Stanya Kahn

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Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video with a practice that includes drawing, sound design, writing and performance. Humor, pathos and the uncanny emerge as central modes in a hybrid media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyper-real, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse. Kahn’s video practice incorporates formal cinematic and sound strategies to place poetic and experimental content inside of loaded social contexts, in an effort to complicate and illuminate both. Combining scripts with improvisation, the work allows affective agency in its making. In a long-term investigation of how rhetoric gains and loses power, Kahn’s projects often situate language in the foreground of works that are dialectically driven by the demands of the body.

Recent solo exhibitions include shows at the New Museum/NY, Pigna Projectspace in Rome, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and Cornerhouse in Manchester, a survey of works from 2008 to 2012 with accompanying monograph. Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She has collaborated with Harry Dodge, Ishmael Houston-Jones and the performance company CORE. Solo and collaborative works have shown in The Whitney Biennial (08); The California Biennial (10); MoMA/NY; MOCA/LA; The Getty Center/LA, the Hammer Museum/LA; the Sundance Film Festival; Migrating Forms Film Festival/NY; the Center for Art and Media/Karlsrühe; PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art/NY; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Elizabeth Dee Gallery/NY, among others.