“The Black Body, whether on the auction block, the American plantation, hanged from a lightpole as part of a lynching ritual, attacked by police dogs within the Civil Rights era, or staged as a “criminal body” by contemporary law enforcement and judicial systems, is a body that has been forced into the public spotlight and given a compul- sorry visibility. It has been made “to be given to be seen”
- Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body, 2010
Photo by Maxwell Huerter.
Body/Space by Anthony Sims
Oct 12th to Nov 6th Co-Prosperity - 3219 S Morgan, Chicago
Performances in the windows each night from 7:00 - 9:00PM
Anthony Sims's practice utilizes durational performance to prompt prolonged visibility for black queer bodies. In his examinations of black queerness, the importance of the environment and the representation of space plays a vital role.
In Body/Space, Sims adopts the form of a tableau vivant (a living image), creating a series of 26 performances that are unique to each of Co-Prosperity’s three windows. Body/Space focuses on conscious and subconscious labeling, neglection, and interpretation of black queerness in the contemporary art world and LGBTQ+ community. By introducing shifting scenic elements and costume design, he will explore vast eras of time, beginning in the 1920s and ultimately documenting the past 100 years of black queer liberation. Reckoning with the window pane as a photographic lens, Sims aims to highlight the power of resistance in stillness.
Stillness in performance can allow for a phenomenological experience in the spectator. In theater, speech and action are found to be the two key elements for understanding. Sims is more interested in the idea of a conscious and subconscious interpretation that is enhanced visually, without the presence of speech and action in this project. This will promote the examination of our own bodies, and question what things arise in them when we see a black body in space. This stillness introduces the dynamic of performative viewing, which stresses the audience’s role as viewers that are also viewed back.
Performing in the age of Covid-19 has raised huge issues within performance communities. To ensure everyone's safety, Sims's target audience is those who pass by the window. Like most durational work, it's about the observation.
A 26-Day Live Encore Performance of Anthony Sims’ “Body/Space “ - 11/7/2020, and broadcast via Lumpen’s twitch channel, livestreamed at the Quarantine Times installation at the MCA’s “The Long Dream” exhibition.
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This show is a part of Co-Prosperity Peers, a series of solo exhibitions initiated by the Co-Prosperity Programming Council. Four artists are selected each year to take over the Co-Prosperity windows and hold programming during the run of their show.
Anthony Sims is a Chicago based interdisciplinary Performance Artist/ Theatre Maker whose mission is to embody Afro American and queer experiences through performance. His work takes on an existentialist approach by focusing on the autonomy of the body within a systematic society. Utilizing the theory of The Black Body by Harvey Young, Sims explores critical memory of The Black Body by creating experiential overlaps that manifest visibility. The Black Body, whether a knee is on its neck, staged as a criminal, hung from a tree or light post, made to serve at plantations, auctioned off like cattle is a body that is given compulsory visibility. Researching that given visibility, Sims uses interdisciplinary methods through collage by constructing new visibility, thus reclaiming The Black Body. His work has been seen at Links Hall, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, The Chicago Physical Theatre Festival, The Peace Studio, Third Estate Art, Slate Arts, The Center of Afrofuturist Studies, and several other locations. He was just recently an Artist in Residence at the ADDS DONNA gallery in Humboldt Park.