a major component in Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? at MoMA (2021) and he has created the soundscore for Pendleton’s latest video work, Toy Soldier (Notes of Robert E. Lee, Richmond, Virginia/Strobe), as part of his exhibition, Toy Soldier (Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich 2022).
