According to co-curators alejandro acierto and José Luis Benavides, “There are new suns is a program of interdisciplinary and experimental performance works highlighting the edges of access, disability, and race. There are new suns poetically and creatively describes multiple conditions of disability to speculate alternative relationships to sound, image, and language. Or, as Octavia Butler writes, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
There are new suns is the third in a series of shared programs between Ensemble Dal Niente and other respected Chicago artists, supported by a DCASE Chicago Artists Recovery Program Grant. The first two programs featured electronicist Norman Long and multi-instrumentalist and composer Douglas R. Ewart with the quintet Limerick Rhythms.
Additional funding for today’s program is provided by the Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund in partnership with Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
Program:
Yun Lee, Space C
Jay Afrisando, [soundwalk]
Ana García Jácome, Malitas: women, disability and medical violence
Carolyn Chen, adagio
Jay Afrisando, [applause]
Ariella Granados, untitled performance
Andrew Mauser-Mooney, live AV tech and projections Hunter Brown, sound engineer
Program notes
The program opens with Yun Lee’s Space C, a poetic gesture that relies on audio descriptions of a site inaccessible to the audience. Creating an imagined “third space”, Lee’s audio descriptive conventions articulate an audio environment similar to the performance venue yet not quite the same, blurring the sites of performance that are both unavailable to the audience and ever-present in its live performance
Working directly with audio captions as a central component of his work, Jay Afrisando’s videos from his [SOUNDSCAPTION] series invite viewers to imagine sounds as they are displayed in text on the screen. Based on phone footage from 2016-2020 and made at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, his videos respond to the prevalence of audio captioning used in Zoom calls (and now TikTok videos) that became a pivotal point of access for those communicating online in languages that were not native to them
In her video essay, Malitas: women, disability and medical violence, Ana García Jácome moves us to reconsider histories of disability in Mexico that asserts a focused politic around the systems of access and how race and gender become impacted by those negotiations. Conversely, Carolyn Chen’s adagio features performers exuding complex facial expressions as they respond to an in-ear recording barely audible to the audience. A piece that translates feeling through the performing, it gestures towards the transcendence of sound as a medium.
Lastly, Ariella Granados performs a not-yet-titled improvisational work that recalls their first encounters with language and access to highlight distinct moments of their immigrant family’s experiences with language barriers.
Artist Bios
Yun Lee is an artist, performer, and curator mostly working with lecture-performances, sound, and workshops. Much of their work engages critically and playfully with recording technology (the phonograph, score-making, the internet) to navigate shifting definitions of what being human is. Other works turn to acoustic phenomena to push the capacities of individual and collective sensorial experience. In short, Yun is concerned with how our filtered ways of sensing both limit and extend the ways we understand, categorize, and compose the world. Yun currently lives in The Hague NL, where they curate the lecture-performance series BARTALK and organize workshops at the intersections of art, sound, and technology.
Jay Afrisando is a composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator. He works on aural diversity, acoustic ecology, and cultural identity, focusing on disability and environmental justice, arts and accessibility, and decolonizing arts practices. He shares vital experiences and disseminates knowledge through multisensory and antidisciplinary practices, including video, text, spatial audio, fixed media, improvisation, and various collaborative methods. His works have been presented at UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences (US), Indexical (US), Curb Appeal Gallery (US), Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (US), Walker Art Center (US), ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts (BE), Attenborough Arts Centre (UK), Fridman Gallery (US), and Stanford University CCRMA (US), among others
Ana García Jácome is a Mexican visual artist based in Estado de Mexico. She graduated from the School of Arts and Design of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (FAD, UNAM) and obtained an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the support of the scholarship program of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. She works with different media such as drawing, writing, and video. Her practice addresses the social construction of disability and looks for ways to rearticulate its narratives. Her work has been presented in different exhibitions, festivals and screenings in Mexico, USA, UK and New Zealand. Instagram: @anafantasma
Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Her work reconfigures the everyday to retune habits of our ears through sound, text, light, and movement. Her studies of the guqin, a Chinese zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature, have informed her thinking on listening in social spaces. Recent projects include an audio essay on a scream and commissions for Klangforum Wien and the LA Phil New Music Group.
Ariella Granados is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago whose work uses video, sound, costuming, make up, and sculpture to explore the liminal space between fiction and truth. Their work integrates green as a signifier of rendering the disabled body against the complexity of the sociopolitical landscape. Granados’s work is intertwined with the consumer’s inability to not be fully satisfied with the consumption of commodities. Utilizing dynamic world building techniques they critique the body as a commodity itself, offering their own lived experience as a bicultural person. Through their work, Granados invites the viewer into a world where they must confront questions of agency and authenticity. Instagram: @sparklmami Granados holds a BFA from The University of Illinois at Chicago. They are a former 3Arts/Bodies of Work Residency artist and an inaugural artist in residence with DCASE and The Mayors Office for People with Disabilities.
José Luis Benavides is a Latinx and queer photographer, moving image maker, and lecturer for the City Colleges of Chicago. He has also taught at Tennessee State University and Vanderbilt University. Working primarily with a range of personal archives, his work explores issues relating to gender, sexuality, culture, and migration. His work has been screened at Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, US (2020), and other festivals around the world. He was recently awarded a Best of Fest’ Spotlight Film at the 55th Humboldt International Film Festival. He has made commissioned works for Chicago Film Archives, Defy Film Festival, and Envisioning Justice: An Exhibition at The Sullivan Galleries. He has recently held solo exhibitions at the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago Art Department, and the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice. His work has also been exhibited at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archive, and Chicago Art Department, Logan Center for the Arts. As an experimental documentarian and video art programmer, he opens conversations, space, and time for diverse perspectives from feminist, queer, trans, and Latinx moving image makers for the virtual archive SinCintaPrevia.com. Find more about their work at JoseLuisBenavides.com and IG: @lu3ge
alejandro t. acierto is an artist, musician, and curator whose work highlights the impact of colonial legacies across technologies, material culture, and the environment. Working within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, he has presented projects and screenings for the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Issue Project Room (NYC), MCA Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Echo Park Film Center (LA), Stove Works (Chattanooga) and Eastside Projects (Birmingham, UK), among others. He has presented multimedia performance works for the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival (Chicago), High Zero Festival (Baltimore), the KANEKO (Omaha), and The Quarantine Concerts for ESS Chicago. Additionally, his curatorial projects have been mounted at Stove Works (Chattanooga), Tipton Gallery at East Tennessee State University (Johnson City), Vanderbilt University’s Space 204 and Coop (both Nashville), as well as online for the Wrong Biennial. Alejandro is a member of Dal Niente and an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance at Arizona State University, New College located on the occupied territories of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples. Instagram: @alejandroacierto
About Ensemble Dal Niente: “Superb” - The New York Times. Ensemble Dal Niente performs, develops, and sustains new and experimental music for small to large chamber ensembles. We are dedicated to growing relationships with artists, composers, and listeners; advancing distinct and challenging musical voices; and sharing that work with our Chicago, U.S., and international communities. To learn more, go to www.dalniente.com.