2025 Resident artists

Kink Out is piloting a residency program offering invited artists support to develop new or ongoing work, inspired by or in dialogue with themes from the Power of Leather talks:

For our Inaugural 2025 Kink Out Artist Residency, five community artists will unleash performance artworks throughout INCARNATE: KING COBRA, Mae Howard, Ione Wang, Riven Ratanavanh, and XCSN. Artists will activate various spaces of the venue; some engaging the audience in immersive interplay, others willfully holding scene boundaries, all of them will INCARNATE leather desires and fantasies into flesh. While consent will be upheld, we dare attendees to push their boundaries of resistance.

Read more about each artist and their performances below:

king cobra

KING COBRA (she/they/King), known online as the silicon don, creates corporeal sculptures—that utilize glass alongside silicone, beads, crystals, rubber, synthetic hair, mysterious goo, and other materials—to explore methods of colonial torture and diseases spread by White Europeans during the transatlantic slave trade. In addition to her sculptural practice, she is also a body modifier and filmmaker. Tattoo is an extension of her explorations in flesh, mark making, and the relationship between image physical pain. Follow: @the_silicon_don

“ALL YOU CAN EAT” is a perverse collection of performance vignettes that marry sadism, the abject and 1950’s kitchen concoctions with whiteness served as the pukey main course. As if we havent had enough of this shit already, KING COBRA dons a blister speckled white silicone mask and handsewn flesh apron whipping up vats of white slop to be devoured by you messy subs. No one leaves the dinner table until the plates are cleared, or else.

Mae Howard

Mae Howard (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work calls upon lineages of disabled labor economies. Mae is interested in the fleshly and material enmeshment of BDSM, the medical industrial complex, leather histories, biopolitics, and debilitation. They are an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and their work has been exhibited and screened at Vox Populi, Automat Gallery, Westbeth Gallery, Dia Chelsea, and GHOSTMACHINE. Follow: @swamp_witch__

“Exo—” is a performance that explores the fissures between disability and pain endurance, creating an exoskeleton of needles that recalls imagery of bracing and armour simultaneously. As a durational performance “Exo—” proposes a witnessing of physical stamina and energetic exchange between collaborators Mae Howard and M. Celeste.

Riven Ratanavanh + Ione Wang

Riven Ratanavanh (he/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work focuses on Asian transmasculine identity, race, and fetishes-and-fetishism, and trans imaginations. Spanning performance, film, and photo, he has presented work at Performance Space New York, the Park Avenue Armory, Movement Research, Center for Performance Research, ICA London; and featured by the London Short Film Festival and the Asian American Arts Alliance. Follow: @transgressrrr

Ione Wang (she/her) is interested in the encounter: as a site of identification and resistance, desire and power. Her work is often relational, serial, collaborative, and durational, across the mediums of performance, printmaking, and installation. She is one of the co-founders of Veil Machine, an artist collective based in NYC. She holds a BA from Columbia University and is an MFA candidate at CalArts. Her work has been shown at the Leslie Lohman Museum, Highways Performance Space, and is in the collection of the LACA Archives. She was a 2020 resident at Eyebeam. Follow: @ioneartprojects

“Gilding” is Riven and Ione’s first collaboration. This mummification ritual transforms the body by encasing it in a second skin. Audiences are invited to come up one by one to gild the body with yellow gold, a participatory act of adorning, ornamenting and creating the fetish object. Afterwards, audiences are invited to lubricate the body as it exits from the shell. Fluctuating between worship and abjection, this encounter stages touch as an opening to collective experience. Is skin a conduit, a barrier, or a construction?

XSCN

XSCN (she/her) is a performance and video artist, writer, archivist, and DIY organizer from New York, by way of Ecuador and Romania. She currently works on the ongoing project "Untitled [TRANNY]," which spans BDSM endurance performance, exploitation filmmaking, electronic noise music, and experimental cultural analysis to ecstatically embody a ghostly figure called “the Tranny” — a myth, ritual icon, weapon, and narrative form for the distinct material experience of being/surviving/dying as a racialized transsexual hooker. Follow: @psic0putaaa___

"THIS IMPRESSIVE TERROR (I must be)" is the second iteration in XSCN’s "MERCILESS ACCELERATING RHYTHM" cycle, and the NYC premiere/homecoming of this performance-mechanism, formed of DIY artists and collaborators/comrades XSCN, LEVITICVS, and EXIT SERAPHIM (MERCURY SYMBOL + LUCY YORK). This staging renews their improvisational harsh noise music group experiment, prompted by June Jordan’s iconic 1976 poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies,” with a sharps body-performance on XSCN that activates fucked flesh as a sonic substance, and BDSM/edge-play as a kind of conjuring of the militant endurance and ecstasy of violent antagonism. Through ritualistic live acts of planning, study, violation, pain, sacrifice and confrontation, the artists ceaselessly escalate and vengefully weaponize the embodied impossibility-intensity of tranny existence within a hyper-gentrifying city at the core of disintegrating empire.

This performance contains strobing lights and projected imagery, harsh electronic noises and high-pitched screeches. Ear protection is highly encouraged.