Cabaret Voltaire Art Center Presents 'Tran'sience', Multimedia Shows and Performances by Sukran Aziz November 17 - December 23 2007

Opening Reception Saturday, Nov. 17, between 4 - 8 p.m. Participating Artists: Sukran Aziz-Karen Dolmanisth-Matthew Slaats-Kirtland Snyder-Fuat Yalin 358 Main Street Pougkeepsie NY 12601 TEL/ FAX: 845-473-1181 sukranaziz@aol.com

(PRWEB) November 17, 2007 -- Cabaret Voltaire will present two multi-media installations with video-sound-photo-and-text and three outdoor performances, "Transience" and "Re-words," by Sukran Aziz, Karen Dolmanisth, Kirtland Snyder, Matt Slaats, and Fuat Yalin.

Though the idea for the show was a long time incubating, the title of the show was born almost at once. One day, Sukran Aziz, Karen Dolmanisth, and Fuat Yalin were sitting in Aziz's studio, musing about the ubiquity of "change." They were reaffirming the fact that the only permanent thing in the universe seemed to be change itself, that things seemed to exist only in flow, in passing from one stage to another, namely in transience, and with that the name of the project was born. This was followed by the realization that the most rapid and dramatic instances of transience were occurring in human identity, best represented in language. Recitation of myriad words prefixed by 'Trans-' and 'Re-' characterize the enactment of the flow.

For Sukran Aziz, language is the most powerful affirmation of cultural and individual identity. "If you want to know who people are, listen to their language." If language is the most powerful affirmation of collective and individual identity, writing is the most powerful carrier of this identity through time. Each language is a different universe in itself, infinite in its own inner possibilities, solipsistically detached from all others. There is really no translating between languages; there is only a groping for rough equivalents. She conceived "Transience" as an antithesis to the impoverishment of language, dedicated entirely to language as an apotheosis of culture. In re-affirming the universal and exalted aspects of human language, she laments its current degradation in cryptic text-messages, monosyllables uttered in place of sentiments, and vulgarities as assertions of self.

In this exhibition, Sukran Aziz works with visual images and sounds of different languages reduced to their minimal form in phonemes. She plays with time, light, and sound as the starting points and building blocks of symbolic exchange. There are also complete texts, personal messages, from the very same mouths that have produced these sounds. We see the unity of the opposites between the simplest and most meaningless sound-units of each language (phonemes) and the ultimately meaningful and complete end-results in final statements.

Sukran Aziz, a Turkish-born artist, traveled extensively in Italy, France, England and Holland to study art history for her MA. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Mimar Sinan, Faculty of Fine Arts, Istanbul, Turkey in 1986. She has been living in New York since 1987. Her aim is to dissolve the boundary between art and everyday life, humorously and critically, much in the spirit of "DaDa and Fluxus". In the chain of art projects she has created over the years, the artist has consistently worked on a progression of interrelated and evolving themes. What began with her explorations on Time, Migration, and Identity, has led to her fascination with language as a powerful manifestation of cultural identity. This evolved into her later interest in the past as a repository of human experience. All this has led to her most recent work, Memory Drops, which focuses on the life and identity of a city, the city of Poughkeepsie, where she presently lives and works. Some of Sukran Aziz's critically acclaimed exhibitions from the past include Memory As Metaphor, O' Difference - Off Difference, Room For Rent, Mythology Of Tongues, and The Past Is With Us shown in New York City, Dream Drops in Los Angeles, Reminiscences II at the 5th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey. Oscillations at the Habitat International Exhibition in Istanbul, Polish Alphabet in Krakow, Poland, and Stones And Voices in Global Bridge Project in Reutlingen, Germany. Also, her Body Identity project was selected by Fundacion America for the Traveling Body-Museum and shown in Santiago, Chile

Karen Dolmanisth, is a New Media Sculptor, Installation and Performance Artist. She studied painting with Jack Whitten at Cooper Union in New York City and went on to complete her BFA at Parsons School of Design and The New School For Social Research. Her MFA is in Sculpture/ New Forms, Video and Performance Art, from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has exhibited widely, by invitation at The Vienna Secession Museum, Austria, In "Next Age DaDa", in the Netherlands, and FEVER II, at The Wexner Center For Contemporary Art. She was awarded a Dayton Artist In Residence Grant at Connecticut College with Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton. Dolmanisth shows frequently at New York City's EXIT ART and Brooklyn's SMACK MELLON, and is represented by the Pierogi 2000 Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is included in the Abrams book, NEW ART, a compendium of important emerging artists of the 90's.

Matthew Slaats, an experiential and interactive artist, completed his MFA and MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA in Archaeology from the University of Evansville. Having traveled the world over, Matthew has endeavored to work across disciplines and media in an effort to create audience-based interactions and experiences. Much of his work focuses around engaging communities in creative processes, re-contextualizing space and action. He has shown work across the United States, with recent shows in New York, Richmond, and Chicago. His work has been seen at the Kitchen and in collaboration with the Flux Factory in New York.    Last year he we traveled to Singapore, working with Artistic Director Ong Keng Sen on his production Diaspora for the Singapore Arts Festival. Other artists he has worked with are Meredith Monk, Matthew Buckingham and Richard Gough. Presently, he is curating the work of emerging artists and writing art criticism.

Kirtland Snyder has published two chapbooks of poetry -- Winter Light and Soldiers of Fortune (the latter a collaboration with the American painter, Leon Golub), and his booklength manuscript, House of Earth, was a finalist in the Paris Review Poetry Prize competition. Snyder has written two novels, The Wolf Moon, and The Man Who Had Two Hearts, which took Third Prize in the 2002 Mayhaven Awards for Fiction. His first spoken-word CD, "Walking with Thoreau," was released in fall 2003. He has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry for 2008.

Fuat Yalin, is a cultural anthropologist with theoretical and research interests in human migration, culture change, and linguistics. In addition to field work he has done in metropolitan areas of the Middle East, Mexico, and the United States, he has taught at the University of Connecticut and at NYU. As a long time student of the arts, art history and criticism, he is also to be credited with conceiving the very title of the present "tran'sience " show.

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