The MCA presents the Chicago premiere of Trisha Baga’s MORE (2025) and Camille Henrot’s In the Veins (2026). Baga and Henrot—whose work Grosse Fatigue (2013) is in the MCA’s collection—are renowned for their singular approaches to the moving image: scintillating in structure, omnivorous in subject, and at once whimsical and prophetic in effect. Their newest works grapple with the realities of artificial intelligence, climate change, and mass extinction and the uncertainties these usher into our present. Questions of parenthood and personhood are brought to the fore in their roving explorations of relation, intimacy, and creation. What does it mean to raise and grow life against a backdrop of dying and decay? Does the future hold the ruin of, or room for, possibility and progress? In this light, Baga and Henrot’s films take shape as stirring existential inquiries of our time.

This program is organized by visiting curator CJ Salapare as part of the MCA DNA Research Initiative, sponsored by the Chanel Culture Fund. A post-screening conversation takes place with Baga, Henrot, and film curator and scholar Bruce Jenkins, moderated by Salapare.

Please note: The 3D screening may be sensitive for some viewers.

About the Artists and Speakers

Trisha Baga was born in 1985 in Venice, FL, and lives and works in Queens, NY. Baga is a Filipino-American artist working in stereoscopic 3D video installation, paint, clay, consumer grade electronics, and community performance. Compelled by an interest in what they call “the stuff that makes things stick together,” Baga recombines objects and images into scenarios that address issues related to the environment, technology, and identity. For them, working in a variety of media is an optimistic metaphor for the power of translation and connection, as they strive to unearth emotional histories and critically engage with contemporary image culture. Baga is represented by Societe Berlin and Gio Marconi Gallery. Baga has had numerous solo institutional exhibitions including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan), Fridericianum (Kassel, Germany), and Kunstverein München. Their work is in several permanent collections including those of the Walker Art Center, the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig Köln, the Whitney Museum, Kunstpalast (Dusseldorf, Germany), and Moderna Museet (Stockholm).

Camille Henrot (b. 1978, France) is recognized as one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today. Over the past 20 years, she has developed a critically acclaimed practice, encompassing drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Inspired by literature, second-hand marketplaces, poetry, cartoons, social media, self-help, and the banality of everyday life, Henrot’s works capture the complexity of living as both private individuals and global citizens in an increasingly connected and over-stimulated world.

In 2026, Henrot premiered her new film In The Veins at the New Museum, New York, and LUMA, Arles. She also presents a major performative survey exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary. Henrot’s first theatrical production Commedia dell’Arte premiered at Aspen Art Museum’s AIR Festival, a co-commission between Performa, Aspen Art Museum/Wheeler Opera House, and LYRA Art Foundation, followed by a New York City premiere in September 2026. Henrot’s first public commission in New York City with the New York Public Art Fund was unveiled in September, remaining on view in Central Park until August 2027.

Bruce Jenkins is an educator, curator, and scholar whose career has focused on artists who work in moving-image media. For the past 20 years, he has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is a Professor of Film, Video, New Media and Animation. Prior to SAIC, Professor Jenkins was the Stanley Cavell Curator at the Harvard Film Archive, Curator of Film/Video at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Film Programmer at Media Study/Buffalo.

He has written for numerous museum exhibition catalogues including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, the MCA, and the Renaissance Society. His essays have appeared in Artforum, October, Mousse, Sight and Sound, Aperture, and Millennium Film Journal. His books include Gordon Matta-Clark: Conical Intersect (Afterall, 2011) and the second volume of the catalogue raisonné for the films of Andy Warhol (Whitney Museum and Yale University Press, 2021).

In 1999, Professor Jenkins was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963–1965, which he coauthored, received the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. In 2025 he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award for Art from the College Art Association.

CJ Salapare is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn. His interests blur and juxtapose the fields of art history and the arts of liveness, with a focus on diasporic and interdisciplinary practices.

His work, spanning essays, interviews, and moderated conversations, has been commissioned by Artists Space, FAR-NEAR, the Hammer Museum, LUX, the MCA, November, the 2024 Venice Biennale, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. He has worked at the intersection of the visual arts and performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as part of the curatorial team for Edges of Ailey (2024) and Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side (2023); the MCA, as a Chanel curatorial fellow; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as part of the curatorial team for Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous (2026); and the New York Public Library, as a Dance Research Fellow.

Salapare received MPhil degrees in arts education and art history from the University of Cambridge as a Herchel Smith Fellow, and received his BA in art history, magna cum laude, from Williams College, where he was awarded the Karl E. Weston Prize for Distinction in Art History.