Kathe Burkhart, Almost Heaven
November 15 – December 31, 2023
on participantafterdark.art

PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK presents an online video premiere of a durational literary performance featuring Kathe Burkhart reading her new book, Almost Heaven, in its entirety. Presented in conjunction with exhibitions of Burkhart’s work at New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections and at Cheim & Read.

Almost Heaven is a collection of twenty interrelated stories full of Southern discomfort mostly set in 1970s West Virginia, a place that is plagued by the dark side of the American dream: transgenerational trauma and poverty, the ghosts of the Civil War, and a drug subculture that preceded the current Opioid Crisis but had no name yet. 

Almost Heaven, written and read by Kathe Burkhart
total running time 4 hours, 42 minutes

Technical Director and Video Editor: Itziar Barrio
Cameras: Marit Liang, Itziar Barrio

Lighting Design: Marit Liang

Audio Recording and Audio Mix: Sophia Orlow
Subtitles: Sarah Anderson, Itziar Barrio

Kathe Burkhart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. A graduate of CalArts (BFA 1982, MFA 1984) working since the early ‘80s, Burkhart has consistently and candidly engaged gender roles, sexuality, celebrity, and language to, in her words, “articulate a radical female subject.” Burkhart has had 45 solo exhibitions including Rozenstraat a rose is a rose is a rose, Netherlands; Fri Art, Fribourg, Switzerland; MoMA PS1, New York; and Participant Inc., New York; among other venues. Burkhart participated in the 45th Venice Biennale (1993),and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 a Pollock Krasner Fellowship in 2021 and a Mondriaan Foundation grant in 2023. She maintains an interdisciplinary practice, and has published four books of fiction, two in French translation, in addition to a vast collection of poetry and essays. 

PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK is a virtual performance, screening, and project space launched by PARTICIPANT INC in October 2020. The site hosts artist projects commissioned specifically for the AFTER DARK web platform and remote viewing. PARTICIPANT invited artist Glen Fogel to design and develop AFTER DARK’s inaugural 2020-21 seasons, with Itziar Barrio joining this role in 2022, working in collaboration with Caroline Mills, to produce web and video projects that enable artists to inhabit the site and modify it for their projects' specific needs. 

This project is supported, in part, by Mondriaan Fund for Visual Arts and Cultural Heritage, the Netherlands.