MCA Live: Haptic
Haptic
Courtesy of the artistsevent description
Haptic presents two concerts simultaneously—performing in the central atrium, but using wireless speakers located in each of the two second-floor gallery spaces to provide radically different soundtracks tailored to each exhibition. By disrupting the unitary listening experience, Haptic aims to complicate the relationship between performer, audience, and work, while also directly engaging with the concerns of the two exhibitions on view.
In Kathryn Andrews: Run for President, the artist renders politics as performance, operating through a highly mediated process of identification, ventriloquism, and doubling. In the opposite gallery, Surrealism: The Conjured Life traces the influence of surrealism across a century, exploring the role of the unconscious in creativity and the intersection of the everyday with the poetic and dreamlike. Haptic's bifurcated concert(s) intersects with a multiplicity of questions raised by both exhibitions and puts them in dialogue with one another: What is the relationship between political representation and aesthetic representation, particularly in an era in which images proliferate uncontrollably, detached from a clear context or unified subject? Driven by unconscious, unknown forces, can one ever be identical with oneself? Who speaks, and for whom?
About the Artists
Chicago-based experimental music group Haptic (Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Adam Sonderberg) explores the intersection between composition and improvisation in concerts, installations, and recordings. Originally conceived
as a vehicle for live collaboration, their performances often cross traditional boundaries between between music, sound, literature, and visual art.