Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity): Kite with Alicia Svigals

Saturday, April 8th at 4:30 PM

Kite will be joined by her aunt, the violinist and composer Alicia Svigals, for an intergenerational dialogue through music and dreams. These complementary performances will place their practices in conversation, building upon a connective thread of sonic ancestry and shared dreaming.

This event is part of Kite’s ongoing performances of her work Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity), which is currently on view in our exhibition and we learn to keep the soil wet. This event is part of Kite’s ongoing performances of her work Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity), which is currently on view in our exhibition and we learn to keep the soil wet. Each week, Kite creates a series of geometric designs, representing her dreams in patterns that correspond to Lakota words and traditional art forms. The patterns are then converted into textiles through an embroidery machine, which acts as kind of translator, transforming knowledge from the dream world into the visual language of designs. These cyborgian communications act as the basis for a series of subsequent activations where Kite sings, fiddles, reads her dreams from the geometric patterns, and invites friends, collaborators, and aligned artists to interpret the embroidered scores.

Learn more about Kite's ongoing performances here.

About the Performers

Violinist/composer Alicia Svigals is a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, who she co-directed for seventeen years.  She has worked with violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and many others.  She has received commissions and awards for her compositions including her score to the 1918 film the Yellow Ticket, and was an NEA Macdowell Fellow.  Her most recent album is Beregovski Suite, a duo with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer exploring klezmer melodies collected in the early 20th century by Soviet Jewish ethnomusicologist Moshe Beregovski.  Svigals currently collaborates with pianist/composer Donald Sosin on original scores for newly-restored silent films, including The Ancient Law and City Without Jews, and Elinor Antin’s faux-20’s silent Man Without a World.

Kite is an award winning Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic raised in Southern California, known for her sound and video performance with her Machine Learning hair-braid interface. Kite holds a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and has received a PHD from Concordia University. Kite’s groundbreaking scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013, Kite is the first American Indian artist to utilize Machine Learning in art practice.

Kite’s artwork and performance has been included in numerous exhibitions, recently Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Plug In Contemporary, PS122 and the Vera List Center, Anthology Film Archives, Walter Phillips Gallery, Chronus Art Center, Toronto Biennial, and Experimenta Triennial. Kite was a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, a 2020 Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellow, a 2020 “100 Women in AI Ethics”, a 2021 Common Fields Fellow, and the 2022 Creative Time Open Call artist for the Black and Indigenous Dreaming Workshops with Alisha B. Wormsley.

Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity) is part of the exhibition and we learn to keep the soil wet, curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director.