Sister Sylvester is the ghost of a nun who haunted the first home/studio/performance venue where Sister made work, and it became the company’s name for its gender-fluid, feminist and spectral associations.
Sister Sylvester makes work, often essayistic performances, using first hand research and found documents. Sister Sylvester invite disruption into both the performance and the process, and look for dissonance and difficulty in text, image and sound.
Sister Sylvester work with animals and technology to make cross species collaborations and cyborg theater. Their first work was about a person who was part cardboard box. Their last, the ways politics forces technology to create new hybrids where computer hardware stands in for a lover’s touch. Housekeepers become their tools of labour with arms replaced by leather brushes. Humans, jellyfish and bacteria unite in a single organism on a petri dish stage. They love classic texts from theatre’s underbelly, and their patron saints are Genet, Brecht and Littlewood. Sister Sylvester are based between New York, Texas and Istanbul. Recent work has toured to Bozar, Brussels; Frascati, Amsterdam; Arcola Theater, London; The Public Theater, New York, The Park Avenue Armory, NYC; Bomontiada, Istanbul. They’ve been part of the Devised Theater Working Group, at The Public; The Public’s New Works program, in residence at Brooklyn College; and in residence at The Park Avenue Armory.
Sister Sylvester is led by Kathryn Karaoglu Hamilton. Current collaborators are : Cyrus Moshrefi, Kelsea Martin, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Juan Betancurth, Jacqueline Blaska, Bruce Steinberg.
About Kathryn Hamilton
Kathryn Hamilton is an artist based in New York and Istanbul. She is the founder of Sister Sylvester, a performance group. Recent productions include Three Rooms at Shubbak Festival, London; They Are Gone… at The Public Theater for Under The Radar’s Incoming! series; Welcome at Alt Bomonti gallery in Istanbul; The Maids’ The Maids at Abrons Arts Center; The Fall at The Park Avenue Armory, as part of the Under Construction Series; Dead Behind These Eyes (NYT critic’s pick) at Sing Sing Karaoke; Science Fiction at Köşe. Her work has been reviewed by New York Times, New Yorker, Time Out, Village Voice, American Theater Magazine, Performance Art Journal, Hyperallergic, Culturebot, among other publications. She has received grants from LMCC, BAC, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and has been a resident at The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group; Salem Art Works; Park Avenue Armory; Flux Factory, Queens; and Spread Art, Detroit, among others. She is currently a part of Lift Festival’s Urban Heat program for social practice artists. She has taught or mentored students at Columbia University, NYU and Boğaziçi, Istanbul; and she spent the years 2011-13 in disguise as a french diplomat in New York.