Jesse Alexander Kotansky is a New York–based musician, composer, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans contemporary music, traditional Balkan forms, improvisation, and experimental performance. Working across violin, voice, and a range of stringed instruments, he explores the intersections of cultural heritage, collective memory, and sonic innovation, creating works that move fluidly between tradition and contemporary expression.
A prolific performer and collaborator, Kotansky has appeared internationally alongside artists from diverse musical backgrounds, ranging from popular music icons to leading practitioners of Balkan and world music. His work is distinguished by a commitment to cross-cultural exchange, improvisation, and the transformative possibilities of sound as a vehicle for storytelling and collective experience.
Kotansky is the founder of Which Way East and co-founder of the indie-rock band Walking Shapes, projects that reflect his longstanding engagement with migration, cultural transmission, and the evolving relationship between vernacular traditions and contemporary artistic practice. Through performance, composition, and collaboration, he continually expands the boundaries between folk traditions, experimental music, and interdisciplinary art.
PROJECTS
Group exhibition reconsiders Argentina’s surrealist artistic legacy from the unstable terrain of the contemporary world, displacing the human as its privileged subject and tracing agency across bodies, technologies, ecologies, matter, other forms of life, and invisible forces.