When I learned that performance artist Kinlaw had spent two years as an artist-in-residence at Bell Labs’ anechoic chamber, which is designed to be completely silent, I was excited to ask if she’d heard anything. After all, John Cage famously recalled hearing the high and low tones of his nervous and circulatory systems. Kinlaw laughed and said yes, but what she heard was nowhere near as refined: She’d heard the gurgling of the meat that is our bodies, and surprisingly, words—not spoken so much as reverberating in her mind like artifacts.
This attention to the materiality and labor of the body, as well as the way such energy holds open a relational space, characterizes Kinlaw’s capacious performance practice. She works across choreography, music, sound, and performance art, describing her process to me in a recent visit to her Bushwick studio as “creating a super-high-stakes situation and really committing to it, making an internal tension visible.”
Kinlaw: gut ccheck: Hard Cut (still), 2024.
Such stakes were abundantly clear in A Parking Lot in SoHo. In December 2024, she performed songs from her synthpop album gut ccheck from the top of a two-tier SoHo parking lot without getting permits or selling tickets. Instead, she negotiated access directly with the workers. “The crowd just built and built and built,” she recalled in our conversation, adding that she guessed the show wasn’t immediately shut down because of the day’s circumstances. “It was Luigi Mangioni day,” she explained, referring to the date of his arraignment downtown on suspicion of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, “and all the cops were busy.”
That appetite for risk sets the stage for her current project FALL RISK, which grapples with the injustices of a healthcare system designed to let so many of us fall through its cracks. Kinlaw performed the first iteration of this work at Art Omi in Upstate New York last summer, hoisted 128 feet up in the air by a crane. Suspended and swinging at that terrifying height, she narrated the story of caring for her disabled mother as her parents slid into poverty, her in-air vocalizations apparently labored.
View of Kinlaw’s performance FALL RISK, 2025, at Art Omi, New York.
Photo Christian DeFonte
FALL RISK reminds us that there is an inevitability to the crises that come for all our bodies in different ways—and of the harrowing ways medical, social, and economic systems regularly fail us in these moments. Particularly haunting is the refrain repeated throughout the 20-minute performance: “My mother’s body falls apart. And I push mine harder… Their bodies fall apart and I push mine harder.”
Kinlaw is now imagining another iteration of FALL RISK that would take place in Times Square. In this version, she would dangle from a crane in the heart of Midtown, physically surrounded by the many industries predicated on calculating the cost of a human life: a brutal arithmetic obscured by financial instruments, actuarial tables, and cost-benefit analyses. Perhaps this performance art spectacle can offer a stark frame through which to reconsider those systems that never pay out, debts of care that can never be repaid, and all the bodies on the line.
