Brendan Fernandes - Roundtable Presenter

Kenyan-born, Goan-Canadian artist Brendan Fernandes, based in Chicago, uses his training in western classical and modern dance to create performances and art objects that infuse white aesthetics with African energies. Choreographing performances for spaces such as New York’s High Line, the Guggenheim Museum rotunda, and Chicago’s Graham Foundation, Fernandes considers the body as it meets resistance from the outside world. Frantz Fanon comes into play, in his consideration of how black subjects must internalize the perceptions of white others in order to protect themselves from unintended consequence negotiated at the interface of skin. Riding a line between Giorgio Agamben’s disassociated, ticcing celluloid gesture and Alva Noe’s articulation of choreography as a system of social organization that takes its shape from the naturally occurring forms of dance, Fernandes responds to violence against his LGBTQ community such as the shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando in 2016, and to the history of gendered and racialized violence that characterizes the colonial project.