Soft Boundaries Performance Night

An evening of responsive performance art featuring Marcel Michelle-Mobama, A M O D E L and Katie Robinson.

For the “Soft Boundaries” performance night, curator Juleana Enright has invited three local performance artists whose work reflect the concepts of the exhibit. They have compiled pieces that speak to the nature of radical softness, representational vulnerability, and the boundaries that test and influence our identity.

Photo credit: B. Sens Photography
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Katie Robinson – Through poetry, performance, social media fasts, and epsom salt baths, katie seeks to remember and conjure her liberation. In her work, she draws upon black feminist wisdom to translate her vast reserves of feelings into knowable suggestions of how to practice love. She has shared her written work at Moon Palace Books, the Black Dog cafe, and the Amsterdam, and her film work will be featured in Free Black Dirt’s Sweetness of Wild, as the character, “Sweet.” She recently collaborated with Adrienne Doyle on a video and performance art piece honoring Alexis Pauline Gumbs and her new book “M Archive: After the End of the World”. katie was a 2017 participant in the VONA Regional Workshop at the Loft Literary Center, a 2015 Fellow with the Givens Foundation, and is thrilled to be a new teacher with the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.

A M O D E L – An avante-garde shape creation organization sent to challenge and comfort those who experience it. When experiencing A M O D E L one may find themselves in a space that has form and function suspended temporarily to cut to a place inside of them that needs to be held, spoken to, and shaken up a bit. Feel free to lose yourself, your attachment to who you have been, and get to know the true you. A M O D E L is one part Sonja Johanson (Wretch), and one part Cole Mealey (Infinity Suite, Neon Blaque, Burn Fetish).

Marcel Michelle-Mobama – A Minneapolis-based performance artist working with subversion, stereotype, exorcism, connection, and eroticism. She is a full time producer, performer, director, choreographer, curator, and all around nasty lady. Marcel combines her experience as a black/latinx/queer/trans womxn with a passionate study of movement, theatre, burlesque, and improv to provide a unique, vulnerable, and varied experience. Her work has appeared in Queertopia, The Minneapolis Burlesque Festival, Red Eye’s New Work Series, Patrick’s Cabaret, Soul Friday, The Pink and White Ball, at First Avenue, The Cowles Center, and a few other places. She was a founding member of Carnivale Revolver and Visions of Sugarplums: The Burlesque Nutcracker, and works regularly with Hot Dish Cabaret, Black Hearts Burlesque, and 20% Theatre Company, where she also serves as a board member. Marcel is the resident FemCee of Daddy each month at Icehouse in Minneapolis.

About the Exhibit

In “Soft Boundaries”, seven artists explore how the vulnerable narrative can be used as an act of resistance, liberation and healing. Through the mediums of illustration, photography, video and audio installation, mixed media, book art, and sculpture, the artists present the distortions which keep us from wholly seeing ourselves and others, and the limitations when identity is categorized into the binaries of hyper-visible and invisible. Examining intersecting identities through art, “Soft Boundaries” sets out to showcase the power of radical softness as a weapon and the strength and truth in allowing ourselves to be fully open.

Featured Exhibition Artists: Blair Moore, Dom Laba, Lamia Abukhadra, Laurie Borggreve, Mikki Coleman, Nadia Honary, and shhhhame

Curated by Juleana Enright