Progress in the World of Fantasy is an experimental performance and music piece addressing notions of projected desire and the female performing body. Viewers are initiated into an environment wedged between pleasure and revulsion — a landscape of desire, object worship, bodily mess, and song.
Mothergirl (Katy Albert and Sophia Hamilton) is a Chicago based performance duo whose work has taken the form of installation, durational event, and guided audience interaction. Mothergirl’s characters, and the worlds they inhabit, exhibit a strategically refracted or misrepresented view of current political and philosophical discourse, creating a space where viewers are asked to think critically about their own relationships with feminism, consumerism, and representational visuality.
Whitney Allen is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, active in the Chicago and national DIY community. She currently performs with the post-punk band Toupee and experimental duo Columba Fasciata. Allen and collaborators challenge their audiences to reconcile intrigue and repulsion by pushing the boundaries of sound.
In ‘A part of something smaller’ Samama looks closely at my body parts, uncover surfaces and cavities, parts and partiality, to investigate the way the relation of part and whole informs our perception of beauty, seduction, and community. Samama is interested in the tension between the body as a whole, as an organic-harmonic unit and the body as fragmented, broken down to its functional parts. The work takes its inspiration from body images in the visual arts but also from other cultural domains such as porn, commercials, human and organ trafficking and the meat industry.
Michal Samama presented her work in Chicago at Rapid Pulse Festival 2014 and TBSO3 at Defibrillator, 6018 North, Mana Contemporary, Links Hall and Northwestern University. In New York her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Performance Mix at HERE and at The Flea Theater, Dixon Place, Joyce SoHo, CPR, Chez Bushwick, Priska C. Juschka Gallery, First Street Green, AUNTS and the 92ndY. Her new project ‘Background Materials’ will be presented at The Chocolate Factory Theater in New York (Oct 2014). Recent residencies include: 2012–2013 Fresh Tracks at NYLA, Movement Research 2011–2013, LiftOff Residency 2013. Samama is an MFA candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
