On Canadian artist Brendan Fernandes’ acclaimed performance-based installations deconstructing ballet and modern dance

In an ambitious new monograph, Kenyan-born, Chicago-based Canadian artist Brendan Fernandes (born 1979) chronicles his two most recent exhibitions, Contract and Release at the Noguchi Museum (2019) and Master and Form commissioned by the Graham Foundation for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. These performance-based installations feature live dancers interacting with Noguchi’s colorful, unstable sculptures and a collection of architectural steel cages resembling ballet barres. The objects in both exhibitions act as training devices and physical constraints, both aiding and encumbering the dancers, and encouraging poses that test their endurance in overt displays of physical tension and self-control. The work engages with notions of discipline and mastery, pain and pleasure, and aims to disrupt and consolidate ballet and modern dance traditions. Alongside documentation of the performances, this book includes insight into Fernandes’ work with texts by Juliet Bellow, Andrew Campbell, Hendrik Folkerts and Dakin Hart.