(above: Route of Stalker Lab’s walk for Performance I on October 8)
21 SEPTEMBER – 16 OCTOBER

Twenty-five years ago, in September 1982, Storefront’s first public event got underway in its original Prince Street location. Performance A-Z, organized by the gallery’s founders Kyong Park and R L Seltman, and artist Arleen Schloss, was a 26-day sequence of performances by New York-based artists. Each of the 26 performers was allocated one evening slot. The event became a manifesto for the gallery’s future programming: as Kyong Park wrote in his introduction, “Storefront supports the idea that art and design have the potential and responsibility to affect public policies which influence the quality of life and the future of all cities.”

In late September 2007, Storefront celebrated its 25th anniversary with a new edition of its first event. Entitled Performance Z-A, this 26-day celebration was hosted in Petrosino Park, adjacent to Storefront, in a specially built pavilion designed by Korean architect Minsuk Cho. 

 

Organized by the three directors who have led Storefront over the past 25 years (Kyong Park, Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima), Performance Z-A was an inclusive event involving not only performance artists but also representatives of all the disciplines that have participated in Storefront’s program in the past decades: architects, artists, writers, researchers, filmmakers, photographers, musicians and more. For 26 days, from September 21 to October 16, 2007, the protagonists of Storefront’s past, present and future hosted 26 evening events including performances, concerts, open discussions, film screenings and interviews.

All events held in Ring Dome (located in Petrosino Park, adjacent to Storefront), at 7pm

The making of Ring Dome Pavilion

Z
Sept 21 – Opening party for Ring Dome hosted by:
Arleen Schloss
, a participant and co-organizer of Performance A-Z at Storefront in 1982, has for many years run the interdisciplinary research lab A’s. It is the most influential place you’ve never heard of, giving birth to bands and experimental movements like Alan Suicide, Phoebe Leger’s Metamonad, Gray/Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Coachman and The Human Arts Ensemble.
Minsuk Cho, designer of the Ring Dome, is a founding partner of Mass Studies, a Seoul-based architecture practice. His work has been exhibited internationally and has won numerous prizes, including first prize in the 1994 Shinkenchiku International Residential Architecture Competition for new dwelling design, the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Award in 2000, and two U.S. Progressive Architecture Awards.

Y
Sept 22
“Lincoln Ocean Victory Eddy” is Jill Magid and Ed Vas’s performance that includes a video and series of photographs, accompanied by a haunting novella. All record her five-month friendship with a New York City police officer. She initiates it by asking him to search her (he doesn’t) and then shadows him during his night shift, usually on subway platforms in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

X
Sept 23
Launch of Storefront Books, a curated micro-bookshop at Storefront, hosted by Akiko Miyake, with the participation of Marina Abramovic, John Miller, Siobhan Liddell, Soo Ja Kim, Liam Gillick, Maurizio Cattelan, Rirkrit Tiravanija. Akiko Miyake is co-founder the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu (Japan) and publisher of the CCA Artists’ Books series, a collection of more than 50 titles by internationally renowned artists. The CCA artists’ books will be on sale at Storefront.
Special guest Hideaki Ariizumi, a former student of Kazuo Shinohara, will discuss Kazuo Shinohara: Street with Human Shadows.


W
Sept 24
Teddy Cruz
hosts Food for Thought: The Tijuana-NY Kitchen . For one evening, Ring Dome becomes an open-air kitchen, serving authentic Tijuana tacos in an exchange of food for thought. Teddy Cruz’ work is centered along the border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory. He has received international recognition for his work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs, including the 2004-05 James Stirling Memorial Lecture On the City Prize.


V
Sept 25
Engaging the City
presents The Obscene Bird of Night, a carnival block party with exquisite entertainment brought to you by the Four of Babylon. Engaging the City is an independent monthly lecture series that serves as a venue for individuals in a variety of professions who engage the extraordinary and exciting complexity of contemporary cities in novel ways.


U
Sept 26

Photographer, editor and researcher Florian Boehm presents his most recent project, Wait for Walk, a series of portraits of New Yorkers waiting to cross the street. Boehm is co-author and co-founder of the project EndCommercial/Reading the City,
a visual record of modern urban life exhibited at Storefront in 2002.


T
Sept 27
Daniel Perlin (AKA DJ N-Ron)
is an artist working across media creating sound, video, objects and installations. For Performance Z-A he will present Dance Faster, a live mix from inside Ring Dome that the audience will be able to listen to through wireless headsets from anywhere inside Petrosino Park and the surrounding area. Daniel Perlin’s work has previously been presented at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Chelsea Art Museum, Postmaster’s Gallery, D’Amelio Terras, TN Probe Tokyo, Temporary Contemporary Gallery London and the Centre Pompidou.


S
Sept 28
Ruben Ochoa
presents a one-day installation of his Dancing PoPos next to Ring Dome in Petrosino Park. Based in Los Angeles, Ochoa excavates the city to uncover forms and structures for his interventions and sculptural works. Support made possible by LACMA: On-Site.
At 3:30 pm, world-famous Monstrologist Johan Olander presents a lecture for children on his recent monstrological discoveries and his new book, A Field Guide to Monsters. The audience will be able to ask questions about his findings.
At 7:00 pm, Marilyn Minter responds to “10 Questions” posed by Karen Marta about Minter’s grisly-glam paintings and photographs, and her new monograph, just released by Gregory R. Miller & Co.


R
Sept 29
Eyal Weizman
presents his most recent book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Guest speakers include Tom Keenan, Reinhold Martin, Felicity Scott and Michael Sorkin. Weizman (Director of the Centre for Architecture Research at Goldsmiths College, London) has conducted an in-depth investigation into the planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for several years. In 2003, Weizman co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture at Storefront.


Q
Sept 30
Armin Linke
screens the US premier of his award winning film-in-progress on the Alps realized in collaboration with architect Piero Zanini. Alpi, a synchronized projection onto 3 screens with surround sound, is a captivating visual investigation that debunks many of the myths surrounding the picturesque alpine landscape, exposing it as a hotbed for experimentation in social, economic and political relations. The film was awarded a Golden Lion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale. Armin Linke’s photographic work was exhibited at Storefront in 2004.


P
Oct 1
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
presents the Envisioning Development Toolkit, a workshop aimed at demystifying the term “affordable housing” that uses an interactive felt poster to help people understand how the city and federal governments define “affordable,” what the income spread is like for different neighborhoods, and who can afford to move into those neighborhoods now. As an agency, CUP makes educational projects about places and how they change, bringing together art and design professionals and community-based advocates and researchers.


O
Oct 2
Bjarke Ingels
hosts the opening of the exhibition CPH Experiments, five radical proposals for high-density dwelling from Danish architecture practice BIG/Bjarke Ingels Group, a group of over 80 architects, designers, builders and thinkers based in Copenhagen. The exhibition will showcase five large-scale models (including one made of 250,000 LEGO blocks) of housing projects currently under construction in the Danish capital. The opening will be followed by Bjarke’s Birthday Bash, a party at Bar 205 on Chrystie Street to celebrate Bjarke Ingel’s 33rd birthday.


N
Oct 3

A reading hosted by Frederic Tuten with other writers who have written about or who themselves make visual art. Frederic Tuten will be joined by Shelley
Jackson, author of Half-Life and The Melancholy of Anatomy; Wayne Koestenbaum, poet, author of Hotel Theory, a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction; and Iris Smyles, short story writer and editor of Smyles & Fish. Tuten has published five novels including The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, Van Gogh’s Bad Café, and Tintin in the New World.


M
Oct 4

Screening of Storefront’s 1982 innaugural event Performance A-Z filmed by Arleen Schloss. The gallery will be open with extended hours and the bookshop will be open, with books featured throughout Z-A for sale.


L
Oct 5
Stefano Boeri
, Gianluigi Ricuperati and the editorial team present the new Abitare magazine. With the September ’07 issue, Abitare, the bilingual English/Italian monthly architecture publication, passes under the editorship of Boeri after the 15-year tenure of Italian architect and designer Italo Lupi. Boeri and guests will discuss the new editorial line, in particular the intersection between architecture, art and literature, hinted at in the magazine’s new subtitle: Dwelling Stories, Telling Spaces.


K
Oct 6
Tomas Saraceno
is an artist based in Frankfurt, Germany. After studying architecture under Peter Cook, Mark Wigley and others, he began an ongoing research into inhabitable lighter-than-air airborne structures as a solution to the world’s exploding population. For Performance Z-A, Saraceno will hold an open discussion with invited guests (TBA) on the potential of new materials such as Aerogel. Saraceno will also present a visionary project under development that will be presented at Storefront in 2008.


J
Oct 7
Anselm Franke
is a curator and writer based in Antwerp and Berlin. He is currently the Artistic Director of Extra City Center for Contemporary Art in Antwerp. He was recently announced as co-curator of the forthcoming Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary art, hosted in different location every two years. Franke, who curated An Uneven Exchange of Power at Storefront in 2004, will present the program-in-progress of the biennial and discuss the opportunities and limitations of this roving exhibition format in the wake of the controversial cancellation of Manifesta 6.

Pedro Reyes will present footage from “Palas Por Pistolas”, a project that involved a voluntary donation of weapons
from civilians in the city of Culiacan in Western Mexico. This city suffers the highest rate of deaths by firearms. For this project 1650 arms have been collected. The footage shows the destruction of these arms that will be melted and casted into farming tools for a foresting campaign and educational purposes. After the film, there will be a discussion about the theories of social scientist Jacob Levy Moreno who in the nineteen-forties proposed Sociatry as field of research and a set of practices aimed to heal society.


I
Oct 8
(Revised program)
10 am : For Columbus Day, Lorenzo Romito and other members of Rome-based research group Stalker Lab present NY Peace Walk: In the Footsteps of Paul Auster. Starting at Storefront at 10am, participants will walk to the United Nations Building spelling the word PEACE along the way.
Participants should meet at Storefront at 10am

7 pm: In the evening, members of Stalker Lab will meet in Ring Dome Pavilion to present photographs of the day’s walk as well as their 7-year ongoing study on an ex-slaughterhouse in Rome as a laboratory of cultural interactions between Stalker and the emergent communities formed by Gypsies, refugees, and clandestine immigrants.

H
Oct 9
Internationally renowned photographer Ramak Fazel tells the remarkable story of his most recent photographic project, to be exhibited at Storefront in 2008. In the summer of 2006, Fazel set out in a camper van to visit and photograph every Capitol Building in the 50 States and the everyday life of the people who work in and around them. A third of the way through his trip, Fazel is detained and mirandized on suspicions of terrorism. He is released and continues his journey, but from then on his observations of everyday America occur in the context of continuous police interrogation and FBI surveillance.


G
Oct 10
(Revised program)
A collaborative musical venture between singer-songwriters Emma Zakarevicius and Sasha Markovic.


F
Oct 11
Rescheduled due to weather


E
Oct 12

Photographer Luca PIzzaroni installs his first sculpture project “Labels” in the ring pavilion. He co-authored Endcommercial: Reading the City, an analytical observation of recurring urban iconographies of New York and various cites. Endcommercial:Reading the City contains over 60,000 images and is still widely acclaimed for creating a new visual vocabulary that depicts the urban experience.

Vito Acconci, co-designer with Steven Holl of the Storefront façade, discusses the possible options for the project’s restoration fifteen years after it was built. Acconci, who today runs the architectural practice Acconci Studio, will also present and discuss his office’s recent work.

D
Oct 13

Artist Dan Graham, whose work was exhibited in Environmental Aesthetic at Storefront in 1986, in conversation with architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina. Graham will show and discuss his most recent photographic work, a contemporary revisitation of his photographic documentation of New Jersey in the late Sixties.

Neil Greenberg grafts real-world metropolitan challenges onto his imagined cities. He’s in the second phase of Fake Omaha, which includes the creation of a central city, its suburban area, its history, its problems, its plans and its future. Greenberg lives in Detroit where during the day he schedules buses for a mid-size transit authority and runs a small, upstart transit system on the side.

C
Oct 14
Are you there G-D? Its Me, Heavy-Meta choreographed and performed by robbinschilds with “the man for the job” played by Michael Helland and music by Deep Forest. robbinschilds was formed by choreographers Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs in 2003 to present highly visual dance works that explore the intersection between architecture and human movement. Performances include Seriously Heavy (I hurt myself hurting you (June 2006), a site-reactive work at the Autumn Skate Bowl in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and C.L.U.E. (December 2005) at Triskelion Arts.


B
Oct 15

Recent video and film artworks by artists-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude.
THe film program was organized as an adjunct public event to the exhibition Searching for an Ideal Urbanity, an interdisciplinary project curated by the Italian architect Fabrizio Gallanti in cooperation with fellows of Akademie Schloss Solitude, which was presented at Solitude in spring of 2007. The works in the film program deal with different forms of urbanity, taking a sociological, architectural or narrative approach.

(1) Korpys/Löffler and Marcus Kaiser, Super Sam (2002), 13 min. (with english subtitles)
(2) Susanne Bürner huts (2007), 2.30 min.
(3) Susanne Bürner Ohne Titel (2004), 5.30 min.
(4) Sanford Biggers A small world (1999-2002), 6.30 min.
(5) Krassimir Terziev A Place (Playground)(2004), 10 min.
(6) Susanne Bürner 50.000.000 can’t be wrong (2006), 6.24 min.
(7) Susanne Bürner Finistère (2005), 5.40 min.
(8) Korpys/Löffler Digging Deep (1999), 42 min. (with english subtitles)
(9) Daniel Kunle and Holger Lauinger NEULAND (2006), 75 min. (with english subtitles)

A three-second-video from the Spots series by Alexander Schellow will be shown in the intermission between the films above.


A
Oct 16

A live sound work by Barbara Held. Barbara Held, one of the participants in Performance A-Z at Storefront in 1982, is a flutist who moves out of the time frame of concert music, combining sound and image in installations that usually include live performance. Recent works include Microcòsmics, a project curated by Joan Fontcuberta in which she worked with electron microscope imagery and sound.
A final screening of Arleen Schloss’s footage of the 1982 Performance A-Z will close this event.

Media Sponsor: The Architect’s Newspaper

Storefront’s program is generously supported by:
New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA)
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC)
New York City Department for Cultural Affairs (DCA)

Performance Z-A is sponsored by:
Kaye Scholer LLP
Sennheiser USA
The Maritime Hotel and Bowery Hotel

Performance Z-A visiting artists are supported by:
Me&Ro
Carlsberg
Citizens for NYC
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
PARC Foundation
Bread 20 Spring
The Color House New York
Esquina
Richard Gluckman
General Strategic Marketing
Mexican Cultural Institute New York
MEXICANA
Japan Foundation New York
Davis Brody Bond Aedas
Italian Cultural Institute