YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP


YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP


PERFORMANCES HELD ON SEPTEMBER 6 AND 7 AT 7 PM
 
SEPTEMBER 6 – OCTOBER 13, 2019


Open on Saturdays and Sundays Between 12 and 6 PM


OCDChinatown is proud to present the New York City debut of Young Boy Dancing Group, following last month’s us premiere at the Boffo Fire Island Performance Festival. This marks YBDG’s first exhibition, comprising photographs and objects. Both projects are co-curated by OCDChinatown and BOFFO.



Initiated in 2014, young boy dancing group began as a nameless performance collective, a versatile host embracing an ever-changing network of dancers across europe. Over the last half-decade, YBDG has worked in video, photography, fashion, sculpture, and installation, but the group remains best known for rawly intimate performances in which the materiality of bodies encounters the ethereality of light. As this precarious brigade continually swells and tightens, picking up new performers at each location, its core values persist as a fierce buttress against mainstream culture: somatic exploration, not sexualization; exposure, not exhibitionism; communal release, not bridled isolation; object-identification, not commodification; and diy, not institutional polish.

These positions are apparent in the eight color photographs on view at OCDChinatown. Anonymous naked bodies, frequently headless or missing limbs, are stacked one upon another like a surrealist cadavre exquis or the gender-fluid images of Brassaï. Similar to YBDG’s live events, which appropriate and transmute each performer’s movement vocabularies and muscle memories, these sculptural poses grew out of structured improvisations. But while the group’s acrobatic performances often transpire within the crepuscular nonspace of a theater or club, here the photographs, printed on reflective aluminum, hang beneath a bright white line of light that droops across the ceiling — a harsh and unforgiving illumination that could be read as a parody of white-cube lighting.

YBDG will hold two performances at OCDChinatown, on september 6 and 7, leaving behind clothing and other remnants to loiter in the gallery. Due to limited space, RSVP is required for both performances.

Young Boy Dancing Group has made numerous international appearances, performing at venues such as the Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2019); Ceremonia Festival, Toluca, Mexico (2019); Athens Biennial (2018); Baltic Triennial, Tallinn, Estonia (2018); Creepy Teepee Festival, Kutná Hora, Czech Republic (2018); Norberg Festival, Sweden (2018); Roskilde Festival, Denmark (2017); Yvonne Lambert Gallery, Berlin (2017); Lithuanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2015); and Silencio, Paris (2014).

 





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OCDChinatown
75 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002
info@ocdchinatown.com

Saturdays and Sundays 12-6pm
or by appointment

design by Graphic Support Group