Live Performance

Brendan Fernandes: Noise See and In Two

June 6, 2025 - June 8, 2025

A photo of a performance with dancers hidden behind a curtain, their hands raised upwards to reach one another.
Brendan Fernandes: In Two, 2024. Live performance at Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Photo credit: Virginia Harold Photography. Courtesy of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Experience Noise See and In Two, two new performance works by Chicago-based visual artist and choreographer Brendan Fernandes. The multinational artist has written these choreographic scores in exploration of the visibility and invisibility of queer bodies. Developed during the artist’s FWM residency, the new works feature dancers engaged in acts of hide and seek and of bodily transformation through interaction with a set of curtains, soft sculptures, and costumes created with the FWM Studio team.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Soft/Cover, the series will be performed simultaneously across FWM’s galleries.

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A photograph of an artist, Brendan Fernandes, squatting on the floor while working on an organically-shaped piece of plaid fabric. The artist is wearing all black, including a cap, long-sleeve t-shirt, and pants, with white shoes.

Brendan Fernandes, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Noise See (Process Image), 2025. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.

Noise See

In this new commission by FWM, Fernandes investigates themes of visibility, protest, the legacy of empire, and embodied resistance. Central to the work are vibrant quilted tapestries crafted as costumes in collaboration with the FWM Studio. These textiles of vivid red and blue plaid recall dress that is commonly associated with contemporary Maasai culture in Kenya yet rooted in British colonial influence.

Performed as a duet, two dancers engage in a choreographic dialogue—merging and separating, concealing and revealing—through their bodily interaction with one another and their own biomorphic form as they inhabit their costume. These dynamic textiles become agents of action, shaping and being shaped by the dancers’ movements.

Noise See reclaims a colonial textile legacy and transforms it into a site of protest, protection, and presence. Here, Fernandes insists that silence is not absence but a resonant and radical form of resistance.


A photo of a performance with dancers' faces hidden behind a curtain, their hands raised upwards to reach one another. They are wearing white t-shirts and light blue jeans.

Brendan Fernandes: In Two, 2024. Live performance at Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Photo credit: Virginia Harold Photography. Courtesy of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

In Two

Commissioned by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2024, Fernandes collaborated with FWM’s Studio team to create an installation of curtains and soft sculptures, designed to accompany an exhibition of the artist Scott Burton’s work (1939–1989). In a series of duets titled In Two, Fernandes has written dance scores that take Burton’s furniture sculptures as a point of departure to explore the duality of display and concealment in gay cruising culture—ideas that Burton had pursued throughout his career. Fernandes integrates specific gestures—“flip the wrist,” “clasp arm to the breast”—directly from Burton’s choreographic notes.

During his residency, Fernandes worked with the FWM Studio to create a set of curtains and soft sculptures to be activated by dancers as they oscillate between concealing themselves and seeking one another.


Event Information

June 6, 2025 - June 8, 2025

The Fabric Workshop and Museum
1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

Second and Eighth Floor Galleries

 

Friday, June 6
Premieres at 6:00 pm
Free | Suggested $5 donation

RSVP

 

Saturday, June 7–Sunday, June 8
Performances at 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm
Included with general admission

Free tickets

Brendan Fernandes | In Two

Pulitzer Arts Foundation

Organizing Credit

Noise See is commissioned by The Fabric Workshop and Museum and is produced by the artist in collaboration with the FWM Studio team.

In Two was commissioned by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2024, to accompany an exhibition of the work of the artist Scott Burton (1939–1989) on view at the Pulitzer from September 6, 2024–February 2, 2025. The presentation included curtains and soft sculptures created by Fernandes in collaboration with FWM’s Studio team.

About the Participants

A portrait of the artist Brendan Fernandes, a brown-skinned man with a shaved head and black beard. He is looking up while wearing black-rimmed glasses, a blue-gray suit, and gray tie.Canadian, born 1979, Nairobi, Kenya. Lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. His practice addresses issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Seeking to create new spaces and forms of agency, his hybrid projects comprise part ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest and are always rooted in collaboration and foster solidarity.

Fernandes is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship. He was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award and is the recipient of a prestigious Canada Council New Chapters grant. Fernandes is also the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, the Artadia Award, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and the Platform Award. His projects have shown at the Whitney Biennial. New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art. New York, NY; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; and MAC, Montreal, QC, among others. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York.

Support

Soft/Cover is made possible by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, The Joy of Giving Something, Inc., and Katie and Tony Schaeffer.

Major support for The Fabric Workshop and Museum is provided by The Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation, The A G Foundation, The Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the annual financial support of our board and individual donors.