As performance art continues to gain a stronger foothold in museum spaces, New York’s Rubin Museum is in the midst of a series giving artists a chance to show unfinished pieces to an inquisitive audience, exposing their processes as they explore often marginalized stories. Re-Figuring the Future provides three acclaimed artists in the city the spotlight as they consider a future that isn’t fixed with respect to gender, sex, and race–and using the most dynamic modern mediums to create a sense of intimacy and immediacy as they do so.
Last month, Jacolby Satterwhite kicked off the series. This month first brings a piece in progress by Juliana Huxtable, known for incorporating text, video, and sound in her explorations of the body and materiality. Flesh will feature instrumental performances by a group of her frequent musical collaborators and will blend poetry and ASMR sounds to create an ambient environment that serves as setting for a piece about the body’s power and powerlessness.
A week later, Morehshin Allahyari teams up with Shirin Fahimi for Breaching Toward Other Futures, expanding upon Allahyari’s idea that “when there is a very small demographic of people imagining a future it is always going to be limited to what they know and what they think are the problems of the world.” In endeavoring to imagine multiple other futures, Allahyari and Fahimi will draw upon the fearsome and revered Jinn figure Aisha Qandisha and Ilm al-raml, the idea of the foresight that the Earth holds within itself. June 22 and 29; 140 W. 17th St.
