Crit Night at Ace Hotel Brooklyn

Ace Hotel Brooklyn and Pioneer Works join in creative arms to foster artistic communities.

Crit Night is a seasonal series, where Pioneer Works artists-in-residence share works in progress during an intimate evening focused around experimentation and discourse.

Visual Arts Resident Dawn Kim will present My Gift—a testimony of a two-year quest to right a wrong. Consisting of pictures made and found by the artist, the slideshow presentation maps a logical approach to faith, law, and magic.

Visual Arts Resident Azzah Sultan will expand on her painting series Not My Burden to Bear, which navigates ideas of domesticity and prescribed roles of mother and daughter within families and marriage through folklore, fibre art, and the artist’s cultural background, via a conversation with her own mother.

Music Resident Samer Ghadry will present Not Knowing and Arriving Anyways—a brief sound journey using gongs in overtone abundance.

Music Resident Alum Jaimie Branch will DJ in the Lobby Bar following the program.

About the artists:

Dawn Kim is an artist who examines everyday complexities through (mis)recorded histories. Taking on forms of video, artist’s books and performance, her work attempts to make visible systems of power that have been hidden, forgotten, or overlooked. She received her MFA in photography from Yale University in 2020.

Azzah Sultan is an interdisciplinary artist who received her BFA from Parsons School of Design and her MFA at Washington State University. Born in Abu Dhabi, Azzah is a Malaysian native who grew up in Malaysia, Saudi, Finland, Bahrain, and is currently based in New York. She has exhibited her work at The New School, Parsons Paris Gallery, S.A.D. Gallery, The Bushwick Collective, BUFU Studios, The Ely Center, Sotheby’s Institute, and more. Her work strives to transcend the fallacy that Muslim women are oppressed by the nature of their religious customs while also speaking on the issues of navigating her identity through culture, immigration, and finding home through installation strategies.

Samer Ghadry is a percussionist and sound healer based in Brooklyn, NY. The son of immigrants from Lebanon and Syria, he studied world music and sociology while at Brown University before moving to NYC in 2008. Samer has collaborated extensively with Dave Harrington, Angel Deradoorian, and Matthew Dear. Since 2018 he's been a student and practitioner of the therapeutic uses of sound, having now offered over 300 sound meditations in various settings. Samer continues training and working alongside leaders in the field at Sage Academy (Woodstock, NY) and 9 Ways Academia (Perkasie, PA). Recently he consulted for the Mandala Lab gong installation at The Rubin Museum, and created an ongoing monthly live sound healing-meets-improv performance series called Spontaneous Space.

Jaimie Branch is a Brooklyn-based musician and artist working in the areas of improvisation and composition. Through her musical practice, her main interests lie in extending and expanding the technical limitations of the trumpet and the musical language of free jazz and improvised music. Before moving to Brooklyn in 2015, she was an active member of the Chicago and Baltimore creative music scenes as a performer, presenter, and recording engineer.

In accordance with the New York City mandate, Key to NYC, visitors (age 12+) must show proof of COVID-19 vaccination to enter this event. Be prepared to show your proof of vaccination upon arrival to Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Please review our updated Health and Safety Policy here.

Crit Night is co-presented with Ace Hotel Brooklyn.

This program is supported in part by The Willem de Kooning Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the Teiger Foundation.