How are our bodies formed by the shifting ground that holds us up? How do we reshape and reform over time? How are we aligned in space and time with the environment around us?

Beyond EMPAC’s glass walls, the horizon converges with printed and projected natural landscapes inhabited by a being that is both body and stone. In this site-specific, multi-channel video installation by collaborators and co-parents Meg Foley and Carmichael Jones, the shifting presence on screen becomes a vortex of gestational and geological time: Foley performs “rock drag,” embodying geologic processes by mimicking a boulder’s sped up evolution through movement while hidden beneath layers of fabric. Responding to the histories of the natural terrains where the footage was shot, the figure becomes both a character within and a physical extension of the landscape—a singular body that is deeply organic but never fully human.

Installed across multiple levels of EMPAC’s glass enclosed bridges, photographic stills printed on stretched lycra become projection surfaces, multiplying the figure so it can be seen from several vantage points as well as close-up within the bridges themselves. The sounds of Foley’s body in motion—heartbeat, breath—form an ambient soundscape, blurring the intimacy implied by the fabric-covered body with the expansiveness of the surrounding landscapes. The result is a meditation on queer gestation, selfhood, geology, and transformation, inviting a slower pace of attention and an expansive sense of scale.

Why do we choose to move in unison—to relinquish individuality to collectivity? What harmonies become possible in group movement, and what are its limits? Can difference and distinction persist within bodily sameness?

The Oath traces a fictional and incomplete history of unison movement as the desire to become a single body. Over a nearly 24-minute film, screened on a continuous loop, it captures the power of mass gesture across a spectrum that ranges from the communal to the monstruous. Dressed in identical, unidentifiable white uniforms and staged within Alla Kovgan’s sweeping direction, a large ensemble of dancers perform Annie-B Parson’s precise cycle of poetic and vernacular gestures. Their movements encompass both utopian and dystopian choreographies of community, clan, club, army, congregation, and machine.

In EMPAC’s vaulted concert hall, the film’s abstract, colorful landscape becomes both larger than life and unsettlingly claustrophobic, calling attention to the spatial patterns the group forms within the contained world of the frame. As the dancers move in perpetual unison, individuality flickers, at once starkly visible and dissolving into the group. The Oath stages collective gesture as bond and bind, promise and battle, celebration and intimidation—at once ritual, rehearsal, and dance.

How are we implicated in the images of power that surround us? How do our actions mimic what we have learned from those that lead us?

Greeting visitors at EMPAC’s main entrance, this interactive sculpture premiere invites us to embody and witness the gesture of the “heroic” death: a dramatized cycle of falling and rising that has long served as a symbol of nationalist ideals. Kate Ladenheim draws on, while sharply critiquing, the formal conventions and political assumptions of monumental sculpture to create an anti-monument that repurposes military materials and trigger mechanics.

Provided with a set of “score” instructions, participants become a part of a system of rising and falling bodies. The sculpture requires not just a single participant but variations on a collective action: people falling on mats activate the rise of an inflatable torso atop a pedestal covered in bullet casings. Without the viewers’ performance of self-sacrifice, the figure of power remains inert and deflated. Together, participants physically rehearse this trope of monumental proportions, revealing how “heroic” figures are constructed, and how many bodies are required, invisibilized, or lost in the process of holding them up. 

Can we hold our relationships to one another as sacred? How do we respond to our environment and effect change? What can we build together from a faltering world? 

At once a sacred mountain and a social microcosm, this sensitive interactive environment—constructed from the detritus of imperialism—invites visitors to build the responses that might carry us home. Meant to be collectively inhabited, Raft is an emergent space inspired in part by Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a painting that frames the horrors that unfold when human lives are treated as expendable. Whether arriving alone or as part of a group activation, visitors are invited to take action, to gather, to take stock of who is present, and consider what must be done. 

In this installation premiere, Yanira Castro and team—including Kathy Couch, RPI alum Stephan Moore, Ariel Lembeck, LD DeArmon, and access doula Marielys Burgos Meléndez—craft a world meant to be felt and moved through, where visitors engage with the actions of others who came before. Intimate voices can be heard embedded inside the installation, interwoven with sounds from Castro’s archipelago origins. Here, participants can contribute to this expanding archive of recorded stories, sharing their own early memories of soil and dirt. 

Open Hours and Group Activations are different experiences. Visitors can do either or both. During the group activations on Thursday and Friday, the installation closes for a participatory experience led by the artist. RSVP is required; the activation begins at listed start times and lasts roughly 75–90 minutes.

For both the installation and group activation, consider wearing comfortable clothes and closed-toed shoes, along with anything else you would wear to freely play. You are encouraged to bring any support elements you typically use in your active life, such as reading glasses.

Accessibility

Raft integrates accessibility practices like low-sensory hours, a care toolkit to navigate the installation, and live Audio Description (AD) for blind and visually impaired people (upon request). Request access

If all life is conducted from within the same finite mass of resources, then everything we know is from a recycled lineage of the same matter in different forms expressing different things at different times. In this way it is all the same and also different. Our temporary variance in the play of matter is part of a long history of making and unmaking, seeing and not seeing, being and being-with. Set within a soil landscape, Conducting Life explores the plural existences of gorgeous microbes as they live through the process of metabolizing their own homescape. 

Apprehend the flux of all the same matter in EMPAC’s Studio 1 celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation (1926). Multi-generational microscopic communities documented with novel high-resolution photography are combined with ambisonics and Wave Field spatialization of Stein’s essay to produce an ever-evolving state and psychedelic status of all the same matter, differently. Become consciously aware of microbial contemporaries who are conducting life just as we are conducting our own lives on this singular planet.

With his composition Liquid Borders, Samson Young gives sound to the audio divide of a closed frontier zone where two territories meet. The four-part work traces both natural and manmade barriers, re-staging these as a textured symphony that flows from the industrial clang of metal to gentle shifts of water and wind.

Young developed the piece from field recordings made along the guarded boundary between Mainland China and Hong Kong, which he later notated for four immersive compositions. As parts of this forbidden barrier zone were redrawn to allow public access, he returned to explore the newly accessible terrain. Using contact microphones along fences and underwater microphones along the river dividing either side of the region, he captured the soundscape of this division and reimagined it as an evolving, resonant score.

In staging grounds, Young’s work fills the theater lobby alongside video by Na Mira. Both works animate seemingly inaccessible sites.

• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
• 6–10:15PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 1–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Liquid Borders / Samson Young

Korakrit Arunanondchai’s film Unity for Nostalgia (2025) follows an artist in pursuit of an origin culture that lives on in the form of a ghost who inhabits human flesh. The work’s scenes unfold in an abandoned cinema overrun by monkeys, and within a stage made of ashes that performers occupy. Containing elements of myth, choreographic performance, and ritual, Unity for Nostalgia stages clashes between secular and sacred powers. It animates dynamics of cultural inheritance, navigating encounters between forces of power and forces of culture. Unity for Nostalgia is screened as a haunting video installation that evokes ancestral presence with atmospheric intensity. At EMPAC, the work is presented on the theater stage amid traces of Arunanondchai’s commissioned performance.

• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Theater
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Unity for Nostalgia / Korakrit Arunanondchai

For staging grounds, Mira’s Autoasphyxiation is on view in EMPAC’s theater lobby. With shots tracking the Dragon Hill military garrison in Seoul, Autoasphyxiation fixates on the border surrounding this zone, which has been controlled by various state forces since its construction by the Japanese Imperial Army in 1906. Mira stages this landscape as a live transmission, where this boundary wavers between presence and disappearance, signal and silence.

• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
• 6–10:15PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 1–5PM, Theater Lobby
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Autoasphyxiation / Na Mira

Jewyo Rhii’s Wing Theater, commissioned by EMPAC, is at once a self-contained theater, a sculptural archive, and a staging ground for storytelling. The installation uses walls that store objects, automated structures, and simple moving elements to give physical shape to personal and public stories, which are shown through precise gestures and motions. The project oscillates between installation and activated performance space, with Rhii offering two live activations daily throughout the festival.

At its base is a large-scale structure composed of six wings, each carrying an assembly of sculptures, images, and projections. These wings become engines for conversation—speaking with ghosts from Rhii’s past, with those who assert power by seizing and privatizing public space, and with the audience gathered in the studio. Throughout staging grounds, Wing Theater subtly spreads out across the studio, setting its stories in motion. In Studio 1, the piece evokes the atmosphere of an artist’s studio transformed into a dynamic stage—blurring the boundary between private process and collective encounter.

Wing Theater asks what it means to make, act, and think in the world as an artist. Two narrative trajectories extend across its physical structure. Viewed front to back, a series of vignettes charts Rhii’s path from her formation as an artist in Seoul, to her nomadic years working across Europe, and to her time in Queens, New York. Back to front, Wing Theater is a meditation on how the rapid pace of urban development transforms both people and place.

Widely recognized for her installations and her practice spanning sculpture, video, and performance, Jewyo Rhii approaches art-making as a mode of shared experience. Her work is marked by a sensitivity to the afterlives of artistic practice, and to the small, intimate acts that quietly shape collective histories.

Each performance is 60 minutes in duration.

• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
• 6:30, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
• 1:30 + 4PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24–SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 11AM–5PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION, FREE
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / No reservation necessary
• TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2026
• 3PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026
• 3PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP
• SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2026
• 1PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION, FREE, RSVP
• Wing Theater / Jewyo Rhii / RSVP

Natan Diacon-Furtado's Community Portal is an open-source ancestral projection and transmission tool. It engages the public in embodied collaborative listening through the re-purposing of naval navigation and paranormal investigation technologies. A water-filled metal bowl is modified to become a ground-plane liquid antenna, engaging the FM radio spectrum as a space for investigation and recuperation of community connection(s). Connecting this antenna to a laptop converted into a software-defined radio “spirit box” allows a hand placed into the water to audibly modify the signals that are received. Additional hands placed into the water merge and amplify the antenna's signal, sharing agency and intention between you, your community, and your watershed, opening a space for joyful meaning-making and the potential to receive site and self-specific messages from other(ed) ancestral imaginations.