Riven Ratanavanh. Photo courtesy the artist.
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For OPEN STUDIOS, poet and Executive Director of The Poetry Project, guest curator Kyle Dacuyan brings together Lucas de Lima, Kamikaze Jones, and Riven Ratanavanh with Demetris Charalambous – a group of artists who roll around textually and gesturally in disobedience, risk, excess, and disarray – to share works-in-progress. Interested in speech and movement behaving against functional expectation and decorum, Dacuyan asks: What do impulse, pleasure, and intuition open; what do order, legibility, and requirement foreclose? When we let go of those mantles, the stakes become higher, hotter, more vivid and true.
Lucas de Lima shares their work Cosmic Bottom, a ritual of rebirth and permeability in which liberation begins inside oneself and grows outwards.
Kamikaze Jones recontextualizes an earlier work, A Storm In Every Port, which troubles the multivalent archetypes of the sailor: as a pornographic stock character, as a vessel of colonial extraction, as an innately subordinate entity, and as a fraught sigil of queer carnality. Marooned on a deserted beach (or perhaps just stuck in a k-hole on Fire Island) the sailor outs himself as a ravenous ghost, an insatiable cumdump, and eventually, as a washed up siren who sings himself to proverbial shipwreck.
Created alongside collaborator Demetris Charalambous, Riven Ratanavan’s The Edge of Desire Has a Way of Curving is a vignette that questions the thresholds of effability, intimacy, and possibility. Drawing from personal experiences of cruising, fisting, and p̶a̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶, this new work-in-progress paints a portrait of power, agony, loss, and illumination through desire, and a queer yearning to reach into the unknown.
View the Program
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
About the Artists
Demetris Charalambous (born 2000) is an experimental NYC-based maker born and raised in Cyprus. Demetris's mediums span performance, choreography, and visual art. Demetris' work and collaborations have been presented on platforms such as NOWNESS, Berlin Commercial, and spaces such as Judson Memorial Church and the Living Gallery. Demetris's artistic practice revolves around the human body as a channel for delving into themes surrounding mortality, form, and time.
Lucas de Lima is a Brazilian-born poet, artist, scholar, and educator based in NYC. Their recent work integrates lyric desire and ritual performance as a way of uprooting fear of ecology and the body. They are the author of Wet Land (Action Books 2014) and Tropical Sacrifice (Birds LLC 2022) and the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canada Council for the Arts. de Lima's performances have taken place at Immigrant Artist Biennial, Untitled Art Fair, Artists Alliance Inc, Recess Art, and Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, with poems appearing in Brooklyn Rail, Hopkins Review, Apogee, Gulf Coast, and PEN America. They hold a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and teach at Mount Holyoke College.
Kamikaze Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. Utilizing counterarchival impulse and experimental research procedures, Jones endeavors to provide both sonic and ceremonial sanctuary for the ghosts of public sex. His work across mediums has been featured by Anthology Film Archives, Black Mountain College Museum, Montez Press Radio, Wave Farm, The Poetry Project, and Onassis USA. He was a founding member of the poetry and performance collective The Anchoress Syndicate, and the host of the podcast “Pure Garbage: An Oral Examination of John Waters.” He is the current arts editor of WUSSY Magazine.
Riven Ratanavanh (born 1996 in Bangkok, Thailand) is a New York-based artist working at the intersection of performance, film, and installation. Weaving trans Asian-diasporic futures, their work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Seattle Trans Film Festival, and the London Short Film Festival. They have taught movement workshops at Performance Space New York, and performed with Young Boy Dancing Group, Cassils, Kinlaw, and Raven Chacon, among others. Their work has also been featured by Dazed Magazine, CIRCA, and on the Piccadilly Lights in London.
Kyle Dacuyan (curator) is a poet, Executive Director of The Poetry Project, and author of Incitements (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). His poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Lambda Literary, The Offing, Social Text, and elsewhere. His performance works include Legal Tender, devised and presented with Andalyn Young and Antigravity Performance Project at Ars Nova, New York, NY (2019) and FringeArts, Philadelphia, PA (2020). As a 2023–2024 Open Call artist, he will present Dad Rock at The Shed, New York, NY (2024). Dacuyan has received the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2023), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing (2021), a Jerome Foundation Artist Fellowship Finalist Award (2021), and a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship (2017).