Chelsea Knight: Fall to Earth, Chapter 2 — “Blasphemy” (Live Event with Mathew Paul Jinks) Presented as part of “Chelsea Knight: Fall to Earth,” a project of the R&D Season: SPECULATION. Please note: Entry to this event is permitted during breaks between intervals of shooting. Each interval will last approximately thirty minutes. “What is at the core of blasphemy? How can a socially condemned or condemnable speech act be engaged in a way that gives it voice and also expresses its danger? As we have seen with the events of Charlie Hebdo and the recent Copenhagen shooting, this is a crucial moment for what blasphemy means in the world and how it is defined, received, and pushed back against.” —Chelsea Knight and Mathew Paul Jinks Chelsea Knight works in video and performance to plumb the social and psychological underpinnings of group behavior, questioning how we encounter one another as singular entities. Her work considers the inadequacy of language and its relation to the reproduction of authority and identity. As an artist-in-residence during the Spring 2015 R&D Season: SPECULATION, Knight is producing the final chapters of Fall to Earth, a cycle of short videos inspired by Salman Rushdie’s magical realist novel The Satanic Verses. Each chapter is staged as a live event produced for video and takes as its point of departure themes related to socially condemned speech and other forms of silencing or restraint and includes original scores created by different collaborating artists. The chapters’ themes are “Conversion,” “Blasphemy,” “Resistance,” “Violence,” and “Silence.” Saturday March 28, 1–3 PM: Fall to Earth, Chapter 2 — “Blasphemy” (Live Event with Mathew Paul Jinks) Saturday April 18, 1–3 PM: Fall to Earth, Chapter 3 — “Resistance” (Live Event with Ryan Tracy) Sunday June 7, 1–3 PM: Fall to Earth, Chapter 4 — “Violence” (Live Event with Nick Hallett) Saturday June 20, 1–3 PM: Fall to Earth, Chapter 5 — “Silence” (Live Event with Christine Sun Kim) Chelsea Knight received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Knight recently completed residencies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace program. She has had solo exhibitions and performances at the Brooklyn Museum; the St. Louis Art Museum; Aspect Ratio Projects, Chicago; DiverseWorks, Houston (with Mark Tribe); Abrons Art Center, New York; and Momenta Art, Brooklyn. She has also exhibited her work in group shows, including “Nouvelles vagues,” Palais de Tokyo, Paris; “Anti-Establishment,” Hessel Museum of Art,CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and the Young Artists Biennial, Bucharest. Mathew Paul Jinks is a lens based media artist who frequently embeds sound and performance practices into his works. Research topics include: histories and inheritance of the self, the landscape of memory and cultural identities. Recent works include performances reading texts culled from ‘The Immigrants Library’ at the MCA Chicago and a solo exhibition At Three Walls Gallery Chicago showing ‘The Unreliable Narrator’, a feature length Ethno-travel-bio work shot in India.