SI OFFSITE | LUNAR INTERVAL IV: FULL MOON | Aria Dean: Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language

Thu Mar 1 2018, 7:00pm

Downtown Art, 2nd Floor Studio
70 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003
http://downtownart.org

Swiss Institute announces the fourth event in the Lunar Intervals series, Aria Dean’s Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language.

Two couples get together for dinner and make conversation. Everything loses its shape.

Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language unravels over the course of five movements. Vacuous from the start, the couples’ chatter veers toward the nonsensical and absurd. Drawing inspiration from Eugene Ionesco’s first (anti)play, The Bald Soprano (1950), Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language is an exercise in the failures of speech, capturing and exhausting the meaningless meaningfulness of the day. Routinized, stock turns of phrases, and empty and overflowing signification reveal their own organizing mechanics as otherwise independent actors find themselves puppeteered by a massive (non)logic not their own. Get-Together follows Ionesco’s interest in the “collapse of reality” brought on by a loss of meaning, but doubles back on itself, exploring western culture as defined and nourished in part by such cyclical crises of meaning. Anxiety around order breaking down signals an order being re-established.

Out of this cycle, Get-Together: A Tragedy of Language forges a text about being emptied out.

Written and Directed by Aria Dean
Chorus: 
Vita Haas
Dillon Petito
Rob Sohmer
Shani Strand

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net as space is limited.

For questions about accessibility, please email lou@swissinstitute.net.

Aria Dean (b. 1993) is an artist, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles, CA. She currently holds the position of Assistant Curator of Net Art and Digital Culture at Rhizome. Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, e-flux, The New Inquiry, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Ghebaly Gallery (2018) and Chateau Shatto (2017) in Los Angeles, American Medium and Foxy Production in New York (2017), Air de Paris in Paris (2017), and Arcadia Missa in London (2017). Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA.

Special Thanks to: Everyone at Fourth Arts Block, Nicole Russo at Chapter NY, Andrea Longacre-White, Martine Syms, Olivia Barrett, Sherry Simpson, and Alec Recinos.

Part of Swiss Institute’s OFFSITE program, each Lunar Interval event takes place in a different location in Lower Manhattan, in the lead-up to Swiss Institute’s move to 38 St Marks Pl in the East Village. Drawing a connection with cycles and orbits, each takes place during a different phase of the lunar cycle, from the waxing crescent to the new moon. Each will be also followed by the publication of a 7-inch record.

Swiss Institute programming is made possible in part with public funds from Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Main sponsors include Luma Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Friends of SI. Swiss Institute gratefully acknowledges its benefactors UBS and Stella Artois, Swiss Re as Public Programs Presenting Sponsor, Vitra as Design Partner, and SWISS as Travel Partner.