Alex Poots, artistic director and CEO of The Shed, rounded out the new arts center’s opening season by announcing five new commissions for fall and winter of 2019. The new work spans creative disciplines and will be presented in spaces throughout The Bloomberg Building.

“The Shed’s mission is to provide a place for artists of all disciplines to make new work,” said Alex Poots. “Our commissioning program encourages established and emerging artists to take creative risks to engage the widest audience.”

New Commissions

Manual Override
Guest curated by Nora N. Khan
November 13, 2019 – January 2020, The Theater
As The Shed’s first guest curator, critic Nora N. Khan has organized Manual Override, a group exhibition with artists Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry, Simon Fujiwara, Martine Syms, and Morehshin Allahyari.

The exhibition centers on the pioneering filmmaker and artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose artistic practice involves collaborations with cutting-edge geneticists, scientists, and engineers. Hershman Leeson will premiere the final episode of her seminal work First Person Plural: The Complete Electronic Diaries (1984 – 2019), a series of confessional videos exploring the complex interplay between DNA editing, trauma, identity, and survival. The Shed will also present a new commission by Hershman Leeson, Shadow Stalker (2019).

Perry, Fujiwara, Syms, and Allahyari will adapt Leeson’s collaborative model as a prototype, each pairing with programmers, engineers, AI experts, and scientists. In Manual Override, these artists continue to create their own hybrid practices to reframe, reimagine, and even intervene in dominant technological narratives. Together, this group of artists suggests how we might override our coded, genetic, and social programming to expand the limits of what personal, artistic, and intellectual inquiry can be.

Arca
Opens September 25, The Theater
Venezuelan artist, singer, and electronic music composer Arca returns to New York City to premiere the first act of an experimental performance cycle titled Mutant;Faith. 

William Forsythe: A Quiet Evening of Dance
October 11 – 25, 2019, The Theater
Groundbreaking choreographer William Forsythe brings to The Shed a vivid combination of new and existing work. The intricate phrasing of the dancers’ breath is the primary sound accompanying Forsythe’s inventive choreography, which draws on the geometric origins of classical ballet and ranges from sparse and analytic to lush and baroque. The result is a new kind of production that, like an evening of chamber music, feels designed to be listened to.

Mirrors and Memory
November 2 – 9, 2019, The McCourt
Artist Joan Jonas and pianist Hélène Grimaud will collaborate on a new live production about memory. At the forefront of video performance and installation since the 1960s, Joan Jonas has utilized the physical mirror as both prop and sculpture. She has also incorporated the concepts of mirror, reflection, and memory as they relate to the self, both as performer and audience member. Hélène Grimaud’s most recent album, Memory, stirs profound emotions through the elegant simplicity of miniatures by Frédéric Chopin, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Valentin Silvestrov. This new commission will include video, projection, and live performance.

Requiem
November 19 – 24, 2019, The McCourt
The Messa da Requiem highlights Giuseppe Verdi’s dramatic gifts for symphonic and choral writing with virtuosic solo moments. Teodor Currentzis and his orchestra and chorus musicAeterna, from Perm, Russia, will perform the Requiem in its entirety in their North American debut. Accompanying the performance is a specially commissioned cinematic artwork of moving image by avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. For this commission, Mekas, who passed away in January at the age of 96, drew inspiration from the words of Alessandro Manzoni, the poet and novelist to whom Requiem was dedicated.

Jonas Mekas’s cinematic artwork for Requiem is co-commissioned by The Shed and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden.