Kinlaw’s performances begin with a simple but unsettling premise: what happens when the body is placed under pressure and asked to speak plainly?
The performance artist spent two years as an artist-in-residence at Bell Labs’ anechoic chamber, a space engineered to eliminate sound. Instead of pure silence, she says she heard the body’s own mechanics — gurgling, reverberation, and words that seemed less spoken than lodged in memory. That experience helps explain the force of her work, which moves across choreography, music, sound, and performance art while keeping bodily labor at its center.
In a recent conversation in her Bushwick studio, Kinlaw described her process as “creating a super-high-stakes situation and really committing to it, making an internal tension visible.” That approach was on display in December 2024, when she performed songs from her synthpop album “gut ccheck” atop a two-tier SoHo parking lot. She did so without permits or ticket sales, instead negotiating access directly with the workers. The crowd, she recalled, kept growing, and the performance was not immediately shut down.
The risk is not incidental to the work. It is the structure.
That is especially clear in “FALL RISK,” her current project, which confronts the failures of the healthcare system and the unequal burdens of care. The first iteration was performed at Art Omi in Upstate New York last summer, where Kinlaw was hoisted 128 feet into the air by a crane. Suspended and swinging, she narrated the story of caring for her disabled mother as her parents slid into poverty, her vocal delivery strained by the conditions of the piece.
The performance’s refrain is blunt in its repetition: “My mother’s body falls apart. And I push mine harder… Their bodies fall apart and I push mine harder.” In that line, Kinlaw links private caregiving to a broader system in which illness, disability, and financial precarity are never evenly distributed.
She is now imagining another version of “FALL RISK” in Times Square. Set amid Midtown’s dense network of finance, tourism, and spectacle, the work would place a human body inside the city’s most public language of value. Kinlaw’s performances do not offer easy catharsis. They make visible the cost of endurance, and the systems that so often refuse to pay it back.
