ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Saturday, July 18th at 8pm, ISSUE closes the summer season with the return of Matana Roberts (2009 AIR). Opening the evening, Ben Vida (2013 AIR) will perform music from his 2026 release, Oblivion Seekers with vocalist Sara Magenheimer.
Roberts has maintained a longtime presence within ISSUE’s history, from early presentations of their Coin Coin cycle during their 2009 residency to community-oriented gatherings such as the LISTENING THROUGH THE FIRE town hall in 2025. For this appearance, Roberts returns to the 22 Boerum Pl. theater in a live performance format, presenting solo work rooted in improvisation, sonic experimentation, and spontaneous composition. Stripped of the multimedia elements they are known for, the performance will center on the immediacy of sound and acoustic space, while continuing ongoing investigations into resonance, perception, and collective listening.
Fellow comrades in narrative art, Vida and Magenheimer, present a live collaboration expanding on material from Vida’s newest release, Oblivion Seekers. Following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire, it focuses on spoken word duets with instrumental compositions that have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued. Evoking novel confluences of music and speech, from Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, to “the entire history of hip hop,” Vida gently and playfully breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony.
ISSUE Members can RSVP to this event for free using their unique code at checkout, and enjoy exclusive perks and access to all limited capacity events.
A dynamic saxophonist, composer, improviser, and mixed media artist, Matana Roberts’ artistic practice aims to expose the mystical roots and the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression in her music and art. Her innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, and political expression within improvisatory structures.
Ben Vida is an artist and composer living in New York. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the group Town and Country and has since worked as a solo artist working with many labels including Alku, PAN, Future Audio Graphics and Kranky. His work has been featured in Artforum, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art Review, Wire Magazine, The Creators Project, WIRED Magazine among others. Vida’s pieces have been presented widely in venues such as the Guggenheim, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; The Kitchen, New York; Leap Gallery, Berlin; Lampo, Chicago; Cricoteka Museum, Kraków, Poland; The Artist’s Institute, New York; the Sydney Opera House; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Borderline Festival, Athens, Greece and the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival in London.
Sara Magenheimer is an artist preoccupied with language whose work spans moving image, writing, performance, collage, sound and sculpture. She is based in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include a survey show at Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY; The New Museum, NY; Timeshare, LA; The University Art Museum in Albany, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, NY. Her videos have been widely screened including Oberhausen Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The New York Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, EMPAC at RPI, Now Instant, The LA Festival of Movies, Flaherty Seminar, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Award, the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2020 and awarded a Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva in 2021. Magenheimer authored Notes on Art and Resistance A–Z after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In 2019 Wendy’s Subway published Beige Pursuit, Magenheimer’s first book of writing. Magenheimer is an Associate Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase College.
