2025 Performance Series
When: June 13th -15th, 2025
Where: The KoKo Lot, 440 19th Street, Brooklyn
Cultivating Play in Exceptional Times is Open Source Gallery’s inaugural performance art biennial, curated by Kalia Brooks. The exhibition, which will take place over a weekend in June 2025 invites artists who use their practices to engage the public in spaces and encounters for rest, pleasure, entertainment and games. The idea of play is inspired by Open Source’s KoKo Lot, which primarily serves as a summer camp for kids. During the summer camp, children work with teaching artists and Open Source staff on a variety of activities that involve building structures and objects from recycled materials for the purposes of play.
Performance art typically produces experiences rather than objects. For this project the artists are invited to create the “stage” for their performance. Three artists, Armando Cortes, Anindita Dutta and Ed Woodham will participate in the weekend. The artists will design their structures with the lot’s primary audience in mind, and for their potential use in the lot by the kids camp and for future programming. The invited artists will work with KoKo teaching artists to design and build their structures.
This project aims to remind the audience of the necessity of play throughout one’s life. That it is the primary learning work of children, but not only for children. That all of us, even beyond our childhood years, still require the benefits of play time. Cortes, Dutta and Woodham will demonstrate variations of play that aim to disrupt the daily pedestrian routines. Their practices open up new possibilities for radical encounters with recreation, entertainment, relaxation and amusement. Utilizing the lot and the materials for building therein, the artists will make and activate spaces where they engage with the audience. Interaction and proximity are therefore an essential quality in this type of performance that will be nurtured through this project. At root, there is an element of encounter between individuals from which playfulness develops. Because this project emphasizes performance within its environment, our awareness moves between the objects we use to access play and our experience of it.
