Sahra Motalebi to Return to The Kitchen with DIRECTORY OF PORTRAYALS

Musician, visual artist, and performer Sahra Motalebi returns to The Kitchen - following her 2015 performance Sounds From Untitled Skies-with Directory of Portrayals (from Rendering What Remains), an open-form opera based on an ongoing online exchange between the artist and her sister.

Though Motalebi and her sister bear a striking resemblance, her sister lives in Iran, and they have never met in person. Directory of Portrayals draws its structure from a libretto by Motalebi, which will be published as a work of experimental auto-fiction, edited by Annie Godfrey Larmon, in Spring 2018.

In this performance, the artist moves among multichannel video sets, spoken text, and musical scores, registering the complicated dynamics of identity, intimacy, and translation that underpin this dialogue. This event is organized by Lumi Tan.

Directory of Portrayals (from Rendering What Remains) will be performed on Thursday, December 14 and Friday, December 15 at 8pm. General admission tickets are $20, and member tickets are $15. They can be purchased at www.thekitchen.org, by phone at 212.255.5793 x 11, or in person at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2-6pm.

Over the last several years, the online conversation between Motalebi, who lives in New York, and her sister, a Muslim English teacher living in Tehran, has accumulated inside various encrypted text applications as a complex network of durations, scales and media. Correspondingly, so too have the opera's iterations as an open work-its media elements, narrative structures, and dramaturgical imperatives. Taking the production of the opera itself as a subject as well, Motalebi's work reflects more broadly on interiority, performance, and their artifacts.

The musical score, sampled from downloaded mp3s of music and sound files shared between Motalebi and her sister, works with the text to present contemporary experience-of searching and browsing, but also being searched and browsed. Represented here are our inscrutable and alienated methods of transference, and the perpetually spliced time signatures of our endless digital present. Says Motalebi, "I feel that the interdisciplinary nature of the work-somewhere between the book, an exhibition, and a kind of musical theater-enables both the complexity of our contemporary methods of communication, and this relationship with my sister, to come across most effectively."

Motalebi performs every role of the opera. She is the writer, director, composer, scenographer and the sole performer playing both herself and her sister, as Levvola and Mastora respectively. She does not, however, give these figures the full spotlight on the stage. Eschewing representational stage conventions, and incorporating a distinctly 3rd space within which she and her sister can each reside, Motalebi places the scenographic video-of interiors, landscapes, imaginings-as the primary visual focus instead. With fractured text (comprising postdramatic monologues, arias, and a duet) incorporating audio culled from her text chain with her sister, a narrative Greek theater-reminiscent chorus sung by Motalebi in multiple vocal tracks, and stage directions and notes that serve as additional commentaries, Motalebi uses experimental art song, modal music, and extended vocal technique to probe notions of family and language as they are determined by modes of contemporary performance that exist on and offstage, on and offline.

Sahra Motalebi (b. 1979) is a visual artist, composer and vocalist born in Birmingham Alabama. Often formatted as performance-exhibition, her work includes opera, scenographic installation, vocal composition and recordings, painting, sculpture, video and text. Motalebi's work has been exhibited and she has performed internationally at the Kitchen, SculptureCenter, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum Ludwig, Hydra School Projects, Watermill Center, the Villa Empain, MoMA PS1. In 2008 Motalebi's multi-channel video installation and vocal performance "Such is the Game of Authenticity" was performed at MoMA PS1. Her shadow play "Intangible Heritages, Belief's Demise" was presented at SculptureCenter in 2014 as part of In Practice. She performed "Sounds from Untitled Skies" at The Kitchen in New York on September 15, 2015. Motalebi will present a series of events, performances, and a book as part of an opera called "Rendering What Remains" over 2016 and 2017.

Motalebi has also contributed to collaborative projects with many contemporary artists, including the theater piece "I Will Be Last" with artist Kai Althoff in 2008 at the Vancouver Art Gallery and again with Althoff in two improvisational musical performances for Althoff's solo show ''Punkt, Absatz, Blümli (period, paragraph, Bluemli)'' (2011) at Gladstone Gallery. Motalebi also performed with Anohni (as Antony & The Johnsons) in 2008 at the premier release of Another World EP at the former Clocktower Gallery. She created a score of sound pieces and vocal music and performed in ''Settlement House'', a four-hour, multi-space dance piece by Will Rawls at the Abrons Art Center in 2015. As part of a Performa 15 commission by artists Jesper Just and FOS, Motalebi performed as a solo improvisational vocalist in their installation "in the shadow/ of a spectacle/ is the view of the crowd". In 2016, Motalebi performed in a play called Love Life by Sibyl Kempson as part "12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens", a three year commission by Kempson for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Motalebi's soundtrack for Sophia Al-Maria's film "The Limerent Object" premiered at the Biennale of Moving Images 2016 at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Geneva.

In 2007 Motalebi co-founded the independent music label Static Recital on which she has released scores from her performances, five studio albums, and collaborations with other artists. Motalebi started the multipurpose Production Company { D I O R A M A } in 2010, and the nonprofit project Spoken Glass Productions in 2015, each to facilitate the realization of her larger interdisciplinary projects as well as those of others artists. In 2013, Motalebi produced Yves Klein's ''Monotone Silence Symphony'' (1960) presented by Dominique Lévy and the Yves Klein Archives.

Motalebi studied classical vocal performance, and the history of art and architecture at Sarah Lawrence College. She attended the Master of Architecture Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture focusing on the relationship between architecture and performance. She lives in New York.

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. Visit The Kitchen on Facebook: facebook.com/TheKitchenNYC, or follow on Twitter: twitter.com/TheKitchen_NYC and Instagram: instagram.com/TheKitchen_NYC.