After a six-year hiatus, the Queer New York International Arts Festival returns to New York
7. – 17. 2. 2024.
NYU Skirball
The new edition of the Queer New York International Arts Festival in New York will present works by Argentinian, German, Brazilian and Canadian artists at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The program is curated and produced by Zvonimir Dobrović, president of the Domino association, founder and the artistic director of the Queer Zagreb and Perforacije festivals in Croatia.
The Queer New York program brings together 8 performances and 1 exhibition by Arijana Lekić-Fridrih, Bruna Isaković, Nataša Rajković, Mia Zalukar, Clayton Lee, Wagner Schwartz, Tiziano Cruz and the Raimund Hoghe Company.
The program is the result of many years of successful cooperation between the Domino association and theaters in the USA. The organization of the entire festival modeled on Queer Zagreb is a production and organizational undertaking that has no adequate comparisons in the domestic framework.
NYU Skirball is one of the most important theaters in New York with a program that is extremely appreciated and followed, it is a theater with 850 seats and guest appearances of this type in the USA are rare for Croatian artists. The program of Queer New York is regularly covered in the American media, and several announcements have already appeared in various media before the opening, while many have announced to accompany media coverage of the festival. Our previous programs in the USA have so far attracted a lot of interest from the American media and dozens of articles have been published in many media, including the New York Times, Financial Times, New Yorker, Huffington Post, culturebot and many others.
As part of the festival, in addition to performances, talks and discussions with artists are planned in collaboration with professors and students of New York University (NYU). Zvonimir Dobrović and Nataša Rajković will hold an educational program for NYU students during their stay in New York, and a joint panel with all artists on the meaning of queer and artistic productions touching upon various identity issues will be held during the next week.
The festival questions traditional definitions and understanding of queer through artistic practices, concepts and/or forms. The starting point on which the artistic platform of the festival is built starts from the idea of queer as a place outside the norm and the fact that the mentioned norm depends on the geographical, social and political context. This long-term engagement of queer art and the Domino festival program is a strong and loud response to the re-traditionalization of art and society that has been happening in Eastern Europe for the past few years.
The guest program of Croatian artists opens with Arijana Lekić-Fridrih’s video installation “From 5 to 95”, in which the artist documents the stories and experiences of girls, women and women who talk about what it’s like to be a woman in Croatia, and the differences compared to the lives of their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. The starting point of the artistic project is the desire for public intergenerational dialogue in a conservative society – such as Croatian. The program continues with the Argentinian-Croatian co-production “Yira, Yira” directed by Nataša Rajković and Bruno Isaković, which explores the life of Argentinian sex workers, and the dance performance “Kill B.” by Mija Zalukar and Bruno Isaković, inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s popular film, but from a slightly different perspective. Zalukar and Isaković create a performative analysis of their own long-term professional relationship, questioning hierarchical structures within the process of creating theater and the powerful dynamic between two, at least in theory, equal partners.
