Doors 7pm
Program 7:30p
Tickets $15

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Welcome to another round of our multimedia series combining live performance, reading, sound and image selected by poet Christine Larusso & writer and curator Rachael Rakes: We’re Sick to Death of All This Nonsense. It’s not ekphrasis. WS2DOATN is a live series merging words, sounds, and moving images, intended to reframe—or unframe—what constitutes the poetic, the time-based, the time-less, the urgent and endurant in art and discourse.

In May, well be thinking about: Saffron Time.

The autumns of weeping and fasting and winters of weeping and praying fold time into season-smeared forget-mes. The erstwhile early crocuses blooming before they will have a chance to live, the chrysanthemum perennial. Our eyes water while gorging on turmoil or being subjected to turmoil, or surviving or “surviving.” Trying to know how to continue, to land on land. Together.

Fine.

Planting bouquets of images, lines, hearts, and mourning and vengeance, this season’s WSTD brings together presentations from a few of those who mention flowers anyway, whose tears don’t dry. Including readings and presentations by Jhani Randhawa, Sampson Starkweather, and your hosts CL&RR, a screening of THE GARDEN AMIDST THE FLAME by Natasha Tontey, plus vocal performance by Amirtha Kidambi, and whatever else we want. Come through!

Program

Opening from hosts Rachael Rakes & Christine Larusso

Reading from Jhani Randhawa

The Garden Amidst the Flame by Natasha Tontey

27’42”, 2022, Colour, 16:9 format, Audio format stereo in Tontemboan, English, and Melayu Minahasa with English and Indonesian subtitle burnt.

Garden Amidst the Flame continues Tontey’s ongoing research into the ancient knowledge, technologies and cosmology of the Minahasa, an Indigenous nation in the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia. In this most recent work, Tontey emphasises core Minahasan cultural beliefs in the all-encompassing equilibrium between the human and non-human. Drawing on her experience of the Karai ceremony, which grants Minahasan warriors an armour of invincibility, the artist seeks to establish a queering approach towards gender, youth and ecology.

Vocal Performance by Amirtha Kidambi

Reading from Sampson Starkweather

Bios

Jhani Randhawa is an artist and independent scholar whose work interweaves experimental poetics and prose with video, performance, and archival photography in a study of cyborgian/monstrous dreamscapes and the entangled expressions of memory, embodiment, and agriculture as they bind the colonial to the contemporary postcolonial moment. Jhani’s debut collection Time Regime (New York: Gaudy Boy, 2022) won the California Book Award for Poetry in 2023. Their hybrid writing has most recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Little Mirror, diode, and the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrit-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Examples of Jhani’s collaborative social practice can be found in May We Gather: A National Buddhist Memorial Ceremony for Asian American Ancestors and Sutra and Bible, an exhibition and anthology project coordinated between the Shinso Ito Center of Japanese Religions & Culture, The Japanese American National Museum, and Kaya Press. Jhani’s research, writing, and visual poetics have been recognized by UNESCO, PEN America, the museum of the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art (Gyeonggi-do, SK), the Richard Bonney Literary Fund (Leicester, UK), and fully funded residencies from Montalvo Arts, Millay Arts, and the Wormfarm Institute. 

Sampson Starkweather is a poet and does other stuff for money to pay rent and survive. He is the author of HONEY IN THE TAPE DECK: New & Uncollected Poems, Slip on the Ski Mask of Night, PAIN: The Board Game, The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather and over a dozen chapbooks from dangerous and/or defunct underground small presses. He is a founding editor of the anti-capitalist independent editor-run poetry press Birds, LLC.

Spanning free jazz, punk, electronic, noise & South Asian music, Amirtha Kidambi’s work challenges systems of power and the “decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical”. Kidambi is a composer-improviser, vocalist, scholar, educator and organizer, leading the defiant protest jazz band Elder Ones. Based in Lenapehoking-Brooklyn, Kidambi collaborates with Luke Stewart, Darius Jones, Mary Halvorson, Maria Grand, Rafiq Bhatia, William Parker, Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley and other groundbreaking artists, receiving praise from Pitchfork, Wire Magazine, NPR and touring internationally at Rewire, SESC (Brazil) Unsound, Big Ears and was recently a guest curator at Le Guess Who? festival in the Netherlands. As a composer, she has scored the anti-colonial films of Suneil Sanzgiri, exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, MoMA and global film festivals. Central to her practice is her work as an organizer and educator, working against oppression in all its forms and was the Working Artist Fellow for 2025 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, hosting a new podcast called Outernational on music and liberation.

Natasha Tontey (b, 1989) is Minahasan artist based between Yogyakarta and Jakarta. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear.’ In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but a subtle and personal struggle of the outcasted entities and beings.

Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bomb Magazine, Volume, the Colorado Review, Wildness, the Los Angeles Times, the Literary Review, Pleiades, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She was a Producer for Rachel Zucker’s podcast, Commonplace, and was a co-founder of the Commonplace School. She lives in Los Angeles most of the time.

Rachael Rakes is a writer, curator, educator, and researcher. She was recently the Artistic Director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2023. Currently Rakes is a Committee Member of the New York Film Festival, an Editor at Large for Verso Books, and a Contributing Editor for INFRASONICA.With Laura Huertas Millán and Onyeka Igwe, she organizes the artistic research initiative on co-subjective encounters, Counter-Encounters. From 2019–2022 she was the Curator for Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Until 2019, she was the Head Curator and Manager of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam. Rakes teaches in the Artificial Times Masters department at Sandberg, on Curating the moving image at Leiden University, and taught recently for the Parsons School of Art, Zine Eskola, HKU, KASK, Eugene Lang College, and Harvard University. Rakes is editor of the publications This, Too, Is a Map (2023, Sema/[NAME]), Toward the Not-Yet (2021, BAK/MIT Press), and Practice Space (2019, [NAME]/De Appel) and frequently publishes as a critic and essayist.