2025 LAB ARTIST

cat mahari’s practice is built from a richly layered body history, stemming from an archive of research, physical training, and questioning with an intent to manifest an intellectual, material, and informal legacy of undisciplined Blk liberation. She is a 2025 Chicago Dancemaker Forum Lab Artist and 2023 Dance/USA Fellow. In 2021, she was named a City of Chicago Esteemed Artist Awardee and received a 3Arts Award. Additionally, cat is a recipient of a 2024 MCA-Chicago New Works Initiative Commission, 2023 MAP Fund microgrant, and 2022 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Emergency funding for the triptych work blk ark: the impossible manifestation. Her work interdisciplinary installations, performances, sound art, and films engages national and international communities, including: the mixtape series violent/break: volumes I and II, sugar in the raw, and migration pressures and strategies. mahari aka culture free aka abstrakt blk aka mississippi is an active culture bearer of hip hop and house, student of diasporic and contemporary performances practices, and caregiver. She holds a BFA from UMKC-Conservatory and a MA in Performance, Practice, and Research from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama at the University of London.

Current Practice/Project: All Roads Lead to Rome is a 3-act sound score for sculpture and movement intrigued by the socio-infrastructural gravitation of empire, the mundane spectacle and immediacy of attention, thought, and action that lead people to where they are/are going now. 32 subwoofer sculptures are created made of southern yellow pine. Each sculpture corresponds to the original number of West African founders of Africatown, who are the survivors of the illegal enslavement vessel The Clotilda and US chattel enslavement. Piezo contact mics will be embedded into the sculptures, resonating with the vibrations that emanate from the sculptures, and the vibrations made by others that walk, run, and move around them. The sounds emitted by the contact mics are processed further via tape and synthesizer creating a modulated cyclic-interactive sound field.

“We”, as intentional and unintentional audience-participants of empire experience fragmentation, coalescing, and care without any particular ordering. I wonder… what happens when empire collapses, but the roads are still used? How is stake or claim fed into personal purpose and identity? How do our contemporary philosophies and humors of life reflect empirical past? What ways is the specter of empire suborned to the spectacle of the personal, the mundane, the everyday – the multi-polar?