View of Brendan Fernandes: The Master and Form. 2018, Graham Foundation, Chicago. Installation in collaboration with Norman Kelley; dancers: Satoru Iwasaki, Yuha Kamoto, Andrea de León Rivera, Antonio Mannino, Leah Upchurch; photo: RCH. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
Performance by the New Ballet Studio Company, choreographed by Brendan Fernandes
In the SJMA galleries
Choreographer and artist Brendan Fernandes, a former dancer, is acutely aware of the particular ways in which ballet dancers are trained to walk. Their gait broadcasts an authority, a calculated deliberateness, which Fernandes notes is “not unlike the presented authority of the museum.” In Inaction, Fernandes has choreographed the movements of a team of dancers to explore boundaries and thresholds within SJMA’s building. Blocking entryways, restricting doorways, and disrupting normal circulation, the dancers draw attention to borders and bodies within the Museum, and by extension to the growing tension surrounding borders and bodies in the world at large.
Inaction is commissioned as part of the exhibition Other Walks, Other Lines.
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is a Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, his projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Previous projects have shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; MAC, Montreal; among a great many others.
Sponsored by University Art with Cornelia and Nathan Pendleton.