ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a multidisciplinary artist who examines issues of cultural displacement, migration, labor, queer subjectivity, and collective agency through interdisciplinary performance that uses installation, video, sculpture, and dance. My life as a dancer, and my experience of leaving that world due to injury informs my current practice. Working at the intersection of dance and visual art, my projects open up questions about hybridity of media and seek to problematize the notion of a fixed, essential or authentic identity. Over the past twenty years, I have researched and staged performance interventions in national and international museums, galleries and cultural institutions; and major museums in my home city of Chicago; created multimedia projects that rigorously engage with postcolonial and critical theory discourse, and facilitated public dialogues on contemporary, everyday socio-political concerns for marginalized communities. 

My investment in confronting the complexities of transitional and transnational identities and my interest in incorporating elements of cultural performance into contemporary art arises from my cultural background as a Queer POC, Kenyan-Indian, Canadian-American. I was born in Nairobi to a Goan, Indian family. Due to political unrest, my family, who lived in Africa for five generations, immigrated to Toronto in 1989. My childhood in Kenya, my family’s immigration to Canada, and my independent migration to the U.S. is central to my artistic practice. Interrogating the fantasy of exoticized spaces, cultural tourism, and questions of authenticity with regards to the “African” artifact and souvenirs, brought the notions of ambiguous provenance, hegemony and identity to the fore and set the stage for my current artistic practice.

In my current work, I aim to highlight the various meanings that the body can encapsulate: it is both a kind of object, endowed with cultural meaning, viewed by others and labored on by ourselves. It is also our expressive access-point to the world, constitutive of our subjectivity and selfhood. Choreography, as I understand it, is a tool for coding and decoding the language of movement. I look at movement through queer and laboring bodies as they relate to the construction of gender roles and physicality. In so, this work continues to engage with the transitional nature of identity, while now exploring how this is enacted and experienced on the level of embodiment.

I am also making work that questions the social and political as it relates to life during and post pandemic as well as social uprisings such as Black Lives Matter. Using incidents such as the Pulse Orlando massacre and the ongoing violence that occurs in Queer spaces, and the continuation of police violence against people of color, I aim to dismantle systems of power to consider their role in shaping a more inclusive and equitable society. By involving different perspectives and voices, I seek to amplify marginalized narratives and foster dialogues about social inequality and injustice. In this work I encourage viewers to confront their own biases and reflect on the broader implications of these dynamics in society using dance and public space as my mediums of political use.

Brendan is currently represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Contact: brendan@brendanfernandes.ca