Human Resources Los Angeles presents Disconsent: Faith, a one-on-one performance by Aliza Shvarts on Thursday, November 15 from 6-8pm. This performance is presented off-site.
Sit down and you will hear a story about a time when someone consented or dissented in the context of religion or faith. Then tell this story back, “reversing” the terms of consent or dissent. This reversal can range from simply replacing the terms used in the original narrative (i.e. replacing “yes” with “no”) to inventing new details entirely. After that, tell a story of your own about a time you consented or dissented in the context of religion or faith. This will be the story told as accurately as possible to the next person. Your voice will be recorded, but not your image.
Disconsent: Faith is a live iteration of Shvarts’ broaderDisconsent series, which examine the relationships between consent, which often takes the form of a speech act, and its imperfect opposite—dissent—which often exceeds speech to take the form of silence, protest, or other forms of bodily action.
To respond to the artist’s invitation & request a time, please fill out this form. Once we have coordinated appointments, we will send a confirmation email with details.
Aki Onda “Spirits Known and Unknown” featuring Eyvind Kang
“Spirits Known and Unknown” is a performance featuring various kinds of brass bells. It examines the materiality and spirituality of these objects and explores the uncanny and unknown.
Bells are a mysterious instrument. It is said that they were born when primitive people banged on resonant surfaces to frighten away evil. They have been used to call spirits in different cultures. They appear in church towers, symbols of peace, but have also been melted down and turned into bullets.
Onda remarks “Playing bells can be eerie at times. I get the sensation that ringing them connects me to their former owners who may have rung them. The actions recall lost sounds and sense histories that would otherwise be erased. It’s like collaborating with forces such as spirits and ancestors which transcends the sense of time and space experienced through multi-sensory channels.”
For this special occasion, Onda invited LA-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Eyvind Kang as a co-performer.
Photo by Lukasz Gawronski
Aki Onda is an artist, composer, and curator currently based in Mito, Japan, after living in New York for two decades. His works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project, Cassette Memories (2004–ongoing), drawn from three decades of field recordings. Crossing genres, he has been active internationally in art, film, music and performance. His artistic collaborators include Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Raha Raissnia, Paul Clipson, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, David Toop and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his work at The Kitchen, MoMA, MoMA P.S.1, New Museum, Blank Forms, ICA Philadelphia, REDCAT, Time-Based Art Festival, documenta 14, Louvre Museum, Pompidou Center, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Cartier, Argos, Bozar, ICA London, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nam June Paik Art Center and many others.
Eyvind Kang—a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger—works across genre and discipline, bringing subtlety, fluidity, and emotional intensity to each of his varied projects. Wary of the divisions of music by nation, Kang makes “people music” influenced by geology, collective memory and sonic possibility.
Everything in Air Human Resources LA presents Everything in Air, a series of public programs over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure. The series was supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation Grant.
June 9th, 2023. Doors open at 7pm, Performance begins 8pm sharp
Aki Onda “Spirits Known and Unknown” featuring Eyvind Kang
“Spirits Known and Unknown” is a performance featuring various kinds of brass bells. It examines the materiality and spirituality of these objects and explores the uncanny and unknown.
Bells are a mysterious instrument. It is said that they were born when primitive people banged on resonant surfaces to frighten away evil. They have been used to call spirits in different cultures. They appear in church towers, symbols of peace, but have also been melted down and turned into bullets.
Onda remarks “Playing bells can be eerie at times. I get the sensation that ringing them connects me to their former owners who may have rung them. The actions recall lost sounds and sense histories that would otherwise be erased. It’s like collaborating with forces such as spirits and ancestors which transcends the sense of time and space experienced through multi-sensory channels.”
For this special occasion, Onda invited LA-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Eyvind Kang as a co-performer.
Photo by Lukasz Gawronski
Aki Onda is an artist, composer, and curator currently based in Mito, Japan, after living in New York for two decades. His works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project, Cassette Memories (2004–ongoing), drawn from three decades of field recordings. Crossing genres, he has been active internationally in art, film, music and performance. His artistic collaborators include Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Raha Raissnia, Paul Clipson, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, David Toop and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his work at The Kitchen, MoMA, MoMA P.S.1, New Museum, Blank Forms, ICA Philadelphia, REDCAT, Time-Based Art Festival, documenta 14, Louvre Museum, Pompidou Center, Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Cartier, Argos, Bozar, ICA London, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nam June Paik Art Center and many others.
Eyvind Kang—a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger—works across genre and discipline, bringing subtlety, fluidity, and emotional intensity to each of his varied projects. Wary of the divisions of music by nation, Kang makes “people music” influenced by geology, collective memory and sonic possibility.
Everything in Air Human Resources LA presents Everything in Air, a series of public programs over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure. The series was supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation Grant.
June 8th, 2023. Doors open at 7pm, Performance begins 8pm sharp
Pull was filmed in Slovakia at Pajštún castle with Susanne Songi Greim. In a rental car, we drove across the Austrian border. After hiking up the mountain for over an hour with bags full of supplies, we wove into the trees and landscape surrounding the castle, drawing into the hill and melting ice just before sunset.
The project was filmed January 2020 and edited between March and May of 2021.
Elliot Reed is an artist and director based in New York. He assembles bodies, movement, and narrative within exhibition space, wielding performance as a tool. Their projects span video, dance, performance, and sculpture highlighting the ways seen (and unseen) actors make their mark.
Elliot is a 2019 danceWEB scholar, 2019–20 Artist in Residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and recipient of the 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Exhibitions include a commission with JACK Quartet (2021), Metro Pictures (2021), MoMA PS1 (2020/21), OCD Chinatown (2021), The Getty Center (2018), Hammer Museum (2016), Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (2018), The Broad (2017), and performances in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Mexico City, Vienna, and Hamburg. Their next show opens Fall 2021 at Kunsthaus Glarus.
In a special iteration, Keijaun Thomas will present two sections from her current project, My Last American Dollar: Round 1. Tricking and Flipping Coins: Making Dollars Hit and Round 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat. I am thinking about resistance. How do we resist temptation, how do we slow down, how do we play, how do we survive? How do we hold space for each other, how do you carry the multiplicities of being young, gifted and black.
“It is complicated. it is blurry. it is rooted and unrooted in my peoples history. my people being black people. it is difficult and hard, it is attached to my spine, it is connected to the middle passage of the Atlantic slave trade, it is in my blood, it is in the color of my shit in the toilet bowel, it is in the smell of my ancestors shit for weeks on end decaying, decaying on their chained bodies. it is crystal clear. it is as blue as water, it is as heavy as 1,000 black bodies being dumped into the ocean. it is dark. it is so peculiar. it is only felt as phantom pains, missing links, pedestals of display. it is the value of the auction block, it is the price of your coffee beans, your sugar and your tea leaves.your coffee beans, your sugar and your tea leaves. it is unforgiven and not speakable. it is unbelievable and thinkable. it is high yellow, red bone, caramel, chocolate. it is so black, it is blue. it is so black, it is blue. it is so fucking queer, it is so fucking clear, it is so fucking queer, it is detached and left for the faggots that can never be black men. it is detached and left for the faggots that can never be black men. it is fragile, it is as soft as cotton and hair weaves. as cotton and hair weaves. it is an open as the wounds on a slaves back. my ancestors backs. it is everything that i have ever known and resisted. it is everything that I have ever known and resisted. it is every piece of fabric and different colored paper with numerical value. it is the palms of my hands, my fathers hands, my brothers hands, my mothers hands, my sisters hands, my aunties hands, my cousins hands, my children’s hands. it is… complicated.”
— “it is complicated” (2018)
Keijaun Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within Black personhood. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a current Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient. Thomas has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.
Nicolas Bermeo is an artist currently living in Los Angeles, California. He is the founder of both Like • Magazine and Like • Movie Night and has shown at 315 Gallery, The Echo Park Film Center, The Squeaky Wheel, The New Latin Wave Festival, The Queer Arts Festival and The Hyde Park Art Center.
