Indigenous Sonic Agency
Thursday, September 22, 2022
12:30m EST
Kite will be moderating a panel discussing Indigenous Sonic Agency, as part of the Arts + Environmental Justice Symposium, presented by Mural Arts Philadelphia. This event will be online and accessible to the public.
This panel discussion highlights the work of multidisciplinary artist Nathan Young, a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, and his plans to create a site-specific, sound-based installation in the landscape surrounding historic Pennsbury Manor – a reconstruction of the home of Pennsylvania founder William Penn. Building upon traditional Lenape practices of song-making and environmental stewardship, the installation will encourage individuals to consider histories of colonialism from a new perspective tuning in to sounds of Lenapehoking today. Moderated by Oglala Lakota Artist Kite aka Suzanne Kite, this conversation bringing together the artist and project organizers, will explore the development of the installation through the lens of indigenous sonic agency.
Speakers:
To sign up for the event, please visit the event link here.
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Tȟaŋmáhel
A lecture-performance for Skill Futures, Presented by the Singapore Art Museum
Wednesday, September 28
7:30 - 9:00pm SGT
Online via Zoom
In this online performance, Suzanne Kite composes a ‘visual score’ – a form of experimental music notation – entailing symbolic forms that performers and musicians can read and interpret. Deriving ideologies from traditional Lakȟóta artmaking, as seen in their quillwork and beadwork, these processes of visual score-reading are reflected in their geometric designs, and translated from the aftermath of a waking or sleeping dream.
Similarly to reading and writing music, these designs communicate concepts without verbal language, becoming a semiotic language, a language of symbols that do not have to be explained. Like stories, their meaning changes over time and develops over a lifetime, no longer confined to its original interpretation. Creating a dream narrative from a collection of visions re-enacted through videos, the performance, Tȟaŋmáhel, will assign visions to symbols and weave a complete graphic score into being.
The performance will be followed by a conversation and Q&A moderated by SAM curator Syaheedah Iskandar. This session is held in conjunction with the programme series Skill Futures.
To sign up for the free online event, please visit the Skill Futures website here.
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Lakota-Sys (L-Sys), Listener Performance
Friday September 30, 2022
7:00pm CST
RSVP here
Epperson Auditorium at KCAI
4415 Warwick Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64111
As part of the exhibition Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, presented at the Kansas City Institute of Art Gallery, Kite will be performing her works Lakota-Sys (L-Sys) and Listener.
For more information on the exhibition and the performance, please visit the KCAI Gallery website for Soundings here.
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Upending Expectations for Indigenous Music, Noisily
Kite, along with various Indigenous musicians, was featured in a New York Times article exploring experimental Indigenous music.
"The immersive sound art of Suzanne Kite, the self-made scrapyard instrumentation of Warren Realrider, the scabrous violin solos of Laura Ortman — these musicians and many of their peers are rapidly upending ideas about what it means to sound Native."
To access the article, follow this link.
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The Whitney Biennial 2022 Review: Raven Chacon’s ‘For Zitkála-Šá’
For Zitkála-Šá, Raven Chacón's compositions presented at the Whitney Bienniale, was reviewed for Operawire by Jennifer Pyron.
"‘For Suzanne Kite’ activates numerology in design with the body. The score is a series of +/- numbers and X’s that invite the performance artist to freely decide in the moment how to value the symbol as a language. Kite interpreted this composition by deciphering as a process of prayer and honoring the work as a documentation to remember. She fully engaged her body, mind, spirit and strong backbone of Lakota philosophy to engage audience members with something more profound.
She also incorporated moments of noise in between spoken-words that fused together this decoding process in a modern way. Audience members were awe-struck with her raw portrait of art as decolonization and her higher understanding of the ways as knowing."
To access the article, please follow this link.
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