ITINERANT, New York City’s annual Performance Art Festival, continues with its 2017 program in the borough of Brooklyn at the Grace Exhibition Space on Friday, May 19th, 7:00 - 11:00 pm. The festival (May 13th to May 21st) has been presenting performances and public interventions in different venues in the city: Last Frontier NYC (May 13th), Socrates Sculpture Park (May 14th), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (May 15th), and Panoply Performance Laboratory (May 16th). The weekend programs will take place at the Queens Museum (Saturday, May 20th) and at Flushing Meadows Park (Sunday, May 21st) the closing day of the international festival.

This year's program, organized and curated independently by interdisciplinary artist Hector Canonge, focuses on works that treat notions of human displacement, pilgrimage, physical dislocations, psychological migrations, and corporeal transformations. ITINERANT 2017 will feature performance art works by local, national and international artists coming from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America.

Participating Artists at Grace Exhibition Space: Shubho Saha (Bangladesh), Michael Barrett (United States), Veronica Rodriguez and stofer&stofer (Puerto Rico / Switzerland), Luke Mannarino (United States), Zhiyuan Yang (China), Katiana Rangel (Brazil), and Marcela Torres (United States).

ITINERANT was created in 2010 by artist Hector Canonge. The initiative was a small platform  for Contemporary Performance Art, and  had its origins in the monthly series A-Lab Forum that Canonge organized at Crossing Art Gallery in Flushing, Queens.  Following the growing interest in Live Art, and the need to present performance in the borough, ITINERANT was launched in 2011 under the auspices of QMAD, Queens Media Arts Development. In 2012, ITINERANT was recognized by the City of New York as the first Performance Art festival taking place in the five boroughs (Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island) that make the metropolitan region.  Following the large scale venture in NYC, Canonge journeyed through Europe and Latin America creating, in 2013, the Spanish edition of the festival and calling it Encuentro ITINERANTe with public presentations in various cities in the Southern Hemisphere.

Participating Artists at Grace Exhibition Space:

Shubho Saha (Bangladesh), “No Man's Land”

Shubho Saha is a Dhaka-based interdisciplinary artist, a founding member of the artist collective BackART, and the director of the Dhaka Live Art Biennale (D’Lab). As a leading advocate for the contemporary art field in Bangladesh, he is now in USA in his three-month Asian Cultural Council (ACC) fellowship to research contemporary art practice in the U.S. The aim of his work is to discover the secret relationship of nature with its inner self. The abstraction of the relation goes beyond the collaboration of energy sources. His artistic practice is also engaged with the architectural and mythological history and the effect of consumerism on urban landscapes. Community and Cultural engagement is one of the most important parts in his plan of Art Creation. He believes Involvement and interaction with community generates a volume of much power into the art project and raises a united global voice. Shubho is an award winning artist, received many awards, the majors are: China Sichuan Award in 1999, water color Grand prize-CAA in 2001, Honorable award-CMKG in 2004, Academic Award-DU 2007, Sand Sculpture Grand prize-BKF in 2009, Residency Grant in Shangyuan Art Museum, Beijing, China in 2014, Fellowship 2015 in Salina Art Center, KS, USA, Individual Grant Award 2016 from Asian Cultural Council (ACC) in New york, USA and receiving recognition for his innovative ideas and art projects. He has produced many site-specific artworks that examine and deconstruct the relationship between spaces. His works are featured in solo and invitational exhibitions, and are held in private and corporate collections.

Michael Barrett (United States), “Kill Fuck”

After serving a tour in the U.S. Marine Corps, receiving a collegiate athletic scholarship, and surviving a battle with testicular cancer, Michael Barrett challenges masculinity as a historical construct through a feminist post-humanistic lens. For over fifteen years, Barrett has immersed himself in a grueling effort at developing masculine narratives that interrogate key areas of gender. As an A/R/Tographer, Barrett reinterprets how masculinity empowers and disempowers through influential theories and concepts of scholars and authors, such as Susan Sontag, Stephanie Springgay and Donna Harraway. With the body, space, and time, Barrett's work ruptures five areas of masculinity and questions cycles of physicality, gender, and identity by unveiling previously missed, invisible, and silenced perspectives on how society could broaden what it means to be masculine and what function masculinity serves. He holds an M.F.A. in contemporary sculpture and has performed extensively around the world, including Austria, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland and across the United States. Barrett's selected solo and group exhibitions include the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts - New York City, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Scope International - Basel, Switzerland, Psi 19 - Stanford University, Galeria Michaela Stock, DOPUST 2016 - Vienna, Surface Gallery - U.K., SOMArts - San Francisco, Las Vegas Contemporary Arts Center, Krowswork - Oakland, Raczej Galeria - Poznan, Poland, Hole of Fame Gallery - Dresden, Germany, and the Tucson Museum of Art.

Veronica Rodriguez and stofer&stofer (Puerto Rico / Switzerland), “Guts Reloaded”

Verónica Rodríguez is a director, writer, performer, actress and teacher. She graduated in 2005 from the University of Puerto Rico with a major in Performing Arts. Received a grant from Accademia Nazionale d'arte Drammatico Silvio D'Amico in 2004, for two month intensive on Meyerhold's Biomechanics. She has studied, directed and collaborated with different theater companies in Spain, England, Italy, Puerto Rico and Chicago. In June 2015, she collaborated with Karim Galici in Gorizia, Italy. Together they provided a sensory theater workshop and created the immersive site specific show Invisible Space. She staged, produced, and directed her first immersive original show «Desde mis entanas» back in Madrid in 2013. She is currently collaborating with several international and local artists in Chicago to remake the show under the name Guts.

stofer&stofer is an artist duo. The twin sisters Rebecca and Ruth (Swiss, 1982) graduated together in 2008 from the University of Lucerne, Design & Art with the major in Fine Arts. Rebecca is a sound artist, sound designer and sound engineer for theater, performer and photographer. She holds a bachelor's degree in Music and Media from the University of Berne since 2011. Ruth is a visual artist, videographer, photographer, graphic designer, video engineer, video designer for theater. She holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of Arts in Zurich since 2010. stofer&stofer are artists who create multimedia installations, photographic pictures and sound design or video design for theater and performances.

Luke Mannarino (United States), “Keep Finding Your Light”

Through his work, Luke Mannarino, explores concepts of site specificity, trauma, identity, memory, and the interactions between humans when considering technology. The work he makes becomes a process in which he takes the information the world is offering to him and uses actions to try and make sense of them. Mandarin invites audience to become a part of the work through discussion, in hopes that they can make sense of the information together. Luke Mannarino has performed and shown work both nationally and internationally. This includes venues such as Panoply Performance Laboratory (Brooklyn, NY), Chinatown Soup (New York, NY), Mobius Gallery (Boston, MA) Inverse Performance Art Festival (Fayetteville, AR), Flesh Crisis Symposium (Kansas City, MO), Dfbrl8r Gallery (Chicago, IL) and Farm Cultural Park (Favara, SIcily) to name a few. He has also been a part of lectures such as the Trans Cultural Exchange in 2016 at Boston University.

Zhiyuan Yang (China), “Drawing Hearts on My Dinner Table”

Zhiyuan Yang, born in Beijing, China. She is currently living and working in Chicago and is a Master of Fine Arts Candidate (2017) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work deals with identity politics as a Chinese queer woman through the opposing lenses of an Eastern upbringing and a Western experience through lens based mediums and live performances. Yang is the recipient of James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship. Her works have been exhibited and screened extensively throughout Chicago including Filter Photo, Latitude, Hairpin art center, ARC Gallery, and performed live at Sullivan Galleries. Her photograph is part of a collective portfolio at The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and The Art Institute of Chicago. Yang will participate the residency program by Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017), and her work will be included in the biennial exhibition of South Bend Museum of Art.

Katiana Rangel (Brazil), “Iraci or What's Underneath My Skin”

Katiana Rangel has a long performance and teaching history in Brazil where she founded a theater and performance group called Untitled 29, for which she translated, co-directed, and performed 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane in 2013. In NYC, she is currently working with Jim Fletcher on Four Seasons, a work derived from Sarah Kane's Blasted. They have presented The Spring and The Summer, at Little Theater at Dixon Place, in 2015 and 2016 respectively. She's also working with Jessie Shelton in a new work called Missing, which had its first part presented at Little Theater at Dixon Place in 2016. As a solo artist she has created the performance Suspended (ITINERANT 2015, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Performance Art Festival in Pittsburgh, 2016). She has worked with Katherine Brook, Shonni Enelow, Liza Birkenmeier, Tory Vazquez, Anna Kohler and Caleb Hammond, and Les Ballets Nomades (Voices Transposed: The Refugee Crises 2016 at Manhattan Movement and Arts Center).

Marcela Torres (United States), “Adaptive Restraints”

Marcela Torres’ practice attempts to repair, transform and destabilize cultural ideologies that target and oppress “the other.” Enmeshing the physicality of martial arts with bastardized political encounters to create modes of collaborative healing; Torres utilizes these strategies to set up performative situations that uncover the reality of the varied and differentially weighted interpellations we reside in. I was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah within the Latter Day Saint (LDS, or Mormon) faith. Torres’ great grandparents were Mexican pioneers of the LDS faith, building churches in Mexico and assisting with the creation of the Spanish speaking branches in the USA. My LDS upbringing caused her to question stereotypes applied to gender, race, and religion and their influence on the mind and body. Although no longer does she practice the LDS faith, she maintains respect for he family’s decision to keep their religious practices. These experiences and history prepped her to be a question asker, to try to find new methods of framing, communicating and subverting. Currently residing in Chicago, IL, SAIC MFA 2017.