KINK OUT INCARNATE is a living altar to leather histories, turning fantasies, archives, and scholarship into flesh-and-blood activations.
PARTY · PERFORMANCE ART · PANEL · PHOTO EXHIBITION
KINK OUT INCARNATE is a day of leather history, art, and embodied experience featuring artists, bootblacks, DJs, vendors, and organizations from the kink community.
As our finale to the CLAGS x KO collaborative Power of Leather dialogues between scholars and the leather sex community, KINK OUT INCARNATE is the embodiment of themes from this past academic year’s conversations: Racialized Erotics of Pleasure in Leather, The Abject, Exigent Sadism, and Fantasies Identity Can’t Hold: Leathersex and Trans Experiences.
KINK OUT INCARNATE follows REVERENCE, a free intergenerational bootblacking panel presented in collaboration with CLAGS. For tickets and info for REVERENCE [CLICK HERE FOR FREE RSVP]
Kick off Pride Month and roll into International Wh0res Day in your Sunday best! Our full program – featuring immersive, durational performance art and live leather installations, photo exhibition, community market and more – is below!
ARTIST RESIDENCY & PERFORMANCE ART
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.
Performances
“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.
“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.
"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.
“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?
Kink Out’s 2025 Artists-in-Residence:
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
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__
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___
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
DARK ROOM
FOR YOUR CRUISING PLEASURE: in collaboration with 502 Bad Gateway, we are installing our very first pop up dark room. The twist? What develops in the dark room will be projected live onto the main stage, putting the motion in motion picture (ahem!). Bring a partner or find someone new in the dark. For exhibitionists and voyeurs alike, come watch and be watched in this peep show turned inside out.
HUMAN GUESTBOOK
Voyeur, leer, stare and share with kd diamond while she records the day’s events onto our Human Guestbook. Throughout the day, come and tell kd and her assistant your own experiences, histories, and fantasies of what you’ve witnessed, and she’ll live-tattoo it right onto leather, with her Human Guestbook strapped down underneath. Quotes, illustrations, interpretations — by the end of the event, it will be a Tattooed Tapestry, to be displayed at Lüstern LA this summer. Sponsored by Rough Trade Gear in Los Angeles.
EFRAIN GONZALEZ PHOTO EXHIBITION
Efrain Gonzalez’s photos are not documentation from the sidelines, they are incarnations of leathersex. For decades, Efrain has photographed New York City’s queer leather scene from the inside, his camera as much a part of these spaces as the boots, the chains, the hands pulling flesh. This one-night exhibition shows never-before-seen original photographs from Efrain’s collection, as well as several binders of photographs from his archive for those who want to dig deeper. In collaboration with the Lesbian Herstory Archives, we offer you some precious relics of New York City’s leather history – its dungeons, its scenes, its lusts – through Efrain’s eyes. All works on display in the gallery will be available for purchase.
Community Market
Our all-day market will feature NYC-based sex worker organizations and local community vendors. A portion of retail vendor proceeds will be donated to the SW organizations present.
OTHER FUN & AMENITIES
Bootblacks: KO’s fav fiends will be on deck to condition and love on your leathers.
DJ Sets: KO’s fav vibe curators will provide the soundtrack to our leather ritual.
Food: TV Eye’s on-site kitchen is serving straight to you in the backyard.
Coat Check: head to the right side of the Front Bar, once you step inside. $3 per item.
ACCESS AND SAFETY
THIS IS A 21+ EVENT. BY ATTENDING ANY PART OF THIS EVENT, YOU AGREE TO FOLLOW OUR FULL ACCESS & SAFETY GUIDE. READ IT HERE
COVID PROTOCOLS: We’d strongly prefer everyone to wear a mask indoors (grab one at the door or from our team); encourage masking outdoors; and encourage testing before and after the event as well (we have free tests available!); the HVAC system has Merv-13 filters; AIR NYC purifiers will be indoors
MOVING AROUND: TV Eye’s main entrance has 1 step to enter the building; we have a clear flat path for wheeled mobility devices via the side gate; the venue is all one level thereafter
RESTROOMS: Main restroom (off the front bar) has one ADA-compliant stall; all restrooms are gender-neutral
SEATING: There are benches and picnic tables all around the backyard. There are booths and banquettes throughout the indoor space. Seat numbers for the 4-10pm indoor performances depend on the given room; we can supply extra seats if needed.
ASL: interpreters will be present for the Bootblacking Panel
CLIMATE: The indoor space is air conditioned; the backyard is an open-air smoking area.
PHOTOS/VIDEO: You will be in a space where photography and video recording will occur. Don’t take photos or videos of anyone without their consent, including those in the background.
GET IN TOUCH: Other accessibility adjustments may be possible - please email us (kinkoutevents@gmail.com) ahead of time if you have specific questions/requirements, or speak to one of our Safety Monitors (wearing red bands), and we will do our best to assist and make your experience better.
JOIN US ON JUNE 1ST!
2-4pm — REVERENCE BOOTBLACKING PANEL: events.humanitix.com/pol-reverence
4-10pm — INCARNATE: tinyurl.com/koincarnate
Follow us via @kinkoutevents to stay updated and catch the full lineup