Channeling: body <-Image-> viewer

About the Exhibition

Channeling: body <-Image-> viewer features works by eleven international artists who communicate through and with the body. The featured artists draw on diverse approaches and means to deliberately activate direct connections with the viewer. These communications position the viewer to experience a heightened awareness of their self and body, or to explore how bodies channel and confront societal malaise and oppression. Varied gestures—crawling, lying, climbing, kneeling, pointing, running, walking backwards—evoke memory, history, and rhetoric. These actions also call attention to the senses and physicality of skin, touch, voice, hearing, and sight.

Situating the body politic and ways in which histories imprint upon us, and as a counter to the disembodiment of remote screen culture, these works remind us that we humans are both in, and of, the body. Channeling: body <-Image-> viewer includes photography, video, and installations that memorialize, witness, and bear tribute to our humanity. 

Guest curated by Joan Giroux (US) and Alice Maude-Roxby (UK), Channeling: body <-Image-> viewer includes works from the 1970s to the present by Laura Aguilar, Pia Arke, EJ Hill, Susan Hiller, Ketty La Rocca, Shari Rothfarb Mekonen, Gustav Metzger, Paulo Nazareth, Anna Oppermann, Gina Pane, and Bridget Smith. Organized by MoCP Associate Curator Asha Iman Veal.   

MoCP is supported by Columbia College Chicago, MoCP Advisory Board, Museum Council, individuals, private and corporate foundations, and government grants.

The 2024–2025 exhibition season is sponsored in part by the Efroymson Family Fund, Henry Nias Foundation, The Rowan Foundation, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, Pritzker Traubert Foundation, Comer Family Foundation, and Venable Foundation.

This project is partially supported by a CityArts grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. MoCP acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.