Please Note: This performance will create different access experiences based on hearing status. D/deaf and Hard of Hearing community members will be directed to specific seating upon arrival where they will be able to access captioning and ASL. As an artistic choice, Chella will be intentionally obscuring captions for hearing audience members.
“All of who I am now lies on a continuum—I no longer operate to fulfill roles that were illusions to begin with.”
In this deeply personal and introspective performance, Chella Man shares their narrative of self-determination, grief, healing, and reclamation of one’s body through tattooing and explorations of their scars from the medical industrial complex. To Man, piercing their skin is an act of erosion, revealing what lies beneath the surface, both within the body and the broader societal constructs we navigate. The piece compiles revelations of liberation that have become their leading values in life. Shattering the constraints of binary thinking, the performance celebrates queer, disabled, and trans bodies. Autonomy lives as an embodied experience, a testament to resilience and adaptability. Through this work, Man explores the continuum of art, disability, gender, and race by adapting and navigating their body as a mutable canvas for profound self-expression.
Autonomy is co-produced with the Jewish Museum, where it will be on view, in installation form, as part of Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration, a seven-person group exhibition opening May 24th.
Support for this program is provided, in part, by the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation.