Intermissions: Xavier Cha

For the inaugural Intermissions performance, New York-based artist Xavier Cha presents In The News, a new work conceived for the Ren’s large open space. Creating a volatile scene for the watchful eyes of the crowd, two actors engage with each other and their surroundings in a hyper-physical encounter.

Cha’s videos and performances grapple with aspects of subjectivity and agency in the digital age. In dynamic ways, they explore our mutating senses of self and our relations to other people—fed by heightened circuits of self-spectatorship, voyeurism, or surveillance, but grounded as much as ever in the physical body.

Set against the mental backdrop of the news cycle, with its feverish role in developing events, Cha’s new performance unfolds in a different experiential mode—without screens and video footage, without talking heads or headlines. Instead, she delivers a moment of intensity, featuring nothing more than two people in a room in close proximity to those watching them.

Intermissions is a new programming series at the Renaissance Society devoted to ephemeral or performance-based works, staged in the empty gallery in between exhibitions. This recurring platform presents two major works every year, supporting a wide variety of live projects.

The performance features Nate Hitpas and Tony Vittorioso, with choreography by Xavier Cha and Greg Poljacik.

Curated by Karsten Lund.

Xavier Cha (1980) is based in New York, and has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2016); 47 Canal, New York (2015, 2012); Aspect / Ratio, Chicago (2013); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011), and has staged performance works at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara (2015); INOVA, Milwaukee (2015); the New Museum (2013), to name only a few. Cha received a Frieze Film Commission in 2015, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2012.

This project was funded by a grant from the Efroymson Family Fund.