Fall 2023 program

EMPAC is pleased to announce its fall 2023 season. The curatorial program of the research and production center for time-based arts and technology presents an ambitious array of new commissions and productions by artists who foreground collaboration and exceed disciplinary frameworks. 

From September through December, the curatorial program celebrates 15 years since the center’s opening with staged productions from Miho Hatori, Michelle Ellsworth and Satchel Spencer, and Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show, as well as an evening of moving image by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Bi Gan, Gelare Khoshgozaran, and Miko Revereza, and talks and discussions with Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, Jessie Marino, Alexis Blake, Petra Kuppers, and Christopher Fisher-Lochhead with Ben Roidl-Ward.

Anchoring the milestone season, the buildingwide Shifting Center exhibition, conceived by Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse, features existing and newly commissioned works by artists including Julian Abraham “Togar,” Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur and Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón and Igor de Gandarias, Hugo Esquinca, Maurice Louca, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Nancy Mounir, Gala Porras-Kim, Micah Silver, and Clarissa Tossin and Michelle Agnes Magalhães, among others. 

At the top of the season, composer-performers Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino present an intimate look into their individual practices and their newest collaboration, which continues their Extended Microphones Project (EMP) with a sense of play by redesigning and preparing the simple microphone using alternative materials, like dried pine cones and agar-agar.

An evening in conversation with Alexis Blake delves into the artist’s approach to choreography, where olfactory, sonic, and tactile materials figure prominently. 

Miho Hatori explores themes of memory, identity, and colonialism through kaleidoscopic dream-pop atmospheres and hypnotic rhythms in Salon Mondialité. This iteration of the electro-acoustic musical performance and video installation features collaborations with guest musicians Patrick Higgins and Michael Beharie, and cross-media artists Steffani Jemison and Cole Lu.

Michelle Ellsworth and Satchel Spencer preview Evidence of Labor, taking their long standing collaboration into realms of machine learning, maintenance art, and ontological speculation—using choreography and a wooden oven to complicate the labor ethics of AI.

Scholar and artist Petra Kuppers draws on her prolific research integrating performance and disability studies to address disabled and mad presences seen in dance archives, in a poetic documentary-in-progress program co-presented with the iEAR Presents series.

Pioneering composer Ellen Fullman brings Elemental View, a musical work in six movements for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show—guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson. The expansive installation of its 136 precisely tuned and calibrated 80-foot strings inhabits the concert hall for one performance only.

Shifting Center is the culmination of an ambitious, multi-year curatorial project on architecture, acoustics, and the politics of sound in museums. The exhibition fully occupies the center and its spaces, utilizing theatrical infrastructure and spatial audio technologies—and proposing techniques and practices—to locate and listen to contemporary artworks that are themselves locating and listening to past events, instruments, architectures, and landscapes.

Beatriz Cortez’s sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left leaves Storm King Art Center to journey up the Hudson River onboard the John J Harvey fireboat to EMPAC for the opening of Shifting Center. Presented in partnership with Storm King and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, the work and its multi-day journey attends to the still continuing geological and ecological effects of a volcanic eruption that took place circa 536 CE in what is present-day El Salvador. Cortez describes “the volcano that left” as an act of migration and considers what it would mean for it to return.

Christopher Fisher-Lochhead marks the release of his portrait album Wake Up the Dead (New Focus Recordings, 2023), with a presentation of music from the album including a full performance of “grandFather” played by the acclaimed bassoonist and long-time collaborator Ben Roidl-Ward.

The fall season concludes with In Pursuit: Short Films, screening select works by Miko Reverza, Bi Gan, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, and Gelare Khoshgozaran that track itineraries through forms of exile or statelessness.