About this Event
Join 21c and Brendan Fernandes for an immersive museum program featuring an artist talk, performance, book signing, and dance party! The night will commence with a conversation between Fernandes, 21c Chicago Creative Ambassador, Nigel Barker. Immediately following will be a special performance of Révérence performed by Joffrey Academy Dancers alongside a book signing of Fernandes’ forthcoming monograph, Brendan Fernandes: Re/Form. The dance party will kick off at 8pm with DJ Harry Cross!
Peroni, Casa Dragones and Jarritos will provide beverages alongside a champagne and wine bar.
ONLY 50 COPIES of Re/Form will be available during the event, however, you will be able to pre-order the book during the event. Payment can be made via Venmo during the event.
Date: Friday, October 21st
Time: 6:00 - 10:00pm
Location: 21c Chicago Main Gallery (55 E Ontario St. Chicago, IL 60611)
About Brendan Fernandes
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Brendan is also the recipient of the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Noguchi Museum, New York, NY; Munch Art Museum, Oslo, Norway; The Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC; and The Girl’s Choir + Danish National Radio, Copenhagen, Denmark.
About Re/Form
In an ambitious new monograph, Kenyan-born, Chicago-based Canadian artist Brendan Fernandes (born 1979) chronicles his two most recent exhibitions, Contract and Release at the Noguchi Museum (2019) and Master and Form commissioned by the Graham Foundation in 2018, which was later expanded for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. These performance-based installations feature live dancers interacting with Noguchi’s colorful, unstable sculptures and a collection of architectural steel cages resembling ballet barres. The objects in both exhibitions act as training devices and physical constraints, both aiding and encumbering the dancers, and encouraging poses that test their endurance in overt displays of physical tension and self-control. The work engages with notions of discipline and mastery, pain and pleasure, and aims to disrupt and consolidate ballet and modern dance traditions. Alongside documentation of the performances, this book includes insight into Fernandes’ work with texts by Juliet Bellow, Andrew Campbell, Hendrik Folkerts and Dakin Hart.
Brendan Fernandes: Re/Form is published by Skira in partnership with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum
About Révérence
Révérence is a performance that intervenes at cultural events and in public spaces where the dynamics of watching and being watched take place. The piece consists of a team of Ballet dancers, who preform a choreographed routine of bowing. Based on "the révérence" the traditional end to a Ballet where dancers make a procession of bows to each other and the audience, this performance breaks the fourth wall and puts the audience in the ambiguous position of being bowed to by dancers who move through and occupy the same space as the audience does. In this way the performance questions notions of social hierarchy; class; privilege; and the often tense relationship between art worlds and their audiences.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
21c Museum Hotel Chicago, 55 East Ontario Street, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00