NEW YORK CITY: Onassis USA has announced a series called ENTER featuring new works commissioned from artists around the globe. The works were created in 120 hours or less and draw on the artists’ experience through the COVID-19 pandemic. ENTER launched April 24, and can be viewed at onassis.org/enter and on the Onassis Foundation’s YouTube channel.
“The space created, filled, and tragically sometimes taken away by COVID-19, has challenged how we experience and make new art,” said Vallejo Gantner, artistic and executive director, in a statement. “This strange combination of isolation and constant reaching out; of new ways of listening and talking; and of touching and being touched; have inspired us to create a new commissioning program called ENTER which we hope will be in part a kind of artistic time capsule, refracting the frustration, grief, comedy, and fear of this moment of pandemic.”
The first round of artists for the ENTER series include the Obie award-winning duo 600 HIGHWAYMEN (Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone), who have created the fictional narrative short film Fighting World; Maria Antelman, with the video work AntiBody; choreographer, performer, educator, and 2019 Guggenheim Fellow Kimberly Bartosik, in collaboration with her husband, lighting designer Roderick Murray and their daughter Dahlia Bartosik-Murray, with The Game, sharing a game of absurd exchange they created after a month in quarantine; director, writer, and 2019 MacArthur Fellow Annie Dorsen, with Training Text, Step 2250, a short cartoon featuring a text generated by a machine learning algorithm trained on answers to the question “What is the meaning of life?”; and NYC performance ensemble Radiohole with Happy Hours, a desperate meditation on the extended passage of time as experienced through social distance. International artists contributing in the first round of releases include playwright and screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, and theatre director Dimitris Karantzas.
U.S.-based artists creating works for a second round of ENTER include writer Isabella Rossellini and Flying Karamazov Brothers member Paul Magid, continuing in the vein of Rossellini’s series of works at the intersection of animal science and art; Kathryn Hamilton (Sister Sylvester); Emily Johnson; Risa Puno; Kaneza Schaal and Christopher Myers; and Stefanos Tsivopoulos. Internationally, Elias Adam, Ziad Antar, Simos Kakalas, Kareem Kalokoh – ATH Kids, Evi Kalogiropoulou, Vasilis Kekatos, Lena Kitsopoulou, Maria Papadimitriou, RootlessRoot, Kostis Stafylakis & Theo Triantafyllidis & Alexis Fidetzis, Andonis Foniadakis (with a work scored by Active Child), Akira Takayama, Daniel Wetzel, and others will share new work. More works from other participating artists in the U.S. and abroad will follow.
Founded in 2000, Onassis USA was the first international affiliate of the Onassis Foundation. It is dedicated to culture, community, and education, with projects that can effectively inspire social change and justice across borders.
