“Can you hear anything?” someone asked me at the opening of Confinement: Politics of Space and Bodies at the Contemporary Arts Center. We cupped our ears to a wall, having heard there were supposed to be performers on the other side. We were listening to Géographie-Cincinnati, an imposing installation by choreographers Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet, in which three dancers — along with more than half the gallery space — are enclosed behind high walls. A man to my left tapped his finger on the drywall. “Oh!” a woman around a corner exclaimed, “I think I heard something!”
Winding my way down the narrowing hallway around its perimeter, I felt a mild surge of panic as the crowd bottlenecked beside a black and white photograph of Igor Stravinsky. Taken by Irving Penn in 1948, the composer is shown backed into a corner, cupping his ear to a wall as I had just done. Curator Valentine Umansky has filled this exhibition with such uncanny twists, revealing how the structures of our environment shape our behavior, and in doing so has somehow made the CAC’s abstruse geometry even more claustrophobic.
This challenging — and rewarding — exhibition asks important questions about agency, and helps us see the literal and metaphorical structures around us. A two-day symposium on Feb. 29 and March 1 will delve into the many important questions posed here.
Confinement: Politics of Space and Bodies runs through March 1 at the Contemporary Arts Center (44 E. 6th St., Downtown). More info: cincycac.org.
