Museum of What Will Have Been
LABYRINTH CLUB
(3658 N PULASKI RD)
Museum of What Will Have Been
What will the future remember of us — and what will it get wrong?
This performance invites audiences into a fictional museum from an unspecified future, where a team of archaeologists from the future, in this case, you, excavate the ordinary artifacts of Asian daily life in the early 21st century. Guided by a museum voice of total, unearned confidence, you'll dig, classify, and label these fragments like the museums before them, which were never built to see the faces they claim to archive.
Drawing on Fredric Jameson's "archaeology of the future," Douglas Crimp's writing on museums, and mockumentary lineages from Hito Steyerl to Andrea Fraser, scholar-artists Yejia Sun and Jintong Yang ask: is preservation ever separable from erasure? And can we imagine a future — or only recalculate the past?
Artists:
Yejia Sun is a dramaturg and artist-scholar from China. She holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and is currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. In the United States, her dramaturgical and creative work has been presented at National Sawdust, JACK, and the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. In China, her dramaturgical works appear in Goethe Institute, Young Theatre, Shekou Theatre Festival, among others. Her writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, Critical Stages, HowlRound, Ying Ming Theatre Magazine, and China Writer. Her honors include the Davis Peace Prize, the Lisa Lu Fellowship, the A4 Foundation WCWD Fellowship, and a finalist selection for the Elliott Hayes Award from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). www.yejiasun.com
Jintong Yang is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of HCI and time-based media art. She explores how computational systems can support more intuitive and embodied forms of expression. Drawing on a background in motion and interactive design, her work bridges digital and physical processes to create experiences that deepen both aesthetic engagement and understanding, across animation, live performance, and installation. She holds an MFA in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Arts and Technology at UC Santa Barbara.
Sat 10/10 at 3:00pm
Sat 10/17 at 3:00pm
Sat 10/24 at 3:00pm