Queer Trash Presents: Rachika S

For their second program as 2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow, Queer Trash is elated to present Black Leather Jesus, (A)sex, Mad Recital, and Rachika S. Queer Trash turns to refuse in both senses of the word: refuse of discarded detritus, and refuse as in “no fucking way.”

Rachika S weaves multi-instrumental samples and synthesized sounds with collaged found and personal video, set in a light and scrim installation. Based in Brooklyn, her work draws on intergenerational memory and meanders purposefully through appropriated visual and audio landscapes from immaterial pasts to the immediate present.

Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and interdisciplinary artist Rachika Sdraws on genres spanning ambient, contemporary classical, shoegaze, and more in her amalgamation of electro-acoustic methods, video, and light manipulation. Destructing her instrumental work using various electronic processing techniques, she juxtaposes latent qualities of acoustic sounds magnified digitally with the artifacts present in those digital apparatuses. In that vein, her work explores latent realities in various forms—as attendant to sonics, her own trans-feminine world-making, and desi ancestry. In her solo work and as a drummer for queercore group MALLRAT, she’s performed and spoken on panels at Roulette Intermedium, Elsewhere, MoMA PS1’s artBook, Flux Factory, Hampshire College, and Cornell University among dozens of other locations, and her music has been featured in publications including Afropunk, Tiny Mixtapes, Mask Magazine, and New Noise Magazine.

Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities. Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing visual and performance art in Washington, D.C.