Friday / May 2, 2025 at 7:00 pm Constantly evolving scenography, kaleidoscopic lighting, jittery electronic sounds, and evocative video projections underscore Ontopoiesis, an EMPAC-commissioned work of experimental music theater. Composer Rama Gottfried, with production designer Anna Paniccia and the experimental music piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, explore new and diverse forms within the intersections of music, experimental theater, and sculpture. EMPAC Spring 2025 Music/Sound, Commission Rama Gottfried & Yarn/Wire

Friday / April 25, 2025 at 7:00 pm A ubiquitous fixture in DJ and electronic music for the better half of the last century, the record turntable has been utilized as an instrument in innumerable ways since its conception. Experimental musicians Victoria Shen and Mariam Rezaei explore and push the musical limits of turntablism in a thrilling and dizzying concert performance of new music for unorthodox instruments and objects where DIY sensibilities meet the audio technological capabilities of EMPAC's Studio 1. EMPAC Spring 2025 Music/Sound

Friday / April 18, 2025 at 5:30 pm Movement artist Justine A. Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, which is currently on tour across Canada. Emerging from traces of childhood memories of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, The Brutal Joy is a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture in the lineage of Black dandyism—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black-living. EMPAC Spring 2025 Talk

Thursday / April 17, 2025 at 5:30 pm Artist Steffani Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of an evolving set of video and live performance works. Her series, collectively titled In Succession, explores how we find the courage to be—physically, ethically, and collectively—the means toward ends that we may never ourselves get to see. EMPAC Spring 2025 Talk

Thursday / April 17, 2025 at 4:00 pm Choreographer Leslie Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion. Cuyjet combines her own embodied archive of movement with looping archival, pre-recorded, and live-captured video in a multi-sided enclosure that serves as both projection screen and stage, dynamically shifting the viewer’s perspective on her bodily form over time. EMPAC Spring 2025 Dance/Theater, Performance Leslie Cuyjet

April 17-18, 2025 Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon experiment with translating their 2022 video collaboration from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions. EMPAC Spring 2025 Installation Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon

April 17-18, 2025 Ephemeral Organ is a series of residencies, performances, and talks by artists whose work explores choreography and bodily motion as technologies for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience. Each artist simultaneously navigates the ever-shifting nature of live performance and the urge to retain, return to, and generate traces of the past. EMPAC Spring 2025 Festival

Tuesday / April 8, 2025 at 6:00 pm In this program with video and performance artist Claudia Pagès, the artist shares various facets of her artistic research. Pagès’s past works have often engaged with palimpsests in which informal, vernacular languages and customs are at cross-purposes with official operations and the semantics of power. EMPAC Spring 2025 Time-Based Visual Art, Talk

Wednesday / March 26, 2025 at 2:00 pm ISATMA expands its scope to workshop immersive technologies and holistic practices for reducing stress and improving well-being in learning environments. The workshop invites intellectual discourse on best and new practices and provides practical resources for individuals who are interested in this topic. Presented by EMPAC Research, Center for Deep Listening Research, Workshop Reconnecting with Nature: Immersion, Embodiment, and Well-being

Tuesday / March 25, 2025 at 7:00 pm For this event, artist Jewyo Rhii is in conversation with curator Ruba Katrib to discuss her artistic practice. Jewyo Rhii’s work engages with the long afterlife of artistic labor and builds public links to patterns of transit, movement, and storage we rarely see. Her practice often bears the mark of itinerancy, on the experience of passing through places where one cannot stay and making meaning out of encounters with transient situations. EMPAC Spring 2025 Talk with Ruba Katrib