Sanity TV (2017 – ongoing)

May 6-7-8-14-15

Performances of Sanity TV will take place over the first weekend, on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th of May at 8pm, allowing the set-up to remain on view until the closing of the exhibition.

“Sanity TV is a performance-for-video work in development. It is an extremely experimental work for me that takes the form of a talk show in which the audience is imaginary and the “guests” – that range from objects to people- are invited into an imaginary dissociative conversational space by myself, the host.

This particular work emerged from hitting a conceptual wall while at a residency last summer. My fellow resident artists became my guests and the dialogues, which seem abstract- discussing vampires, kinetic human sculpture and flower kingdom hierarchies- revealed more intense, layered conversations about cruelty, identity on the margins, and self/hood/objecthood in the African diasporic context.

I’ve since decided to take this work further by including it in a live performance; very soon it will develop into a series produced summer 2017. This work feels important, yet effortless; it achieves my goal of working with my strengths as an improvisational performer while instantly critically engaging my ongoing inquiry into psychodynamic theory.” [Autumn Knight]

Knight privileges the rehearsal as an open space, with works like Sanity TV, she is able to rely on their structures to allow improvisation to enliven each new performance. The processes of development, the rehearsals, develop like scores––allowing future revisitations of their protocols to then allow the work itself to continue to grow.

Knight’s work first appeared at Shedhalle on the SHED in February 2021, and later these works moved into the physical Shedhalle in Protozone3: You’re So Busy. In Protozone6: Are You Coming? Knight revisits “Letto”, another performance-for-video work, that calls on collaborators to perform a loose score that reveals moments of intimacy and longing between two performers in their home and in their beds.

BIOGRAFIE:

Autumn Knight (b. 1980, Houston, U.S.A.) is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, and text. She has presented work at The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The 2019 Whitney Biennial and Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, among other venues. Her performance work is in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem where she was also a 2016–2017 artist in residence. Knight attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University. She is the current recipient of the Nancy B. Negley Prize at the American Academy in Rome (2021-22).