News & Recent Exhibitions

“An Gorta Mór (A Great Hunger)”

Expanded cinema performance: multichannel video projection with live sound

Elastro AV Expanded Cinema Festival curated by Yousif Alzayed, Elastic Arts, Chicago, September 2025

Performance of my short film-in-progress “An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger)” with live piano accompaniment by Yousif Alzayed and sound-scaping by me with a contact mic and rocks.

The film explores the mercurial and cyclical nature of mourning: entwining grief ritual with play, heaviness with flight, mesmerizing repetition and abrupt endings, the permanence of death and the movement of migratory birds.

Photos by Mikey Mosher

Forms of Flesh: Contemplating Embodiment

Jeremy Plotkin Wong, George Mosher, Kat Bawden, curated by Alicja Seledec

Chicago Grand Gallery, August 2025

During the exhibition opening, dancer Hannah Marcus and sound artist Maya Nguyen created a performance that both responded to and activated my video installation.

Artists in Public Schools: Kat Bawden & Nyia Sissac

EXPO CHICAGO, Navy Pier, April 2025

Unique silver gelatin photograms, silver gelatin lumen prints, and cyanotypes from my series Sea of Grass, exhibited alongside inkjet and fabric prints by photographer Nyia Sissac.

I had never seen her face so read

Archive reading performance, April 2025

Chicago Cluster Project at 400 N Peoria, Chicago, IL

Photos by Eugene Tang

Alive A Life A Light

Expanded cinema slide-show performance, April 2025

Chicago Cluster Project at 400 N Peoria, Chicago, IL

An aging couple in the Chicago suburbs give away their personal archive of family photographs to a stranger, discarding of hundreds of slide film photographs from the 1950s and 60s. The photographs are strange, tender, silly, mysterious, poetic, and they feel very much alive.

I bring this archive to life in a slide-show performance, asking: Why do we photograph our lives? Are photographs alive? If so, what is the lifespan of a photograph, of an archive?

These questions form the thread of an accompanying poetic essay. I photograph my writing, print it on transparency, and turn it into slides – allowing myself, and my questions, to both respond to and physically enter the archive.

Photos by Eugene Tang