Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity): Kite with Robbie Wing

For the final performance of Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity), Kite and her partner, musician and sound artist Robbie Wing will perform a multi-instrumental interpretation of dreams, deep time, place, and kinship. This conversation through sound and performance will be the second time Kite and Wing have shared music and movement together at CARA, the first time as part of our Conjuring series in the Summer of 2022 where they presented their work ᎤᎩᏥᏕᏱ ᎠᏗᏗᏍᎪ ᏧᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᏱᎩ, which included field recordings, dreaming medicines, and more.

Kite’s work Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity), currently on view at CARA till June 25th, is composed of geometric designs that translate the artist’s dreams in patterns that correspond to Lakota words and traditional art forms. An embroidery machine acts as an artificial being which transforms knowledge from Kite’s dream world into the visual language of designs by stitching the patterns into cloth. These cyborgian communications act as the basis for a series of subsequent activations where Kite sings, fiddles, reads her dreams from the geometric patterns, and invites friends, relatives, collaborators, and aligned artists to interpret the embroidered scores.

Robbie Wing is a musician and sound artist born in Tulsa, OK and is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is a multi-instrumentalist, installation artist and field recordist. He released a new album in 2023, Snake on the Road on the label Peyote Tapes.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an award winning Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic raised in Southern California, known for her sound and video performance with her Machine Learning hair-braid interface. Kite holds a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and has received a PHD from Concordia University. Kite’s groundbreaking scholarship and practice explore contemporary Lakȟóta ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Working with machine learning techniques since 2017 and developing body interfaces for performance since 2013, Kite is the first American Indian artist to utilize Machine Learning in art practice.

Kite’s artwork and performance has been included in numerous exhibitions, recently Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Plug In Contemporary, PS122 and the Vera List Center, Anthology Film Archives, Walter Phillips Gallery, Chronus Art Center, Toronto Biennial, and Experimenta Triennial. Kite was a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, a 2020 Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellow, a 2020 “100 Women in AI Ethics”, a 2021 Common Fields Fellow, and the 2022 Creative Time Open Call artist for the Black and Indigenous Dreaming Workshops with Alisha B. Wormsley.

Oíhaŋke Waníča (Infinity) is part of the exhibition and we learn to keep the soil wet, curated by Manuela Moscoso, Chief Curator and Executive Director of CARA.

Read more about Kite’s ongoing series of performances here.

Cover image by Emmanuel Abreu.