Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity): Kite with LEYA

The ambient, transcendental punk duo LEYA (violinist Adam Markiewicz and harpist Marilu Donovan) will be Kite’s special invited guests to interpret her dream scores; an ongoing production titled Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity). This program is the next event in a series of activations where Kite sings, fiddles, reads her dreams converted into geometric patterns, and invites friends, collaborators, and aligned artists to interpret the embroidered scores.

Kite’s work Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity), which is currently on view is composed of geometric designs that translate the artist’s dreams in patterns that correspond to Lakota words and traditional art forms. In this work an embroidery machine acts as an artificial being which transforms knowledge from the dream world into the visual language of designs by stitching the patterns into cloth. These cyborgian communications act as the basis for a series of subsequent activations.

NYC’s LEYA occupies a space between many worlds, creating work that equally encompasses beguiling Medieval song, modern folk, and their own classical-meets-pop language rooted in weird sensuality. The duo is harpist Marilu Donovan, who uses a unique tuning system designed for LEYA, and vocalist/violinist Adam Markiewicz, who blends operatic singing in multiple languages with warm string tones, culminating in a sound that is instantly recognizable, otherworldly, and uneasy. Their catalog spans two albums, a collaborative mixtape, a collaborative EP, a porn, major fashion house commissions, film and dance scoring, a number of visual art installations, and additional singles and features. Prominent collaborators include Eartheater, Brooke Candy, Actress, Liturgy, Okay Kaya, Julie Byrne, and many others.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an award winning Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic raised in Southern California, known for her sound and video performance with her Machine Learning hair-braid interface. Kite holds a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and has received a PHD from Concordia University. Kite’s groundbreaking scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013, Kite is the first American Indian artist to utilize Machine Learning in art practice.

Kite’s artwork and performance has been included in numerous exhibitions, recently Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Plug In Contemporary, PS122 and the Vera List Center, Anthology Film Archives, Walter Phillips Gallery, Chronus Art Center, Toronto Biennial, and Experimenta Triennial. Kite was a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, a 2020 Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellow, a 2020 “100 Women in AI Ethics”, a 2021 Common Fields Fellow, and the 2022 Creative Time Open Call artist for the Black and Indigenous Dreaming Workshops with Alisha B. Wormsley.

Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity) is part of the exhibition and we learn to keep the soil wet, curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director.

Read more about Kite’s ongoing series of performances here.

LEYA Image credit: Jane Pain