Chokehole
With economies crashing, techno fascism uploading, and the nuclear war boiling, what better way to celebrate the end of the world than drag queen wrestling?
Pioneer Works is excited to present Chokehole’s newest drag spectacular, ARMAGEDDON. A hilarious take on current events, the performance features Chokehole’s divas taking center stage—to throw, flip, and fling each other across the ring and into your hardened hearts. With acrobatics and custom backstage videos, ARMAGEDDON features Raúl de Nieves’s band Hairbone performing a live, halftime show within the artist’s Main Hall exhibition, In Light of Innocence. This smackdown is not to be missed!
About the Artists
Chokehole is a drag wrestling event born out of New Orleans’s underground queer party scene. Since 2018, Chokehole has been merging the camp aesthetics and culture of drag with the physicality of WWE-style wrestling. Chokehole is known for its humorous take on contemporary politics, its irreverent violence, and proof that gays not only bash back, they backflip. Chokehole has graced and stained the stages of Area 15 (Las Vegas), Kampnagel (Hamburg), Times Square Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1, to humbly brag and name a few.
Hairbone is a New York-based power trio composed of artists Raúl de Nieves, Jessie Stead, and Nathan Whipple, formerly known as Haribo. Functioning mainly in the art world, Hairbone has inflicted their carnivalesque live shows upon audiences in museums to decrepit basements for nearly a decade. Each unique, narrative multimedia performance features frontman de Nieves inhabiting new personae in a sculptural actionist mode. Brandishing oversized, text-emblazoned props as if they were picket signs, de Nieves proceeds to destroy them as Hairbone’s near-opera burlesque freak show unfurls. Obliquely political, theirs is a protest music without didacticism.