29.12.1979–?
Brendan Fernandes
Brendan Fernandes was born in Nairobi but has lived in Canada since the age of nine. He trained as a ballet dancer, became a visual artist after an injury, and combined dance with sculpture, video and installation. In 2018 he showed the series “The Master and Form”, on the discipline of ballet, and in 2017 he staged the choreography “Free Fall 49” at the Getty. He teaches at Northwestern University.
Biography
In 2017, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, eight dancers improvised for two hours to music by Tom Krell (How to Dress Well). Forty-nine times the rhythm broke off, and the dancers fell to the floor and then rose. This was how Brendan Fernandes staged “Free Fall 49”, a work about the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, in which forty-nine people died.
Fernandes was born in Nairobi on 29 December 1979. His family belongs to the Indian community in Kenya and is of Goan descent; it had lived in Africa for five generations. When the boy was nine, the family moved to Canada because of political unrest, and he finished school in Newmarket, Ontario. He trained professionally as a ballet dancer. In his final year of college he tore a hamstring, and his dance career ended there. Next came training as a visual artist: a Bachelor of Fine Arts at York University in Toronto and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 2007 he completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Dance did not disappear from his work; it changed place. Fernandes works at the boundary of choreography and visual art, combining performance with installation, video and sculpture. His projects centre on migration, cultural displacement, labour, queer subjectivity and collective agency; he treats the body both as a carrier of cultural meanings and as a means of expression. For him choreography is a way to study the movement of queer bodies and labouring bodies, and how that movement relates to gender roles. His projects engage with postcolonial and critical theory and question the idea of a fixed, “authentic” identity. I think the artist’s own biography, with its several continents and change of profession, counts for at least as much as theory here, although as far as I know he does not say so directly.
In 2011 Fernandes took part in the exhibition “Found in Translation” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2010 he was nominated for the Sobey Art Award.
In 2018 at the Graham Foundation he showed “The Master and Form”, a series of sculptures and live performances. Its subject was mastery and discipline in ballet culture: objects designed so that dancers could perfect and extend the classic positions. The work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. “Free Fall 49” was later shown in the Kogod Courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in June 2019. Among his awards are the Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014), the New Chapters grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (2017), the Artadia Award (2019), a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2019) and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020). His projects have been presented at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Getty Museum and at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. His book “Re/Form”, published in 2022, relates to his project at the Noguchi Museum. He now teaches art theory and practice at Northwestern University and works in Chicago.
Profile notes