

MATA presents its 27th annual MATA Festival, this year in partnership with ISSUE Project Room at the limited capacity 22 Boerum Pl. theater. Featuring four concerts across four nights, this year’s festival explores the concept of INTERGALACTIC INFINITY: Music Between Spaces.
ISSUE Project Room hosts a free limited engagement for up to 10 ISSUE Members with RSVP with Thomas Ankersmit on his artistic practice with the Serge Modular analog synthesizer, his main instrument since 2006.
ISSUE Project Room is honored to present a special recording session by composer, poet, and 2021 Artist-In-Residence JJJJJerome Ellis, joined by longtime collaborator S T A R R busby. This intimate event gives unique access to ISSUE Members and launches the 2025 summer membership campaign.
At 2pm, ISSUE hosts a free public town hall organized by sound conceptualist & 2009 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Matana Roberts–the first in a nationwide series of gatherings.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary with two evenings featuring work from influential composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies. Each presentation will feature a showing of Hennies short film Passing plus the premiere of a new collaborative work with bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary with a restaging of the installation of electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel’s piece A Harmonic Algorithm 2020, coordinated in collaboration with composer and artist Seth Cluett. Working in dialogue with Spiegel on the multi-channel loudspeaker array at NOKIA Bell Labs, Seth Cluett restages a new diffusion of the work that takes advantage of the unique acoustics of the Boerum Pl. theater.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary at our 22 Boerum Pl. theater with projections of Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, recorded for his 90th Birthday Celebration, presented by ISSUE in May 2021. The evening includes versions of Lucier’s paradigmatic 1969 work I am sitting in a room from Joan La Barbara, Abigail Levine & James McNew all created during isolated stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, plus Lucier himself recorded live at ISSUE’s Boerum theater in 2017. The evening will also feature a panel conversation with La Barbara, Levine and McNew focusing on their presentations and Lucier’s legacy, moderated by James Fei.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary at our 22 Boerum Pl. theater with projections of work commissioned for our With Womens Work Series (2021), which engaged fourteen artists to create new works inspired by scores included in Womens Work, a magazine edited and self-published by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood in NYC. Originally published in 1975, Womens Work sought to highlight the overlooked work of female artists working at the cusp of the visual arts, music, and performance and is a collection of performance scores.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary at our 22 Boerum Pl. theater with projections of eight audio-visual works commissioned for our Distant Pairs Series (2020-2022). During three years, the Series engaged thirty-six artists, across eighteen programs that paired artists in disparate locations who could not work together in “traditional” ways over the past three years. The Distant Pairs series examined the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst the constrained conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary at our 22 Boerum Pl. theater with projections of work commissioned from Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free jazz ensemble of writers, artists and musicians. The performance titled The Day We Gave The Globes Back, A Sing Along!, was recorded and streamed as a part of the 2020 Brooklyn Book Festival featuring an expansive fourteen-member band that included the full group’s lineup as well as multiple embedded solos and ensemble formations of the group’s various members.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary at our 22 Boerum Pl. theater with projections of work commissioned for The Steve Circuit (2020), an episodic series of videos and digital artwork dedicated to the late beloved poet Steve Dalachinsky developed by his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo, and interdisciplinary artist and 2010 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence (AIR), Matt Mottel.
ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary at our 22 Boerum Pl. theater with projections of work commissioned for our Isolated Field Recordings Series (2020), which engaged nineteen artists to create new audio field recordings, with associated visuals, in response to COVID-19’s impact on public assembly.