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2024 Co-MISSION Festival of New Works | Fall Residents: AiRos 頌恩 medill, Jamila Kekulah, and Eshan Rafi

Friday, June 21, 2024
7:00 PM 8:30 PM

Links Hall 3111 North Western Avenue Chicago, IL, 60618 United States (map)

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AiRos 頌恩 medill, Jamila Kekulah, and Eshan Rafi

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AiRos 頌恩 medill’s ZÌRÁN // 自然 | in {sharing} my solitude

Part of Links Hall’s 2024 Co-MISSION Festival of New Works

metal. earth. fire. wood. water

grief. worry. joy. anger. wisdom

is a series of {7} gathered movements from songs that have come through to me since 2018 mapping my travel through the aftermath of remembering. i spent much time alone- recalculating-listening- expressing -& Billie Holiday's solitude played on repeat. i would greet the earth daily, witnessed & held. so now i share this ritual to be witnessed weaving in of others in rebuilding.

this iteration is the beginning of this sharing

Jamila Kekulah’s Lay Your Burdens Down: The Bridge

Part of Links Hall’s 2024 Co-MISSION Festival of New Works

Lay Your Burdens Down: The Bridge is a meditation on spirit and grace. Holding the questions of when and where they’ve been experienced, the state you're in when you‘ve gone looking for one or both? How are they welcomed when they appear?

Eshan Rafi’s begin

Part of Links Hall’s 2024 Co-MISSION Festival of New Works

Inhabiting the present political moment, I look backwards and forwards in time. I explore the relationship between making art, doing politics, and the possibility of history. I fold in an interview with my father; appropriate and enact a speech by Harry S. Truman to Congress; and use an opening title track to map questions in space.

Artist Bios

**AiRos 頌恩 medill** is a yellow hapa nonbinary trans Taiwanese american circle keeper, care worker, storyteller, facilitator, bodyworker, and culture bearer who is moving to organize abundance in the ecology of home. AiRos practices with the 5 elements (water, wood, fire, metal, earth) to align bodies to heaven and earth in reciprocity and reverence of feeling and the distribution of energies. As part of the diaspora air has a lifelong practice of traveling, moving through and shifting culture.

**Jamila Kekulah** is ever evolving. They are a mover, an observer, a movement creator, a lifelong learner, and a deep listener of the body. Jamila is interested in investigating how we inhabit ourselves and each other in this human experience.

Eshan Rafi is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, expanded photography, and video. Their works deal with the intersection of political events and personal archives, often staging the impossibility of representation. Their work has been exhibited, performed, and screened internationally including at SummerWorks Lab, Toronto; Sharjah Film Platform; M:ST 9 Performance Art Biennale, Calgary; and neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin. Rafi holds an MFA in Art, Theory, and Practice from Northwestern University, Evanston.

Collaborators

Alyssa Vera Ramos (collaborator, ZìRán // 自然) (she/her/ella) is a Boricua devising artist, theatre director, cultural strategist, and blossoming intimacy director dedicated to dreaming and practicing a liberated world. Her artistic work includes shaping many collaboratively written, often participatory plays, and explores themes of reproductive and racial justice and getting in right relationship with ancestors and each other. Alyssa is a curator of Swarm Artist Residency and a student at La Escuelita Bombera de Corazón.

Crystle LiWayway Diño (collaborator, ZìRán // 自然) is a Pinay Chicago native guided by her passions in the visual, performance, and healing arts rooted in community and her cultural upbringings. She unearths herstory and investigates time, place, and relation by incorporating elements of the body, participation, and memory and by creating movement using repetition in patterns immersed in personal stories, collective experiences, and folklore. She practices as a folk art therapist, performance and visual artist, mover & dancer, cultural worker, and youth development worker. She embodies her freedom by training in Filipino Martial Arts and dance and utilizes the concepts of Chicago House culture of freedom, love, and empowerment, as well as the Babaylan consciousness as foundation and impetus for her practices.

This event is part of Links Hall’s 2024 Co-MISSION Festival of New Works, two groundbreaking weekends of new performance and public events. Representing some of the most talented makers in Chicago from dance, performance art, installation, and performance as social practice, four artists present works developed while in-residence at Links during the 2023-2024 season. Featured artists include: Links Hall Residents AiRos 頌恩 medill, Jamila Kekulah, and Eshan Rafi, and Fellows Najee-Zaid Searcy and Lani T. Montreal.