On Wednesday, March 4th at 8pm, 2026 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow Isabella Thorpe-Woods will present her first program, Dear, at ISSUE’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater. Over the course of her fellowship, the artist will share a series of events that explore letters as a curatorial prompt, and the ways they both fail and succeed in transmitting meaning or reaching their desired destination. Dear, invites artists Kate Williams and Aminah Ibrahim to share new works that explore the epistolary nature of performance, and with that, new potentialities for approaching performance through its likeness to the letter form.
Thorpe-Woods asks, “Are all performances just letters to homes beyond or within us, real, imagined, or remembered? Is performance making, like letter writing, always a question of address? The addressing of places, people, things, sentiments, or selves that exist in our shared world or internal realities, which we may call home, carry with us, or shed entirely?”
It’s fitting that Thorpe-Woods has titled her first program Dear, the standard salutation that dutifully opens a letter, marks an arrival and signals a transmission across thresholds. As a non-American artist, the liminal position of the threshold, placing you between one space and the next, reflects a mode of being precariously suspended in a temporary home. This unsettled space haunts the word “Dear.” It resonates with Thorpe-Woods’ approach to performance, which oscillates rather than resolves. The threshold as an edge, or perhaps a border, also gestures toward the remote intimacy and lagging presence of geographical distance—out of sync, out of touch, and out of time within a political environment that renders one’s surroundings paper-thin.
Within the performance space, this suspension intensifies: the outside world no longer quite holds. One never fully arrives or fully returns home. Like letters, performance is imperfect and intimate, delayed and disjointed yet insistently relational.Together and separately, the artists consider how performance can speak across distance, memory, and (be)longing. With these mediations, Dear, strives to present a series of performed letters, drafts, and transmissions-to-come. Hovering between confession, critique, invocation, and rupture.
Some are sent.
Some are staged.
Some are left unsent.
Some are cherished.
Some are destroyed.
Some are purloined.
Some are displayed.
Some are hidden.
Some are abandoned.
Some are redressed.
Some are read.
And so on.
Kate Williams is a multimedia artist. She began her process of ‘dance’ in college, focusing on narrative dialogues rooted in personal experience. Through movement improvisation and choreography, she continues to deepen her investigation into these experiences. She is a self-taught sewist and has been sewing for over a decade. Kate’s work merges her two practices—using clothing she creates as a sculptural element of her movement work, making her own costumes since college. She also does commissioned seamstressing work, which has been in shows at SculptureCenter, Pioneer Works, and Judson Church among others. Currently, Williams is co-founder and one half of performance duo Star & Stan with Reed Rushes, performing their work in various places around New York City and Upstate New York such as: Performance Space New York, The Park Avenue Armory, PAGEANT, Art OMI, and Basilica Hudson. As well as touring internationally: at Les Urbaines, Lausanne, Switzerland; Moulin Rouge, Paris; CREAMCAKE, Berlin; and BENTA Gallery, Istanbul. She is also part of the management team at Otion Front Studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She graduated from Bard College in 2020, majoring in Dance and Human Rights with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and received the Ana Itelman Prize for Choreography.
Aminah Ibrahim is a Kuwaiti-Indonesian-American artist and producer of performance. Utilizing somatics, automatic writing, soundscapes, adornment, Khaleeji dance, and the blues, Aminah maps the body as a mystical instrument for spiritual excavation and resistance. Her sculptures are worn in performance, fusing natural materials, chainmail, and found objects. Past works developed into video artworks and multimedia installations, investigating surveillance and self-censorship. She received a BS in TV, Radio, Film and Anthropology from Syracuse University and a MA in Sound Art from University of the Arts London. Aminah’s performances have been shared at PAGEANT, Performance Space New York, DUPLEX, Cathy Weis Projects, Movement Research, Triskelion Arts, Magenta Plains, JACK, and Judson Memorial Church.
