Curator’s Note

I am thrilled to welcome you to MCA Chicago’s second annual Chicago Performs series! This four-day weekend of live art and performance showcases the vitality of artists creating work in Chicago, elevating them on a national platform in the city they call home. Three interdisciplinary artists—Irene Hsiao, Anjal Chande, and Jonas Becker—have each carefully crafted and/or reimagined performances for the series. This work was made possible with the support of the New Works Initiative, a set of programs designed to develop new works and foster connections between artists, audiences, and communities. Chicago Performs spotlights the depth and range of the city’s creative landscape, supporting artists as they expand the scale of their practices with works made with Chicago, for Chicago, and beyond Chicago.

Our world has changed drastically since the MCA debuted Chicago Performs in the fall of 2022, when the series celebrated the return of live arts with performances that explored joy as a path to more expansive ways of living and being together. This year our city finds itself implicated in and affected by disasters both global and local, as smoke plumes from Canada reach our doorstep, as Lahaina reels from last month’s wildfires in Maui, and as the pandemic continues to shape the way we live. While we rejoice at reuniting artists and audiences, both locally at our museum and in arts and culture more broadly, we also contend with urgent and immediate questions about the future.

Performance is ephemeral. We experience it briefly, as an act of creation between performer and audience. It denies fixity and, therefore, is anti-capitalist in nature, providing an escape while still creating space for recognition, healing, or catharsis; it also holds a mirror up to society through which we may gain radically new perspectives on familiar issues. Through the improvisatory and embodied nature of their works, this year’s Chicago Performs artists ask audiences to slow down and pause long enough to soak in and experience the moment, and to give attention to what might otherwise be taken for granted. Whether an artist tests the limits of physical strength in response to diminishing environmental and political conditions (Becker), meditates on the quotidian movements of our everyday lives to explore the narratives that shape our identities (Chande), or moves silently and mysteriously through space on a spectrum between object and human to question the way we interact with art (Hsiao), their works invite us to recalibrate our sense of urgency through the use of sound, body, movement, object, and text.

Over these four days Hsiao, Chande, and Becker will challenge us to notice the subtle details of our world, and how, over time, our attention to those details may change the way we live and think. With these works I hope you will find time for moments of reflection and collaboration with artists, performers, and those around you. Thank you for sharing your time with us.

—Laura Paige Kyber
Curatorial Associate, Performance