Saturday October 1, 3-5pm
Pokey The Kitty’s Birthday Party (2022)
Live birthday party performance
by Marni Kotak & Ajax Kotak Bell
“Pokey The Kitty’s Birthday Party” is a live birthday party performance by Marni Kotak & Ajax Kotak Bell event taking place in connection with the artists’ current exhibition at the gallery, “Seriously Kidding Around,” to celebrate the 6th birthday of Kotak Bell’s cat Pokey. The artists’ invite family, friends, and the general public to join them for the event which will feature a spacial feline rendition of Happy Birthday song, homemade gelato, and a custom cake designed by Ajax in the shape of Pokey. The kitty has already been acclimated to our space and will be present.
The audience is also invited to engage within the artists’ large-scale installation on view which includes a Minecraft playstation, elaborate tracks for Hot Wheels cars, Jurassic Park figures, boardgames, custom slime, new artworks in progress by Kotak within her “studio,” and more.
Pokey was born in the artists’ Bushwick, Brooklyn basement in late September 2016 to a neighborhood stray cat, and the family has raised her and cared for since then.
The exhibit “Seriously Kidding Around” stems from artist’s ongoing project Raising Baby X (RBX), began in 10:17AM, October 25, 2011 when the Marni Kotak gave birth to Ajax as a live performance during her show “The Birth of Baby X” at the gallery’s original location in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The current show marks the 10th year of RBX, which includes an installation recreating Ajax’s bedroom and the Marni’s studio among other works in installation, painting, photography, mixed-media and video.
“Pokey The Kitty’s Birthday Party” is an opportunity for Ajax to carry on the annual tradition of the celebration of life since the beginning of RBX, here taking a lead role in celebrating the birthday of Pokey, his little sister in a sense.
More information about the event and exhibit can be found HERE
Admission is free and audience may enter or exit at any time.
Please note: masks are required for entrance at this time.
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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 “Treehouse” (2017), Kotak — who had just experienced a devastating fire in her home — created a refuge for herself and others to pause from the overwhelming aspects of life and in “Dancing in the Oval Office” (2019) she danced each day within a recreation of the White House Oval Office. 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 Feminism: 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, ZDF Kultur, 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.