Kris Grey: Archival Impulse

Join the Department of Performance Studies as we welcome Kris Grey for our first artist talk of the semester! Archival Impulse examines the queer and trans desire to search for evidence of lives and experiences that have been obscured, misrepresented, or excluded from dominant historical narratives. Drawing from their interdisciplinary practice, Grey considers the archive not only as a repository of historical material, but as generative raw material shaped equally by what has been preserved and what remains absent. Moving through site-specific queer histories, salvaged materials, and medical and police representations of trans bodies, Grey traces the ways research has informed their approach to performance and cultural production. Introducing these materials and the histories they carry, Archival Impulse considers how artists might engage the fragments left by history, and how artistic practice can create relationships between historical inquiry, embodied experience, and queer futurity.

BIO:
Kris Grey is a New York City-based transgender artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores how histories are carried, embodied, erased, and reanimated. Working across sculpture, performance, installation, and social practice, Grey engages archives both institutional and personal, transforming found materials, collective memory, and the body itself into sites of inquiry and cultural agitation. Their work investigates the relationship between material evidence and lived experience, asking how objects, stories, and communities preserve traces of the past while generating new possibilities in the present. Grey has been a resident artist at the Wave Hill, Bronx Museum, Fire Island Artist Residency, ANTI Festival for Contemporary Art, International Centre for Training in the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson. Grey's writing, Trans*feminism: fragmenting and re-reading the history of art through a trans* perspective, was published by Manchester University Press in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories. Grey earned a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from Ohio University. They perform, teach, and exhibit work internationally.