This evening of ongoing/emergent performances, experimental music, delayed exhibition, belated documentary, non-fragmented multiplicity, synchronic installation, and performative events feature the work and participation of Kristi McGuire, Greg Ruffing, Madam Data (Ada Adhiyatma), Kim Nucci, and Josh Rios. Events, activities, moments, readings, image projections, installations, etc., will transpire throughout the evening recursively and will be partially transcribed as documentation to be installed in the space after the fact.

“[P]erformative events are truly graspable only while they are happening. A performance is constantly emerging, rolling, vanishing.” —Leo Cabranes-Grant

“To navigate the ruins of history is not to lament them, not to represent them, but to find a way to tap into the historical energy trapped in them by re-activating them. This utilitarian approach requires from the historian a certain amount of violence . . . necessary for dwelling in the ruins of history, for showing history’s violent logic, and for listening to history’s wasted, long-muffled mutterings.” —André Lepeki

How should one begin to understand a performative event, an utterance, a sounding out after the fact? The historian as investigator turns to the scattered remnants and residues of the archive, the indexical yet always partial fragments traveling from the horizons of their eras towards (and through) the horizons of our emerging presents. Art historian Michael Anne Holly tells us that works of art and artifacts may exist “in the same space as their analysts, yet their sense of time is hardly congruent with ours.” A logic of temporal displacement is evoked so that the substance of analysis—the splinters, rubble, artifacts, art objects, and documents—only arrive at meaning through an irrevocable collapsing of the “then” and “now.” Those who cannot constitute past things within the past work by assigning new meaning in the present, so that nothing is ever simply one thing, but an accumulation of trans-temporal events, histories, and various political conceptualizations layered onto each other across contexts and time.

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Greg Ruffing is an artist, writer, organizer, and curator working on topics around the production of space on micro and macro scales, and often looking critically or conceptually at the specifics of site and place. He completed a dual degree MFA in Photography and MA in Visual & Critical Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017.

Kristi McGuire is an artist-educator, writer, and researcher, who teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies Department at SAIC. Editorially, she’s collaborated with a spectrum of artists and scholars, for works published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, DOMINICA, Sternberg Press, Soberscove Press, Semiotext(e), Artists’ Platform and Projects, and Publication Studio. She is coeditor of Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline (Routledge, 2012). In 2017, she was the Critical Studies Fellow in global studies/political economy at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and in 2018, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant for the platform, falseflags.art. Her research asks more-or-less urgent questions about contemporary social and political life, especially how, informed by the perversions of neoliberal capitalism and disseminated by both new and remediated technologies, we determine and organize ourselves into new classes of viewers (yet old subjects of history).

Performing as Madam Data, Ada Adhiyatma explores machine interfaces and the potential for technology to birth mutable bodies that defy the strictures of liberal humanism. They fantasize that machine-mediated sound can offer ways of re-imagining the still-gendered, still-racialized, still differently-abled body in terms that are freeing, fundamentally strange, and ultimately healing. They also think about buildings a lot.

Kim Nucci (OAK) is a media artist, composer/improviser, technologist and educator. They perform throughout the US with a variety of performance mediums ranging from saxophone, modular synthesizer, laptop, electronics and live video. They are an Associate Professor of Electronic Music and Composition at California Jazz Conservatory where they teach classes on electro-acoustic improvisation and experimental studio techniques. They have released recordings on Unheard Records (as Kim Nucci) and Rubber City Noise (as Peanut Twins). Their research interests are in cybernetics, digital architectures and body, and their u/dys-topias in everyday life and as it applies to creative practice. Their fine arts background is in historical photography and large scale paintings, which they have been translating to mediums of experimental video, installation and cutting edge interactive design. They hold a B.A. in Fine Arts and Music Composition from Bennington College, an M.A. in Music Composition and an M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College.

Josh Rios is faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University, where he teaches courses in visual and critical studies, political science fiction, and institutional critique. As a media artist and cultural critic, his projects deal with the intersection of globalization, modernity, postmodernity, and neocoloniality along the US-Mexico border. Recent exhibitions and performances have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), Tufts University Art Galleries (Boston), the University of Houston (Houston), Andrea Meislin Gallery (NYC), and Sector 2337 (Chicago). Upcoming activities include a performance for the Mountain Standard Time Performative Arts Festival (Calgary, Canada), the Truth and Reconciliation Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe), and a long-term sound project made possible by a Boston Live Arts Grant (Boston). Additionally, he will chair a session at the upcoming 2019 CAA conference on critical sound practices in Latinx communities.

Image: Greg Ruffing, Untitled, 2018, archival inkjet print, 30×20”. Image courtesy of the artist

ACRE Projects welcomes all gender expressions and features gender neutral bathrooms. ACRE’s space is wheelchair accessible. Please contact Kate Bowen (exhibitions@acreresidency.org) if you require additional accessibility information.

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Tags: ACRE, ACRE Projects, Ada Adhiyatma, Chicago, Emerging rolling vanishing or listening to history’s wasted long-muffled mutterings, Greg Ruffing, JOSH RIOS, Kim Nucci, Kristi McGuire, Lower West Side, Madam Data, Pilsen