The Sun Seekers
Amy Khoshbin and Jennifer Khoshbin
June 18 at 3pm
Exhibition Open 12-6pm
Upper Gallery, The Arts Center at Governors Island, 110 Andes Road, Governors Island
All events in the River To River Festival are free and all are welcome.
Join us and become a Sun Seeker. Heal from the burnout, detach from your phone (Wreck-tangle), and connect with yourself, each other and the natural world. We'll make together and lead you through a series of collective movements and somatic prompts both in the Sunport and outside in the sun. Engage with the large-scale sensory sculptures in the Sunport to awaken senses left untapped in the Wreck-tangle world – enter the sun and be reborn!
The Sun Seekers Induction Ceremony is an hour-long participatory performance led by Amy Khoshbin, co-written by Yuliya Tsukerman and choreographed by Danielle Russo. This River to River performance, set in sisters Amy and Jennifer Khoshbin’s immersive installation at The Arts Center at Governors Island, features performers Mercedes Searer, Ching-I Chang, Eshe All Day Hues, and musicians Alex Koi and Jon Panikkar.
The performance begins in the Sun Seekers Sunport – the large-scale immersive installation of analog sensory sculptures that doubles as an initiation space to the Sun Seekers world. The Sun Seekers is a sci-fi narrative about an alternate world that maintains a direct correlation to our experience of the isolation and anxiety of indoor on-screen life (the Wreck-tangle).
Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist. She pushes the formal and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to foster radical social change through performance, social practice, video, collage, rap music, writing, and installation. She has shown at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, Artpace, The High Line, Socrates Sculpture Park, and festivals such as South by Southwest and River to River. She has received residencies at The Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts among others. She has received a NYFA Grant, Franklin Furnace Fund, and Rema Hort Mann Grant. She is the current Fellow in Civic Engagement at Pratt Institute. Khoshbin received an MA in New Media Art from New York University and a BA in Film at University of Texas at Austin. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and poet Anne Carson among others.
Jennifer Khoshbin is a San Antonio artist and curator. Her work often aims to present a detail of the story of human diversity and community. The strength of the work comes from great attention to pictorial detail, seen in her drawings, murals and installations. The guiding inspiration in all Jennifer’s artwork is twofold: the public self and the private self. Her public works are created with a respect to the specific history of the site and its communities of settlers and wayfarers, past and present, human, plant or animal. Her private works are intended to explore personal identities through storytelling. Whether creating intricate personal drawings or large-scale public art pieces, there exists a simple phrase, idea or story worth telling. Jennifer has exhibited works in galleries and museums throughout the United States: Times Square Arts, Artpace, Southwest School of Art and Craft, TX; Blue Star Contemporary, TX; Artpace, TX; The Watermill Center, NY; Rose and Radish Gallery, SF; Bellevue Arts Museum, WA; 360SEE, Chicago; and Tinlark Gallery in LA, among others. Her work has been published and written about widely and has appeared in Newsweek, Readymade, House Beautiful, Glamour, and in numerous art and craft books.