Opening weekend streaming live
at The Kitchen ON AIR
Friday 22. November 2024
01:00 CET (19:00 EST)
Saturday 23. november 2024
22:00 CET (16:00 EST)

Renowned art institution The Kitchen in New York opens «Lines of Distribution» in collaboration with North Norwegian Art Centre and Lofoten International Art Festival - LIAF. Tonight the exhibition's opening weekend programme will be streamed live.

«Lines of Distribution»
21. November - 25. January
The Kitchen at Westbeth
(163B Bank Street, 4th Floor Loft)

In what ways can experimental practices from previous eras springboard new strategies for the distribution and circulation of art across today’s global circuits? Drawing on The Kitchen’s history of presenting and disseminating avant-garde art for over fifty years, the exhibition Lines of Distribution takes up this question by reanimating aspects of its past programming through a cross-institutional dialogue with Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF (Lofoten, Norway) and its organizer North Norwegian Art Centre.

Lines of Distribution brings together new works by Viktor Bomstad, Elise Macmillan, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Wong Kit Yi that have emerged from or been shaped by the artists’ engagements with both the 2024 edition of LIAF and The Kitchen’s local and institutional contexts.

Drawing on the resonances between The Kitchen and LIAF 2024’s historical references and contemporary aims, The Kitchen and North Norwegian Art Centre partnered to conceive a method for working together with artists that would spark reciprocal relations beyond the model of one-way transmission.

Wong Kit Yi made the video «Telefision» co-commisioned by The Kitchen and North Norwegian Art Centre/LIAF.


Taken together, the archival and contemporary elements of the exhibition coalesce to illuminate historical traditions while simultaneously enacting new possibilities for how artworks can travel across different networks in the present. Against the backdrop of a landscape in which the distribution and circulation of art occurs at ever-increasing speeds across globalized exhibition circuits and in digital space, Lines of Distribution endeavors to slow down these processes to consider the role institutions play in setting artworks into motion and the ways the meaning and associations of artistic projects evolve as they move through different cultural and institutional contexts. 

Centering this goal, the institutions invited Bomstad, Macmillan, Rasheed, and Wong to travel their works between the exhibitions SPARKS and Lines of Distribution while developing or evolving their projects in dialogue with the specificities of each presentation context.

Elise Macmillan is to perform a new iteration of the concert «Surprised Everytime» in New York, here seen performing at Sørvågen Radio. A more extensive performance was held in relation to the opening weekend of LIAF.

The contemporary works in Lines of Distribution resulting from this institutional partnership include Wong Kit Yi's new video Telefishion (2024), co-commissioned by The Kitchen and LIAF 2024/North Norwegian Art Centre and pulling from the artist’s experiences studying The Kitchen Archives and conducting research visits to sites associated with the Lofoten Line. Following its premiere in Lofoten as part of SPARKS, the video appears in New York alongside a display of materials from The Kitchen Archives that reveals the work’s ties to specific examples from The Kitchen’s past programming.

In a program celebrating the opening of Lines of Distribution, Elise Macmillan performs a new iteration of Surprised Everytime (2024), a sonic work developed and presented in stages through the artist’s collaboration with LIAF 2024 and The Kitchen. The performance features a suite of instruments made by Macmillan and her collaborator Carl Schrecongost including long fiddle bows made from magnetic tape, devices made from walkmans and answering machines, and bows made from the hair of an unusually tall horse. The ensemble includes Kaja Krakowian and Joseph Wolf Helland.

Viktor Bomstad is a traditional joiker and experimental guitarist from the north of Sápmi/Norway. He is the current regional joiker of the two northernmost counties in Norway, a one-of-a-kind employment in Norway that seeks to promote exciting joikers in the region. In September 2024, Bomstad’s new project Devil’s Kin premiered at Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF 2024. The work is an audiovisual performance exploring old colonizers’ myths and representations of Sámi people, mixing them with references to genuine local Sámi folklore and important places.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates.

Lines of Distribution is organized by Alison Burstein, Curator, The Kitchen, with Curatorial Advisor Kjersti Solbakken, Curator, LIAF 2024 and Director, Bergen Kunsthall.

For more information about Lines of Distribution, visit The Kitchen's website.