UNDOXX: THERE ARE NO WORDS, SO MAY IT BE THE END and ALTAR EGO

THERE ARE NO WORDS, SO MAY IT BE THE END is a new performance by Mette Loulou von Kohl. Centering queer sensuality, pleasure, and fantasy, von Kohl satirically comments on the counter-terror industry of the Zionist State. THERE ARE NO WORDS, SO MAY IT BE THE END is a multivocal, multimedia solo performance in which the artist proposes Palestinian futurity to challenge and destabilize settler colonial projects and identities.

ALTAR EGO stages altars for kindred, mythic, and discarded selves. Meditating on relationships to power and internalized racial, colonial logics, ALTAR EGO transforms the gaze of the altar to manipulate vantage points that place the sacred alongside the desecrated. Alami’s performance tenderly unsettles portals of surveillance and (anti)care. ALTAR EGO asks, how do we sustain feeling deeply?

Mette Loulou von Kohl was born from the orange at the center before the new world came. She is a cultural worker, community organizer, and wanderer. von Kohl employs her art as a tool in the struggle to end the colonization of Palestine. She is an alum of EmergeNYC, a former Macdowell Colony Fellow, and Jerome Foundation AIRspace Resident. von Kohl has performed nationally and across Europe. She exists in two places at once.
Nora Alami is a Moroccan-American experimental dance artist and creative producer. Dance is her tool for conducting research, building community, and organizing politically. Her artistic works research nostalgia for a sense of belonging never quite experienced and join disparate realities through sensuality, embodiment, and materiality. She has been awarded MANCC Forward Dialogues 3, New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Choreographic Residency, CUNY Dance Initiative, BRIClab: Performing Arts Residency, JACK Artist Residency, and Rest and Restore at The Petronio Center. Her choreography has been presented at LaMaMa Moves!, Danspace Project's DraftWork series, Triskelion Arts, Houston Metropolitan Dance Center, Center for Performance Research, New York Live Arts, and Movement Research at Judson Church. She has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, River to River Festival, and toured with Jadd Tank at the 2018 Focus on Mediterranean Choreography platform in Italy. She holds a Masters degree in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. Nora loves to collaborate across disciplines. Reach out to connect at [email protected] or @noralami on Instagram.

Across three weeks, UNDOXX will present performances, films, and new media works, conversations, teach-ins, and resource-sharing events for artists seeking tools to navigate the shifting landscape of censorship in the arts. Censorship of artists in the U.S. is currently surging as a powerful force, yet it is not unprecedented. By bringing together global majority artists, queer artists, marginalized artists who have understood its inner workings for generations, UNDOXX will spark conversation and generate resources for artists and audiences in the U.S. to understand censorship in the arts, its history, and its current evolutions. UNDOXX will make space for people to learn in community and present work by censored artists as their primary intervention.

For more information check out: www.jackny.org/undoxx-2024

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