Brendan Fernandes is a multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of dance and visual arts. His unique cultural background as a Kenyan-Indian Canadian who has lived in New York City for the past 12 years and who now resides in Chicago, confronts the hybrid and transitional nature of identity. This compels aspects of his artistic practice towards an exploration that the thesis of identity is not static, but enacted. Throughout his work, he questions his experience as a dancer who studied ballet and modern dance techniques, and who had to leave the dance world due to injury.

For the past five years, he has explored how stillness and static movement can be powerful tools for making and resistance. He routinely explores the role of the body within social and political spaces, challenging the notion of hegemony. Inspired by ballet movement vocabularies and their relationship to labour and endurance, his work demonstrates an investment in histories of avant-garde dance with regard to visual art. Rarely performed on a stage, these works navigate between the languages and etiquettes of visual art and dance, becoming hybrid acts of movement.

Find out more at http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/