The MCA Chicago is pleased to present multi-disciplinary performance artist Autumn Knight's "M_ _ _ER" as a part of On Stage: Entanglement. This year begins the MCA's annual suite of live, digital, and durational performance works shaped by a rigorous and relevant curatorial theme. This year, the suite focuses on how the ways we connect are sometimes fleeting, sometimes enduring. In this season of MCA On Stage, three distinct performances engage with our many entanglements.
Combining improvisation with sculpture, sound, and lights, M___ER taps into the tangled relationships we have with familiar people and things to examine the shifting dynamics of intimacy between audience members' senses of self, others, and objects. The title suggests various interpretations of its missing letters; the performance itself addresses ideas such as “mother,” “murder,” and “matter,” while still leaving room for ambiguity. M___ER is a nonlinear, scenic examination of entanglements, from mothers to matter. Investigating relationships that are common to almost everyone, the performance probes the precarity inherent to physical proximity or emotional closeness.
Using her training as an improviser and the inexhaustible possibilities each audience member brings, Knight’s work regularly puts Black femmes—often herself—in contested and confrontational positions of power. Knight guides her audiences through indeterminate situations that illuminate the relationships at play in performance and in our everyday lives. The controlled chaos of these mysterious group interactions provokes laughter and occasional discomfort, using irrationality to make meaning out of our contemporary culture.
Autumn Knight (Performer and writer) is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, and text. Her video and performance work has been viewed within several institutions including the the New Museum (NYC), Western Front, (Vancouver, Canada), Akademie der Kunste (Berlin), On the Boards (Seattle), The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Kitchen (NYC).
ASL and live stream with closed captioning available on April 15th!
