Saturday December 10, 2-5pm
Marni Kotak & Ajax Kotak Bell
It’s Me! Ajax’s Birthday Party Performance
Location: Artists’ home
RSVP to rsvp@microscopegallery.com to attend
Marni Kotak and Ajax Kotak Bell invite the public to join them for “It’s Me. Ajax’s 11th Birthday!” performance taking place as part of the ongoing project “Raising Baby X.” This year’s event draws inspiration from the children’s video game and book series “Five Nights at Freddy’s” (FNAF).
Ajax has designed and made his own costume as the FNAF character “Bonnie,” a large purple animatronic bunny, and will perform to a FNAF song “The Bonnie Song”, among others. “It’s Me.” Is an iconic phrase drawn from Five Night’s at Freddy’s and highlights Ajax’s growing independence as he moves into the tween years. Bonnie, and the song he sings, in a sense, represents an aspect of Ajax’s inner self. Kotak will be in costume as Freddy Fazbear and Jason Robert Bell, the child’s father, will be dressed as the security guard at the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where the games takes place.
The event — which will include homemade pizza from the family’s kitchen turned into Freddy Fazbear’s pizzeria, cupcakes based on Mr. Cupcake from the series, Five Nights at Freddy’s board and AR games, and pinata made by Ajax — marks the beginning of the 12th year of Kotak’s “Raising Baby X” (RBX) project, which celebrates the unseen labors of motherhood and growing up to adulthood.
Kotak views RBX as central to her wider body of work considering everyday life as art and its rituals, accomplishments and achievements as personal triumphs to be shared and celebrated. The long-term project began with her son’s Ajax’s birth on October 25, 2011, during her solo exhibition and performance “The Birth of Baby X.” The project has included annual birthday party performances, a series of diaristic panels by Kotak, and a video series called “Raising Baby X” which records Kotak Bell’s life from his own point of view via a wearable camera. Her most recent exhibition related to the project was “Seriously Kidding Around” (2022) – which took place this past September/October during which where mother and son lived their daily lives in the gallery throughout the run of the show.
“It’s Me. Ajax’s 11th Birthday!” takes place on Saturday, December 10th, 2-5pm at the artists’ home. To attend please RSVP to rsvp@microscopegallery.com. The event was rescheduled from October 30th.
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Marni Kotak is a multimedia and performance artist presenting everyday life being lived. She has received international attention for her durational performances and exhibitions, most notably “The Birth of Baby X” (2011) in which she gave birth to her son as a live performance and “Mad Meds” (2014) during which the artist slowly withdrew from psychiatric medications prescribed for postpartum depression. In “Dancing in the Oval Office” (2019) she danced each day within a recreation of the White House Oval Office. and most recently Kotak along with her son spent gallery hours living within replica’s of the child’s bedroom and the artist’s studio as part of the exhibition “Seriously Kidding Around,” (2022) celebrating 10 years of positioning the acts of raising a child and growing up as art. Kotak’s works have also appeared at the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile; Artists Space, New York, NY; Exit Art, New York, NY; White Box, New York, NY Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY; English Kills Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY; among others. She has performed extensively in the US and abroad.
Her exhibitions have been featured in Artforum, Blouin Artinfo, Art Pulse, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, Studio International, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time Magazine, Washington Post, among many others. Kotak’s work also appear in books and publications including “The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption,” Bloomsbury (2022); Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations, Palgrave McMillian (2021); The Art of Feminisim: Images that shaped the Fight for Equality, 1957-2017, Chronicle Books (2018); and Blackwells Companions to Contemporary Art: A Companion to Feminist Art, John Wiley & Sons (2019), among others. Kotak has appeared on Good Morning America (ABC), CBC Radio, NPR, ZDFKultur, and other broadcasts as well as in the documentary “The Art of Making it,” (2021) currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Marni Kotak received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Brooklyn College.