Performance: Brendan Fernandes: Noise See

There is no designated seating for this performance. Visitors are welcome to drop in and seating can be provided upon request. There will be 2 performances and a 15min intermission.

Noise See is a performance work by Canadian visual artist and choreographer Brendan Fernandes. Originally commissioned by The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, the work explores themes of visibility, protest, the legacy of empire, and embodied resistance. Central to the performance are vibrant quilted tapestry costumes that evoke textiles commonly associated with contemporary Maasai culture in Kenya yet rooted in British colonial influence.

Presented alongside the exhibition Other Moves, Noise See is performed as a duet: two dancers engage in a choreographic dialogue—merging and separating, concealing and revealing—through their bodily interaction with one another and their own biomorphic form as they inhabit their costume.

These dynamic textiles become agents of action, shaping and being shaped by the dancers’ movements. Noise See reclaims a colonial textile legacy and transforms it into a site of protest, protection, and presence. Here, Fernandes insists that silence is not absence but a resonant and radical form of resistance.

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based in Chicago, his practice addresses issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. Constantly seeking to create new spaces and forms of agency, Fernandes’ work often takes on hybrid forms: part ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.

Image: Brendan Fernandes, Noise See, performance. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.

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