Dirty Looks and Kembra Pfahler Return to The Kitchen This October

The Kitchen welcomes back Dirty Looks, the bi-coastal platform for queer experimental film, video and performance, for an unprecedented program of cinematic arcana and voluptuous horrors that make up the work of painted Downtown New York icon Kembra Pfahler. The artist has been performing since the late 1980s in museums, galleries, and clubs the world over, largely through her ongoing project with her band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. From the beginnings of her practice through to recently produced material, Pfahler and a selection of her illustrious collaborators will present a deliciously harrowing evening, sure to bring back the night.

The evening at the Kitchen will feature an 80-minute screening program of shorts that either feature or were created with Pfahler (including just-digitized super8mm films from the late 1970s/early 80s); a solo performance by Pfahler, as well as a performance by her and the girls of Karen Black; and a world premiere of a new video by the artist, filmed at the Kitchen.

This event will take place on October 30 at 8pm The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). Tickets, $20 for general audiences, $16 for students and seniors, and $15 for members, are available at thekitchen.org.

In their continued showcasing of the artistic legacies that built the foundations of contemporary queer aesthetics, Dirty Looks has set their sights on the confrontational, corporeal, death metal-tinged feminism of Kembra Pfahler, and are teaming up with the artist herself to put together this night of grotesque beauty in film and performance. Pfahler, who advocates an art of "available-ism," creates raucous social commentary using what's, straightforwardly, available. "The only thing you need to be an artist is courage and audacity," Pfahler tells Dazed. "You don't even need talent. Let's check 'audacity' in the dictionary. It means shamelessness, boldness or daring, especially with confidence and arrogance."

Music, the artist's own body, and the bodies of her collaborators-and the ability to cheaply decorate them to devilishly eroticize, eviscerate, and feminize exhausted patriarchal norms-are activated as her most available mediums. Throughout her career, Pfahler has commandeered the male gaze, infesting the core of male imagistic desire with her vagina sewn shut in Penthouse, and recreating a separate feminist response to a Penthouse trend by having her electrocuted-looking neon bandmates pile up in a "wall of vagina."

The shock tactics of Pfahler's artistry are rooted in a cohesive, and ultimately utopic, set of political ideals; having been at the center of the Downtown New York Arts scene when the governmentally ignored horrors of AIDS decimated the community, Pfahler's near-four-decades of performance are united by the uplift of the marginalized against a cruel status quo. Her recent Future Feminist work with artists like Anohni and Johanna Constantine amounted in 2014 to an exhibition at the Hole, with 13 nights of performance collectivizing the artists' long-carried feminist ideas and forming what the group described as "a call to arms" for a shift in our species towards the adoption of "archetypally feminine values." That project has continued into the present, with the group's exhibition of their vital, 13 monolithic marble Future Feminist tenets, and a series of talks, workshops, and performances for Denmark's Aarhus 2017. Pfahler continues in Dazed, "When art is pointing out the direction towards the truth, when art is good and strong, it tells us about what our future is going to be. It creates a prophecy, in a way...So art matters as long as human beings all matter. I think it's one of the only things that human beings do that's of any value. Everything else seems to be driven towards destruction."

Funding Credits

Dirty Looks: Kembra Pfahler is made possible with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and Howard Gilman Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and The New York State Legislature.

About Kembra Pfahler

Kembra Pfahler is an artist and rock musician, best known as the painted lead singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a theatrical death rock band she co-founded in 1990. The band uses music, drawings and films to spread a clear message of love in a beautiful, tsuristic, anti-natural, fearless and happy way to dispel the antiquated notion that there is a hierarchy of artistic mediums. The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black has toured extensively since the 1990s and has recorded four classic rock albums. In 2006, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black gave a conceptual concert, entitled Sound of Magic, at Deitch Projects. Recently, the Independent Film Channel produced a special film on the group called: I Believe in Halloween. Kembra Pfahler has additionally exhibited in Womanizer at Deitch Projects in 2007, Heaven & Hell, a solo show in Miami during Art Basel 2007, It's Not Only Rock 'N' Roll, Baby! curated by Jerome Sans at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels during the summer of 2008 and in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Pfahler's participation in the Biennial included an installation at the Park Avenue Armory and a live concert entitled Actresstocracy. Deitch Projects published a book on Kembra Pfahler, entitled Beautalism, in celebration of her projects for the Biennial.

About Dirty Looks

Dirty Looksis a bi-coastal platform for queer experimental film, video and performance. A roaming screening series, DL is an open platform for inquiry, discussion and debate. Designed to trace contemporary queer aesthetics through historical works, Dirty Looks presents quintessential GLBT film and video, alongside up-and-coming artists and filmmakers. Dirty Looks exhibits a lineage of queer tactics and visual styles for younger artists, casual viewers and seasoned avant-garde filmgoers, alike.

Over the course of seven years, Dirty Looks NYC has staged local screening initiatives at The Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, The Hammer, Participant Inc, White Columns, ONE Archives, Artists Space and Judson Memorial Church. DL began regular Los Angeles programming in January 2015, instating a national reach for these programs.

About The Kitchen The Kitchen is one of New York City's most forward-looking nonprofit spaces, showing innovative work by emerging and established artists across disciplines. Our programs range from dance, music, performance, and theater to video, film, and art, in addition to literary events, artists' talks, and lecture series. Since its inception in 1971, The Kitchen has been a powerful force in shaping the cultural landscape of this country, and has helped launch the careers of many artists who have gone on to worldwide prominence.

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