Kathryn Karaoglu Hamilton, also known as Sister Sylvester, is an artist and a featherweight microbiologist who works in time-based multimedia forms, primarily theater, video and VR.
Sister Sylvester works with biology and technology to make cross-species collaborations and cyborg theater. Often, not always, these take the form of essayistic performances, using first-hand research, interviews and found documents, looking for dissonance and difficulty in text, image and sound.
In Read Subtitles Aloud and Three Rooms, politics forces technology to create new hybrids where computer hardware stands in for a lover’s touch. In The Maids The Maids, housekeepers become their tools of labour with arms replaced by leather brushes. In The Eagle and The Tortoise, the performance takes place within the pages of a shared book. Good Genes unites humans, jellyfish and bacteria in a single organism on a petri-dish stage.
Sister loves to revisit cult texts from theatre’s underbelly, and her patron saints are Jean Genet, Bertolt Brecht and Joan Littlewood.
Recent work has been performed and exhibited at: MoCA Toronto; MUTEK Festival; National Sawdust, New York City; 601 Artspace NYC; Humboldt University, Berlin; Bozar, Brussels; Frascati, Amsterdam; Arcola Theater, London; The Public Theater, New York, The Park Avenue Armory, New York City; Bomontiada, Istanbul; Abrons Art Center, New York City. Residencies include: the Devised Theater Working Group, at The Public; The Public’s New Works program, at Brooklyn College; and The Park Avenue Armory.
