NEW YORK, October 12, 2023—The Museum of Modern Art announces a year of programs slated for 2024 in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, a state-of-the-art space in the heart of the Museum dedicated to MoMA’s ongoing presentation of live and experimental works. The dynamic lineup of leading contemporary artists working in media and performance features Shana Moulton: Meta/Physical Therapy (February 17–April 21, 2024); Joan Jonas: Out Takes (May 2024); Martin Beck: Last Night (June 2, 2024); Studio Sound: Sable Elyse Smith (June–July 2024); Studio Residency: Sarah Michelson (August 3–September 8, 2024); and Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono (October 26, 2024–January 5, 2025).
“Anchored by pioneering artist Joan Jonas’s most recent performance, presented in tandem with her retrospective Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, MoMA’s 2024 Kravis Studio program celebrates a range of artists who have reconfigured sound, video, sculpture, and movement to create powerful new works charged with sonic and spatial complexity,”
Stuart Comer, the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance.
Shana Moulton: Meta/Physical Therapy
February 17–April 21, 2024
This exhibition will premiere a new site-specific installation by Shana Moulton, whose work seeks to capture the enormity and banality of everyday life. Through performance, video, and sculpture, Moulton chronicles the experiences of her semi-autobiographical alter-ego, Cynthia, as she navigates personal choices and physical limitations. Transforming the Kravis Studio into a prismatic environment, this installation employs the artist’s signature blend of spiritual imagery, medical technology, popular culture, and references to high art and dollar-store kitsch. An extension of Moulton’s Whispering Pines series, which began in 2002, the project continues the artist’s incisive examination of the aesthetics of pain and healing and the mass marketing of wellness, and explores the maladies of middle age. Presented as a multi-chapter narrative, the installation will be accompanied by a series of performances created in collaboration with composer Nick Hallett, bringing Cynthia’s inner world to life.
Organized by Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Performances produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, with Olivia Rousey, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.
High-definition video (color, sound). 3 min.
Image courtesy the artist © 2023 Shana Moulton
Joan Jonas: Out Takes
May 2024
Continuing Joan Jonas’s decades-long exploration of nature, ritual, and techniques of perception, Out Takes will feature Jonas’s most recent performance, organized in conjunction with the major exhibition Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning.
Layering sound, video, and narration, Out Takes began from Jonas’s explorations of unused footage from the artist’s archive, exemplifying her longstanding practice of reworking elements of previous artwork in her subsequent pieces. In this performance, Jonas interacts with videos excerpted from her works In the Trees (2015) and Moving Off the Land II (2019) alongside previously unreleased footage recorded over the past 30 years, including scenes of forests, coastlines, and appearances by Jonas’s dogs Zina and Ozu. Other prominent features of the work include sequences of the artist’s friends and neighbors, as well as the lush natural surroundings of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Jonas’s longtime summer home.
This performance of Out Takes (2019/2024) will incorporate new material developed exclusively for its presentation at MoMA. Jonas will be accompanied by performer Lucy Mullican, with live music by composer Ikue Mori on keyboard.
Organized by Ana Janevski, Curator, with Lilia Taboada, Curatorial Assistant, and Gee Wesley, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Produced by Kate Scherer, Senior Manager and Producer, with Kayva Yang, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.
Courtesy of the artist
Martin Beck: Last Night
June 2, 2024
Martin Beck: Last Night presents the artist’s eponymous film work for one day only, on June 2, 2024. Acquired by the Museum in 2022, Last Night (2016) revisits the records that musical host David Mancuso played on June 2, 1984, at one of the last parties at the 99 Prince Street location of the seminal New York dance party known as the Loft.
Beginning on Valentine’s Day 1970, Mancuso regularly held invitation-only dance parties at his home, which later became known as the Loft. In this intimate yet vibrant communal space, high-quality sound and exquisite music were central to the atmosphere, and defined the Loft’s lasting influence on dance culture.
Taking a cue from Mancuso’s signature style of playing each song from beginning to end, no matter their length, Beck films the records spun on June 2, 1984, in full and in sequence, using 10 different camera angles in a pattern based on the Golden Ratio. Unfolding across
13 and a half hours, the work offers communion with that singular night, while simultaneously implying distance from the original event.
June 2, 2024, will mark exactly 40 years since the evening Last Night commemorates. Installed in MoMA’s Kravis Studio on this anniversary, the presentation creates the conditions for memory, contemplation, and celebration—highlighting the communities and exchange of ideas that develop alongside works of art. MoMA will extend the Kravis Studio opening hours to accommodate the full runtime.
Organized by May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance.
Installation with high-definition video (color, sound), 13 hours 29 minutes; sound system; seating. Dimensions variable.
Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New York © Martin Beck
Studio Sound: Sable Elyse Smith
June–July 2024
The second annual presentation of Studio Sound—a performance series that champions artists and musicians whose work engages new possibilities for sound and music—will feature interdisciplinary artist and writer Sable Elyse Smith. Exploring auditory art forms through both live and recorded performance, this ongoing series suggests an expanded history of art in which sound plays a central role.
Smith’s work draws from the legacy of Conceptual art, using video, sculpture, photography, text, and now sound to confront the mundane and pervasive impacts of systemic oppression. At MoMA, Smith will present a new musical composition and video installation in the form of an opera, with ticketed performances and an installation on view during Museum hours. Part of a larger ongoing project, this work tells a story of queer love between two Black women set in a surreal environment. Unfolding across multiple scenes, the performance explores the political, collective, and dramatic potential of the voice as well as the ways in which language dissolves through sonic expression.
Organized by Martha Joseph, The Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Assistant Curator of Media and Performance, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance. Performances produced by Lizzie Gorfaine, Associate Director and Producer, with Nora Chellew, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.
Neon. 220.98 × 506.73 cm. Installation view, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams. Photo by: Andrea Avezzù, Roberto Marossi, Marco Cappelletti, Marco Cappelletti con Filippo Rossi, Jacopo Salvi, Ela Bialkowska. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Studio Residency: Sarah Michelson
August 3–September 8, 2024
The 2024 Studio Residency program will feature the choreographer, dancer, and artist Sarah Michelson. Offering space for experimentation, collaboration, and the incubation of new projects, this annual residency provides artists the ability to evolve their work, while offering audiences an opportunity to encounter artworks in development.
Born in Manchester, England, and based in New York, since the 1990s Michelson has created performances that examine the nature of dance as a discipline through its historical, physical, and intellectual rigor. Her recent work has incorporated painting, video
projection, sound, and installation. While at MoMA, Michelson will continue her dance-making research.
“The place where the work will happen is pretty much always my starting point,” Michelson has said about her process. As such, this residency will offer the artist the opportunity to create work in situ, culminating in several public events in the Kravis Studio in the summer of 2024.
Organized by Ana Janevski, Curator, Department of Media and Performance, and Martha Joseph, The Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Assistant Curator of Media and Performance. Produced by Kate Scherer, Senior Manager and Producer, with Olivia Rousey, Assistant Performance Coordinator, Performance and Live Programs.
Nour Mobarak: Dafne Phono
October 26, 2024–January 5, 2025
For her first museum exhibition in New York City, Lebanese American artist Nour Mobarak presents a large-scale installation reinterpreting the first opera, La Dafne, which was staged by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598 and inspired by Ovid’s myth of Apollo and Daphne. In Mobarak’s reimagining of La Dafne, 15 singing sculptures—encasing a multichannel sound installation within mycelium structures—recount the tale in some of the world’s most phonetically complex languages.
Building on histories of avant-garde sound, Mobarak’s most ambitious work to date draws on a longstanding interest in mechanized voice and memory across her practice, which ranges from sculpture to performance, moving image, poetry, and music. In Dafne Phono, Mobarak draws analogies between linguistic structure and the biological processes of mycelium, exploring how both are governed by systems of repetition, decomposition, and regeneration, and relate to wider forces of political power. Bringing new perspectives to a key antecedent in the history of performance, Dafne Phono joins nature and technology in an exploration of the voice’s ability to endure cycles of life and death, bridging histories both ancient and present.
Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film, with May Makki, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance.
Photograph: Stathis Mamalakis
THE MARIE-JOSÉE AND HENRY KRAVIS STUDIO
Opened in October 2019 as part of MoMA’s major expansion project, the Kravis Studio is a live space dedicated to performance, music, sound, spoken word, and expanded approaches to the moving image. Since MoMA’s founding, the Museum has shown a commitment to dance and the performing arts through its collection and exhibition programming. It has been a bold innovator in positioning live art within broader narratives of art history. Situated at the heart of the Museum, within the collection gallery circuit on the fourth floor, the Kravis Studio is the world’s first dedicated space for performance, process, and time-based art to be centrally integrated within the galleries of a major international collection.
Striving to create an open, accessible, and generous experience, the Kravis Studio includes a double-height glass wall with a view of 53rd Street, an overlook from the fifth-floor collection galleries, and an entrance on the fourth floor that can be exposed to the adjacent galleries or sealed to control light and sound. The space is designed to support the technical needs of performance with state-of-the-art facilities and carefully considered acoustics. The scale of the space provides an intimate and focused experience with the work. With a capacity to accommodate multiple configurations, the Kravis Studio is activated throughout the year by a range of performances, programs, and installations through commissions, festivals, residencies, rehearsals, and workshops.
The Kravis Studio programs are presented as part of The Hyundai Card Performance Series.
Major support is provided by the Sarah Arison Endowment Fund for Performance and by the Wallis Annenberg Director’s Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art.