Facilitated by Eiko Otake & DonChristian Jones
Pay-What-You-Wish
Laurel Hill East, Tent
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37 years apart, friends and artistic collaborators Eiko Otake and DonChristian Jones have created multiple performance and video works together. Their bodies co-inhabiting a wide range of spaces, they ran, collapsed, and held each other. Their spoken and non-verbal dialogues have focused on violence, survival, and witnessing.
Prior to their site-specific performances at Laurel Hill East, which will intersect with each other, join them for a conversation: what does it mean to create urgent work? How do massive deaths differ from personal deaths? They will also recall how they attended the death and dying of a parent.
Learn more about Eiko Otake here and about DonChristian Jones here.
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Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma creating numerous performance works. Eiko has worked on the theme of death and dying for a long time, i.e. River (1995-1999), post-9/11 Offering (2002), Death Poem (2005) and Mourning (2007). More recently, in the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, she has presented A Body in a Cemetery (2020), Mother (2022), With the Dead (2022) and stone (2023). She has also performed in Maplewood Cemetery in Durham, NC and Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs, CO. Eiko is currently working on her 10-year project, I Invited Myself (2022–), a series of exhibitions and screenings of her media works. Its Volume 3 was presented in Philadelphia in 2024 at Asian Arts Initiative and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
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is a postdisciplinary artist and social sculptor whose practice blurs the boundaries between visual art, music, performance, and social intervention. Working across media and modes, his work engages architecture, community, and futurity—often emerging from spaces shaped by surveillance, abandonment, or resistance.
Raised in Philadelphia and based in New York, DonChristian’s early years painting inside Rikers Island and other carceral institutions ground his work in both aesthetic experimentation and civic urgency. His installations, soundworks, and performances have appeared at The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, The Shed, New Museum, and Brooklyn Museum, among others.
In 2020, he founded Public Assistants Inc.—a radical mutual aid network and community design studio that reimagines urban space as a site of liberation, care, and creative infrastructure.