Resurge 2026
October 8th - 10th
@Co-Prosperity (3219 S. Morgan St)
Join us for the return of Co-Prosperity's annual performing arts festival! Resurge returns this year as a celebration of queer performance, identity, and the complicated realities we live. While queer life remains at the heart of the festival, Resurge asks us to look beyond celebration alone to engage with the intersections of power, belonging, and the forces shaping our lives. This year's lineup brings together a group of artists working across movement, installation, puppetry and interactive performances.
October 8th we will be kicking the festival off with a screening of Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary by Adam Soch followed by a performance from artist Hesam Salehbeig. On Friday, October 9th, Clothilde Cook, alterotics, Rin Reisert and Mátyás Tóth will bring their work to the stage. Finally, on Saturday, October 10th we’re closing things out with A.J. McClenon, Sharkey Zalek, Maryam Faridani and Aza Greenlee. Doors will open at 6:00 PM each day.
Resurge is a gathering of queer performance artists from across Chicago, presenting bold, risk-taking work. The festival honors queer ancestors, amplifies queer futures, and sparks new possibilities for live art in a city where experimental performance spaces are increasingly under threat. This program is partially funded by the LGBTQ Community Fund, an operating grant from the Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust with support from the Chicago Community Trust.
Quotations from a life -imagined and lived-
Hesam Salehbeig
Duration: 30 mins
In the light of ongoing queer resistance, Hesam Salehbeig presents a new solo performance honoring Reza Abdoh, the queer Iranian avant-garde director, playwright, poet, and company leader who died from AIDS during the epidemic 1995 at the age of thirty-two in New York.
Drawing from archival interviews with Abdoh, his family, friends, critics, and collaborators, Salehbeig reassembles fragments of a life and artistic practice shaped by diaspora, queerness, AIDS, patriarchy, violence, rage, and war. Rather than attempting to reproduce Abdoh’s work, the performance asks what it means for a queer Iranian immigrant artist to encounter, inherit, and reenact his unfinished legacy today.
The performance will be followed by a screening of Adam Soch’s documentary Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary.
Reza Abdoh: Theater Visionary
Running Time: 104 mins
The impact of wunderkind theatre director Reza Abdoh's explosive work is finally brought to light twenty years after his death of AIDS, with live performance footage and interviews with those closest to him.
Artist Biography:
Hesam Salehbeig is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago working across performance, moving image, sound, and installation. Their practice is focused on displacement, transformation, embodiment. Moving through territories of queerness, spirituality, desire, and memory, Salehbeig brings ritual, repetition, duration, and participation into dialogue with live and mediated technologies, using cameras, sound, and projection to alter the relationship between body, image, and audience. Their work creates encounters that unsettle familiar ways of seeing and being, where identity becomes less fixed and other possibilities of presence and becoming can emerge.
Their work and artistic collaborations have been presented in Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, Austria, France and Bangladesh. Salehbeig received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Eligibility Maintained
Performance by Rin Peisert
Durational performance
Rin Peisert occupies a storefront enclosure. Visitors use an animal feed scoop to scatter balls from a hog feeder. She retrieves them.
Visitors choose when and how many. They can scatter once and leave. She stays. Every ball she returns can be scattered again.
Hog feeders and feed scoops are tools of animal management: confine the animal, feed it, and govern how it spends its time and uses its body. Livestock are kept for what they produce. Here, she is the one confined and laboring on demand.
The display window makes her body and work available for consumption. In a skirt and heels, she performs two jobs at once: fetching and maintaining her appearance. She can stop collecting. She cannot stop being on display or performing femininity.
For many working-class women, wages pay for survival and the clothing, cosmetics, and grooming that expected femininity demands. The appearance helps keep the job, and the job pays to maintain it. Not conforming can cost a woman her job and her standing.
The task has no final round. Nothing she collects stays collected. For three hours, she picks up the balls and refills the feeder, with no result except being allowed to continue.
RENO_ATION 30 min
Mátyás Tóth
The work brings together digital manipulation, autocratic language, and fragmented queer identities through puppetry and performance, connecting artistic research with neuroscientific inquiry into how digital consumption shapes our identities, mindsets, and decision-making.
The Moon Card 15 min
Clothilde M Cook
A Clown within a Clown yearns for answers in the Moon. Cold, distant and indifferent, the Moon stares its reflective surface down on Earth where the clown reveals all its secret pains and fears, feeling as though it is the Moon drawing it out.
Clothilde Cook uses video, dance and performance, paper collage and paper mache, plastic discardables and natural ephemera to express my view of the world, disgusting and pretty, for better or worse. I enjoy the formats of fairy tale, sacred gender liminality, hand building and participatory experimentation. Past works include co -producer of The Rainbow in the Dark National Queer Arts Tour, performance project Cavenaw and Cavenis and drag experiment Feldspar Rhodochrosite.
broken glass in the hole 12:16am 21 min
alterotics
At Resurge 2026 we offer a new audio/video/movement work lured forward by the process of abstraction in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). Our interest in reenacting Duchamp’s painting is formal and pedestrian: how it fields/strobes/drops the inertial frame of the body in motion, and the fact that this body is nude. Our piece is most enticed by the possibility that chronographic study of the body may sink into pornographic blur, or vice versa.
Along the path of that descent we seek also to recreate a more particular scene–the Hole, a basement sex club where we host monthly trans/queer cruising parties. In sound, projection, and choreography, the idea is to derive some Pathosformeln (“emotive formulas”) from the apparently spontaneous flux of attractions and deviations that carry us through this scene.
Descending repeatedly from the upper office space to the main floor of Co-Prosperity is our way of uncovering the subterranean body of techniques–postures, gestures, attitudes, etc.–one absorbs by recurrence in the process of cruising. Making the rounds, eyeing, looking past, taking a lap, brushing by, catching a look, bumping into, dissociating, making a pass, turning away, leaning into, swaying with, meeting, parting, floating off, stepping in… With this performance we of course elide the actual sex that motivates the actual parties. If it’s possible to feel the negative space around that motive, this might be what we’re after.
Artist bios
Clothilde Cook uses video, dance and performance, paper collage and paper mache, plastic discardables and natural ephemera to express my view of the world, disgusting and pretty, for better or worse. I enjoy the formats of fairy tale, sacred gender liminality, hand building and participatory experimentation. Past works include co -producer of The Rainbow in the Dark National Queer Arts Tour, performance project Cavenaw and Cavenis and drag experiment Feldspar Rhodochrosite.
alterotics is a multiyear artistic and social project led by Anais Alias and Avery Jaye. Our practice revolves around monthly party organizing, experimental filmmaking, and multimedia performance.
Rin Peisert is an interdisciplinary performance artist working with bodies, time, and the gaze. Her work focuses on how perception changes across contexts and how endurance, proximity, and spectatorship shape actions and their consequences. Her projects are often interventions or durational works in which a live audience becomes active material.
Peisert has performed at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Power Station of Art (Shanghai), The Momentary, and Defibrillator Gallery, as well as on rooftops and in tunnels, bomb shelters, and a market for arranged marriages.
She curates and directs Relative Intensity Noise, an ongoing durational performance and sound series at Elastic Arts and The Momentary, and co-produces the score-based series Image of Thought. Based in Chicago, she also performs with several ensembles at the experimental edges of music and sound. Peisert has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Mátyás Tóth is a Hungarian puppeteer and interdisciplinary artist working across performance, installation and research. He holds an MA in Puppetry from the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest, and has presented work in Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Switzerland and the US.
Tóth uses the puppet as a metaphor for control: a body moved and voiced by someone else. Drawing on his research into Japanese Bunraku puppetry at the Hungarian Academy of Arts, he works with the "puppet paradox," the puppet as both dead and alive, to explore how autocratic language, propaganda and AI-generated content shape what people believe. His recent work looks at fragmented and queer identities under autocratic regimes: bodies that learn to hide, split, and speak in borrowed voices.
persistence as resistance 3 hours
Sharkey Zalek
Material Study. Live Art. Action Drawing. Sound Installation. Performance Ritual. Theater of the Absurd.
A necessary new beginning. A blank paper and a white painted body. Begin at the zero point, at nothing. From there move in all directions. Every form of existence culminates here, in one living body, now burned to the darkest dust, the body as ash. This is the charcoal. Heavy lifting. Active life is blood red. The living breath condensed to carry the codes, carry the ancient stories, to the moveable present. We are moving. A multiplicity, which is singular. Like a flock, in the wind, then the green grasses, the juice of life connecting us, treats us, flourishes regardless of us. Plants. The scale of being human. I find myself.
Microcosmic. Intergalactic. Animalistic. I am here to leave some impression, some trace. Disbelief that my life is futile. Existing for a reason, alongside one another, alone and together. Bathing in this knowing.
To embody life force until the day no more is left. That day will come. Mistress to the mystery. Building towards antithesis, a slow strip tease, a slow reveal. What is awareness in the face of now? Heave, Ho. Heave, Ho.
Sankofa, 25 min
aza
A table stands at the center of the room behind a small tank of clear gelatin and suspended plastic teeth. The tank rests on a stand. A tarp covers the floor beneath the performance area.
As the audience enters. Without an announcement, the house lights fade. aza, dressed in a dress and leather corset, enters and lays prone on the table. Two LED floodlights illuminate the table and tank, casting light upward from below.
aza lies on the table with the upper half of her body extending toward the tank. Holding the rails, she lowers her head into the gelatin and gathers teeth in her mouth. She lifts herself up and lets the gelatin pass through her teeth onto the tarp. She then beckons an audience member to extend their hands and gently deposits the collected teeth into them.
With each exchange, aza recounts a story, memory, or vision of a moment in her past that shook her. She repeats the action until she can draw no more teeth from the tank. The performance ends.
VEGA: Becoming Ashton Coochie 40 min
A.J. McClenon
VEGA: Becoming Ashton Coochie, A Love Story, moves thru brane and branching worlds, meeting parallel selves thru song, sleepy bedroom dancing, and transport thru electronic and synthesized sounds. Ongoing video installation will be ongoing thru-out the evening in the cave before the performance. Interdimensional debris from Ashton’s travels found thru-out the gallery as video installations and assemblages.
Looyeh 2.0 25 min
Mayram Faridani
This piece revisits Looyeh, which was originally performed 11 years ago in Tehran with the participation of my former therapist, without his knowledge.
This version, however, is being performed with the knowledge of my current therapist, who has strongly advised against it.
I hope this could become a therapy from Looyeh.
Artist bios
A.J. McClenon was born and raised in Washington, D.C., in a multigenerational home with grandparents from Trenton and Chester, South Carolina, and has lived and worked in Chicago for over a decade. McClenon is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, sculpture, moving and still images, sound, and writing. Their work is driven by familial and collective grief, water, Blackness, geomorphology, and the global future. Much of their writing takes the form of coming-of-age narratives, drawing from physics, psychology, geomorphology, and visual and sonic languages to explore how time, ecology, memory, and the decentering of humanness overlap.
aza takes after slime molds - fluid and rooted - coalescing loose tooth tanks, ancestral juke joints, Smudge cinematic pharmacies, No Nation Art Labs, chatterbate-masturbation web-temples, reparative collusions, and spontaneous acts of earnest disorientation.
Sharkey (Sara) Zalek is a transdisciplinary artist, international performer, independent producer, curator, and educator based in Chicago for over twenty years. Rooted in a performance practice through physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation, their work is intimate, raw, and poetic. Drawing from a deep well of creative exploration, they teach, co-lead, and facilitate environments that encourage thoughtful interpersonal connection.
Zalek performs often in both live and online situations; the City of Chicago named them an Esteemed Artist in 2022. They were a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist in 2015, 3Arts Make a Wave Awardee and a Ragdale Foundation Fellow in 2017. The Elastic Arts Foundation awarded them a 3-year Curatorial Grant in 2020 for Hot Mess! An episodic event featuring over seventy artists who engaged in interdisciplinary tactics using audio, video, and spatial mixing.
Faridani (b. Tehran) is one of many lost souls raised on the internet, doomed to scroll. Self-diagnosed through an online test with AHDD (Adverserial Hyper-Digital Dependency), she lacks concentration. Her art practice resembles hopping between apps on a phone—restless, layered, and nonlinear. Working across video, installation, and performance, she uses speculative narration to reflect on the overwhelming feeling of being online and how it affects our understanding of selfhood, society, and security.
Her work has been recognized through awards and residencies, including a, Individual Artists Program award (2026), Chicago Artists Coalition Residency (2024–26), a MacDowell Fellowship (2023), a Define American Fellowship (2020), and recognition as one of Chicago’s “Breakout Artists” (2022).