Foregrounding the slippages between doing and undoing or not doing, speech and movement-based forms of address, and improvisation and the score, Lauren Bakst traces the forms performance takes, be they in our everyday experiences, intimate and personal relationships, memories, or on stage.

Lauren Bakst is an artist and writer living in New York. Working at the interstices of language and movement, Bakst stages critical phenomenologies of performance. Her video, publication, and performance works have been commissioned by BAM/Wendy's Subway, Dance and Process at The Kitchen, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Danspace Project, SculptureCenter, and Pioneer Works. Lauren teaches in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts School of Dance, where she is currently curating The School for Temporary Liveness, to which rile* was invited to participate in its second edition over the spring of 2020.

A character called X journeys through a present that is neither here nor there, but feels oddly proximate. She moves through landscapes of words, ever-shifting to host the groundless present, a place and time driven by her motivated, yet contextless pursuit. Narrative is always under construction. The preferred medium for X's peregrinations: a sentence, as capacious as a three-second video, a ten-year nap, or an unexplored hard drive. In this suspended world, X's sensorium is curious and alert, but also anguished, hesitant, and precarious: she feels around for sympathetic energies and familiar faces along the way. Along what way? A book like a body might be a room for waiting, a machine for memory, a sensuous thing, an image quickly glimpsed...

Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York-based artist Sara Magenheimer disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage.