performance | 15 minutes | multimedia performance piece, with projections for 4 gallery walls and gallery floor.

The piece takes my body through an environmental simulation of the Oglala Lakota comsologyscape, as I shoulder the burden of 4 female Lakota characters who have shaped space/time. The piece includes 12 sculptures, animation, sound, video, carbon fiber, clothing, and movement, developed from an obsessive hyper-structure derived from “bad” source books that attempt to qualify Oglala religion into a simplified chart.

This piece explores the relationship between my body and the entanglement between lies, fiction, oral history, mythology, ethnography, and Lakota religion.

Music produced by Kite, Aerial

This set of works explores a few questions: What is an Indian narrative? Is data meaningless without narrative? If I map and claim my indigenous female body, is it now my own? The conceptual framework of this piece focuses on data as both fiction and reality. Data in this piece functions in many contexts: data from geologic maps, data on controversial Uranium ore deposits, data from my body read by the accelerometer, and so on.

While all these data points are real, they leave much in question. Is this data accurate? Is this data telling the whole story? Is this data meaningless once it is mediated through technology? What is real about this data or even numbers themselves? I feel using data for its qualities of “realness” is a useful tool in exploring where my own indigenous body fits in a world in which I feel very unreal. While most statistical data says I should already be dead from teenage suicide, from murder, or from fetal alcohol syndrome, the narrative says otherwise. My goal in this piece is to explore my indigenous narrative with these data driven tools and try and reach what is real.

The visual content I will explore comes from questions of how futuristic technology can aesthetically coexist with a Native aesthetic identity that is often portrayed as artifact. I will make wearable carbon-fiber sculptures that will house my body interface, I will hand sew the costuming for the performance, hand draw the narrative book and turn it into animation. While these items will all be ‘handcrafted 'Lakota pieces’, their use and reflection of technologies places them at a crossroads between Native-futurism and Native science fiction, both, I feel, are difficult psychological spaces. On one hand I would like these objects and the piece to create an imagined future in the now, but for a lot of my family and tribe, the focus needs to be on the daily personal and community crises that we are forced to face.

On view at Infinity Room, October 24- November 10, 2015

Unheard Records is a record label, voices of artists you have yet to hear, started by Mint Park and Suzanne Kite.

Our mission is to build a creative home for experimental electronic sound artists, as well as artists of all mediums, whose works are not bounded by genres. We also focus on curating female, female-identifying, minority, and queer artists.

In form of online radio, and an online gallery, our goal is to curate and share our friends and colleagues’ amazing and unique work that needs a place to stand and to be heard. This is an incubator of “shit you haven’t put out because no ones asked because it’s weird”.

We are on open call for submissions and we’d love to feature your sounds, tracks, songs words, poetry, article, essay, interview, video, mixtape, photos, drawing, paintings, documentation of dance, workshop, performance, lectures, nature recordings, or anything else! Reach out!

About

Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer from Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition and a MFA candidate at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School. Kite's work includes performance, drawing, animations, choreography, movement, electronic productions, arrangements for large ensembles, sound sculpture, gallery installation, text scores, and video compositions. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations, and has recently launched the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records.