Ron Athey, Cassils, Dragonfly, Arshia Fatima Haq, Sebastián Hernández, Sherman Fleming, rafa esparza, Lila De Magalhaes, Christopher Richmond, Ni Santas, Denise Uyehara, Wilawan Wiangthong, Xina Xurner.

February 15th – March 15th, 2021

The Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University is honored to host BODY MEMORY BODY VISION – Performance Works, a virtual exhibition that takes place over the course of February and March 2021, co-curated by Danielle Cobb, Olivia Collins, Nicole Daskas, Lucile Henderson, Marcus Herse, Hannah Scott and Natalia Ventura.

Members of the Art Department’s DEI Committee, student gallery assistants and the gallery coordinator have co-curated this exhibition to present artists and artist collectives whose practices are vital to furthering diversity, equity and inclusion. Each week we will highlight two artists or collectives and release additions to the growing exhibition accompanied by student writing from interviews and personal notes to poetry.

Performance wants to be partaken in and a virtual exhibition can hardly replace the understanding of bodies interacting in the real world; the fleetingness of the moment and the impact that intense experiences have, the smells, the sounds, the feeling of proximity to other bodies and how we negotiate shared spaces cannot be captured via documentation. However, this show takes the notion of space and who occupies it as its cue. Addressing the ongoing underrepresentation of marginalized groups in the institutionalized and free market art world, the exhibition shows a selection of performance works by BIPOC and genderqueer artists. Questioning the status quo of visibility within this framework and actively contributing to changing that status is one aspect the contributions share. Another one is the deliberate step outside of this structure beyond addressing art world internal discourses, in offering visions relevant to communities and social realities.

Body Memory Body Vision – Performance Works presents 16 artists who create a distinct range of actions and whose aesthetic scope is manifold and cannot be subsumed under one criterion of expression - stylistic unity is beside the point. The commonality is making ways of being visible that are invisible or actively suppressed; it is the invitation to see the complexities and scope of society’s heterogeneity beyond the binary thinking that still guides mainstream culture’s decision-making in philosophical and therefore social, political and economic terms.

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