Queer Trash Symposium: Sarah Hennies

Suzanne Fiol 2018 Curatorial Fellows Queer Trash present Queer Trash: the Symposium, featuring Justin Allen, Derek Baron, Lorene Bouboushian, Ivoire Foreman, Sarah Hennies, Crystal Penalosa, and Claire Rousay. An auspicious meeting of some very bright and very queer minds, the evening showcases the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life.

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm) and has received commissions for new work from Cristian Alvear, Bearthoven, Bent Frequency, R. Andrew Lee, LIMINAR, Qubit Music, and the Thin Edge New Music Collective. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Music USA, New York State Council on the Arts, and in 2016 was awarded a fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. In late 2017 she premiered the groundbreaking work, Contralto at Issue Project Room (NYC), a film featuring a cast of transgender women with a live score for string quartet and three percussionists. In 2013, Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music including Prune Bécheau, Thomas Bonvalet, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Tim Feeney, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Enrico Malatesta, and Matt Sargent.