Performance Space New York Hosts Chella Man's AUTONOMY, Co-presented With The Jewish Museum

Performance Space New York and the Jewish Museum will co-present the performance of artist, actor, and director Chella Man's Autonomy (May 2 at 7pm in Performance Space's Keith Haring Theatre), a two-part work that culminates in an installation at the Jewish Museum. With Autonomy, Man reclaims their Deaf, transmasculine, genderqueer, Chinese, and Jewish body as a site of growth, adaptation, and resilience. Lovingly piercing, eroding, and transmuting a mold of their own form, Man treats their body as a mutable canvas for profound self-expression. For this personal and introspective performance, Man has engaged both members of their biological and chosen families, including their mother, father, sister, and former partner, who join the artist onstage and otherwise contribute to the performance in collectivized acts of care.

 

Man performs their act of self-creation on a “clone”—a hyper-realistic, full-body silicone sculpture cast from the artist's nude form, fabricated by special effects artist Manuela Benaim, with lead mold fabricator Samantha Shawzin. Describing the casting of their body, Man wrote, “To liberate myself, I first had to be constrained. How fitting it was to mirror this process to create a silicone clone of myself for Autonomy. Coated in goo in total restraint, I spent hours immobilized and simultaneously deaf without the ability to see. The pain began to set in around two and a half hours, with hours still to go… Yet it hurt differently than in the past. Buried alive, I realized consent over my pain gave me permission to find purpose within it. This time I chose it.”

 

Man, who has learned to tattoo specifically for the performance, pierces replicas of the self-designed tattoos that appear on their own body into the clone's flesh; other tattoos become visible on deeper layers of silicone as Man erodes the clone's skin, emphasizing these images not as surface additions or adornments of the body, but rather evocations of the primal and internal. Submerged in a clinical blue light, the performance likewise reconsiders surgical incisions and medical scarring as acts of both self-determination and products of the medical industrial complex; Man applies the scars from their cochlear implant and top surgeries (“trophies of my body's resilience and adaptability,” says the artist) to their facsimile form. The silicone clone will be on view—bathed in warm golden-hour light in a state of reclamation—as part of the seven-person group exhibition Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration at the Jewish Museum, May 24 - September 15, 2024  (1109 Fifth Avenue).

 

Various dramaturgical choices center D/deaf and Hard of Hearing community members' gaze, experience of, and relationship to the performance. Autonomy audience members will be seated in the Keith Haring Theatre based on how they identify their hearing status. Hearing audience members' experience will involve intentionally obscured captions and set elements, reflecting the inaccess that disabled individuals face on a daily basis.

 

In a moment in America where trans and gender expansive people are under constant attack—both physical and rhetorical, in politics and in everyday life—this work reclaims the body from the constraints of binary thinking, celebrating queer, disabled, and trans bodies. Says Man, “I conceived the idea of Autonomy years ago, at a point in my medical transition on testosterone, after getting top surgery, when I stopped noticing so many rapid shifts in my body. In this moment of stability, I began reflecting on how I had literally built my body, and it made sense to do so for a piece just as I had in life; I could see myself in mirrors and photos, but to see the self I'd built in three dimensions, I began Autonomy. That said, I don't think the body is ever complete: time doesn't stop. So to me this body I'm creating is a checkpoint, symbolic of a period of growth and an accumulation of revelations.”

 

At the Jewish Museum, Man's installation will be exhibited alongside works in painting and sculpture by Sula Bermúdez-Silverman (b. 1993), Sasha Gordon (b. 1998), Sara Issakharian (b. 1983), Austin Martin White (b. 1984), Ilana Savdie (b. 1986), and Rosha Yaghmai (b. 1978). Overflow, Afterglow highlights how these artists “use supernatural color and uncanny luminescence to evade the reductive nature of traditional figuration. Their palettes embody the lived experiences and cross-cultural allegiances of a multiethnic, multiracial, and otherwise multifaceted group of makers.” For more information: https://thejewishmuseum.org/exhibitions/overflow-afterglow