INCARNATE Artists in Residence
Turning Leather Desires and Fantasies into Flesh
KINK OUT INCARNATE is a living altar to leather histories, turning fantasies, archives, and scholarship into flesh-and-blood activations. Party, performance art, panel, photo exhibition, community market, and more.
DATE & TIME:
Sunday, June 1, 2025 // 2-10pm ET
LOCATION:
TV Eye, 1647 Weirfield St, Ridgewood, NY 11385 (near the Halsey L)
GET TICKETS
Early Bird - SOLD OUT
1st Release - SOLD OUT
$35 2nd Release - selling fast!
$40 3rd Release
$40 On the Door***
TICKETING NOTES:
No one turned away for lack of funds, please email: kinkoutevents@gmail.com
*** On the Door tickets depend on event day capacity and are only available at Door Person's discretion. Arrive early on the day!
REVERENCE: the 2-4pm free bootblack panel is now waitlist only. If you can no longer make it, please forgo your RSVP here so waitlisted folks can attend!
This is a 21+ event.
2025 KINK OUT ARTIST RESIDENCY
Kink Out is piloting an artist residency program that supports invited artists to develop new or ongoing work. For our inaugural program, we invited artists to develop works inspired by or in dialogue with themes from the Power of Leather talks.
Five community artists will unleash performance artworks throughout INCARNATE. Artists will activate various spaces of the venue; some engaging the audience in immersive interplay, others willfully holding scene boundaries, all of them will INCARNATE leather desires and fantasies into flesh. While consent will be upheld, we dare attendees to push their boundaries of resistance.
Keep scrolling to learn more about our inaugural cohort of artists!
INCARNATE Performance Program
4:00pm — “Exo—” is a performance that explores the fissures between disability and pain endurance, creating an exoskeleton of needles that recalls imagery of bracing and armour simultaneously. As a durational performance “Exo—” proposes a witnessing of physical stamina and energetic exchange between collaborators Mae Howard and M. Celeste.
5:30pm — “ALL YOU CAN EAT” is a perverse collection of performance vignettes that marry sadism, the abject and 1950’s kitchen concoctions with whiteness served as the pukey main course. As if we havent had enough of this shit already, KING COBRA dons a blister speckled white silicone mask and handsewn flesh apron whipping up vats of white slop to be devoured by you messy subs. No one leaves the dinner table until the plates are cleared, or else.
6:30pm — “Gilding” is Riven Ratanavanh and Ione Wang’s first collaboration. This mummification ritual transforms the body by encasing it in a second skin. Audiences are invited to come up one by one to gild the body with yellow gold, a participatory act of adorning, ornamenting and creating the fetish object. Afterwards, audiences are invited to lubricate the body as it exits from the shell. Fluctuating between worship and abjection, this encounter stages touch as an opening to collective experience. Is skin a conduit, a barrier, or a construction?
8:15pm — "THIS IMPRESSIVE TERROR (I must be)" is the second iteration in XSCN’s "MERCILESS ACCELERATING RHYTHM" cycle, and the NYC premiere/homecoming of this performance-mechanism, formed of DIY artists and collaborators/comrades XSCN, LEVITICVS, and EXIT SERAPHIM (MERCURY SYMBOL + LUCY YORK). This staging renews their improvisational harsh noise music group experiment, prompted by June Jordan’s iconic 1976 poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” with a sharps body-performance on XSCN that activates fucked flesh as a sonic substance, and BDSM/edge-play as a kind of conjuring of the militant endurance and ecstasy of violent antagonism. Through ritualistic live acts of planning, study, violation, pain, sacrifice and confrontation, the artists ceaselessly escalate and vengefully weaponize the embodied impossibility-intensity of tranny existence within a hyper-gentrifying city at the core of disintegrating empire.
This performance contains strobing lights and projected imagery, harsh electronic noises and high-pitched screeches. Ear protection is highly encouraged.
2025 ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE
KING COBRA (she/they/King), known online as the silicon don, creates corporeal sculptures—that utilize glass alongside silicone, beads, crystals, rubber, synthetic hair, mysterious goo, and other materials—to explore methods of colonial torture and diseases spread by White Europeans during the transatlantic slave trade. In addition to her sculptural practice, she is also a body modifier and filmmaker. Tattoo is an extension of her explorations in flesh, mark making, and the relationship between image physical pain.
Mae Howard (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work calls upon lineages of disabled labor economies. Mae is interested in the fleshly and material enmeshment of BDSM, the medical industrial complex, leather histories, biopolitics, and debilitation. They are an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and their work has been exhibited and screened at Vox Populi, Automat Gallery, Westbeth Gallery, Dia Chelsea, and GHOSTMACHINE.
XSCN (she/her) is a performance and video artist, writer, archivist, and DIY organizer from New York, by way of Ecuador and Romania. She currently works on the ongoing project "Untitled [TRANNY]," which spans BDSM endurance performance, exploitation filmmaking, electronic noise music, and experimental cultural analysis to ecstatically embody a ghostly figure called “the Tranny” — a myth, ritual icon, weapon, and narrative form for the distinct material experience of being/surviving/dying as a racialized transsexual hooker.
Riven Ratanavanh (he/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work focuses on Asian transmasculine identity, race, and fetishes-and-fetishism, and trans imaginations. Spanning performance, film, and photo, he has presented work at Performance Space New York, the Park Avenue Armory, Movement Research, Center for Performance Research, ICA London; and featured by the London Short Film Festival and the Asian American Arts Alliance.
Ione Wang (she/her) is interested in the encounter: as a site of identification and resistance, desire and power. Her work is often relational, serial, collaborative, and durational, across the mediums of performance, printmaking, and installation. She is one of the co-founders of Veil Machine, an artist collective based in NYC. She holds a BA from Columbia University and is an MFA candidate at CalArts. Her work has been shown at the Leslie Lohman Museum, Highways Performance Space, and is in the collection of the LACA Archives. She was a 2020 resident at Eyebeam.
ACCESS & SAFETY
By attending any part of this event, you agree to follow our full Access & Safety Guide. Read the full guide here: https://tinyurl.com/incarnate-safety-plan
COVID PROTOCOLS: We’d strongly prefer everyone to wear a mask indoors (grab one at the door or from our team); encourage masking outdoors; and encourage testing before and after the event as well (we have free tests available!); the HVAC system has Merv-13 filters; AIR NYC purifiers will be indoors
GET IN TOUCH: Other accessibility adjustments may be possible - please speak to one of our Safety Monitors (wearing red bands) or email us (kinkoutevents@gmail.com) if you have specific questions/requirements and we will do our best to assist and make your experience better.
Follow us via @kinkoutevents to stay updated and catch the full lineup