Stanya Kahn is an American video artist. "Using humor as a central device, Kahn combines storytelling with visceral performances, blurring the lines between the fictional and the real to show how language is forged out of trauma." "Kahn’s characters are contemporary flaneurs, and each is steadfast on a physical or linguistic dérive that takes the viewer through narratives of mortality, trauma, family, and the ethics of civic and ecological responsibility."
Career
She graduated with an MFA in 2003 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She has exhibited worldwide collaboratively with artist Harry Dodge in the last decade and has exhibited solo since 2010. Previous to and during her collaboration with Dodge, she made solo performance works and also collaborated with performers and choreographers Keith Hennessy, CORE and Ishmael Houston Jones, touring live shows worldwide from 1992-2000. She starred in and was a contributing writer for the independent feature filmBy Hook or By Crook, which won numerous awards and was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival. She is represented by Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Hammer Museum, LA and the Goetz Collection, Munich. Kahn's work has shown in numerous venues nationally and internationally, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial; 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Sundance Film Festival; Center for Art and Media, Karlsrühe; P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art, New York; Contemporary Center for Art, Vilnius, Lithuania; MIT, Cambridge; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunstalle, Bonn, GDR; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Hayward Gallery, London; Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles. and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, among many others. Her solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally, and she was a founding member of the performance group/band CORE. Her writings appear in journals and anthologies including Nothing Moments, Userlands, Soft Targets Journal of Art and Theory, LTTR and Movement Research. She teaches as adjunct faculty in New Genres at UCLA, Photo/Media at Cal Arts, Visual Arts/Media and Critical Gender Studies at UCSD, and has taught in the MFA programs at USC and UCLA.
