Artist Brendan Fernandes on ballet and BDSM

Artist Brendan Fernandes had a life-changing break-up at 21. Not unlike most heartbreaks, however, his was a formative one – the ‘bliss in disguise’ kind that later proved him life works in strange ways. ‘When I was told my body was not equipped for professional ballet, I realised dance and I were through and we would never cross paths again,’ he now remembers. It was this parting of ways with dance in 2006 and starting the prestigious Whitney Independent Study program in New York that helped the Kenyan-Canadian artist craft his unique art practice. Today, Fernandes is known for creating multidisciplinary artworks that challenge the single experience of sculpture, performance or BDSM. 

‘How do I support and burden the body in a world full of power dynamics?’ asks the Chicago-based artist. His response varies from sculptures inspired by ballet training devices and S&M toys, to performances for which he assigns professional dancers. ‘Ballet and kink are both about searching for beauty and pleasure through discipline – and they depend on hierarchy and effortless fortitude.’ Look at a ballet dancer’s foot training device or a back stretcher, and you will notice more than a single similarity with the leather community’s own toys.

‘I always look at feet,’ he admits. This fixation ties back to his teenage years when he struggled to form his own foot’s arch to deliver moves, but it was a challenge. ‘Ballet is romanticised and beautiful as much as it is racialised,’ he says in relation to growing up as a child of Kenyan immigrants outside of Toronto and struggling to fit into the dance community. The only artwork he’s personally performed to this day is Standing Leg (2014), in which he struggled to get up and stand while donning a training device on one foot. 

Standing up is not only a physical act, but an ideological one for Fernandes as a gay artist of African and Indian heritage. He flirts with territories traditionally reserved for White creativity, such as Minimalist sculpture and design, in addition to ballet, and exhibits his work internationally at esteemed museums. His solo exhibition, Contract And Release, at New York’s Noguchi Museum last year introduced a series of abstract sculptures in response to artist Isamu Noguchi’s collaboration with modern dance doyenne Martha Graham. The rocking chair Noguchi had made for Graham’s dancers did not swing. But the version Fernandes created in collaboration with the architecture firm Norman Kelley, and with inspiration from West African market chairs, did. 

Throughout the run of the show, dancers’ movements activated his sculptures, including the rocking chair, in a series of performances. Action, in fact, is a crucial word for Fernandes, and 2019 was a year to prove that with back-to-back crowd-pleaser pieces at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Guggenheim prior to The Noguchi. He took over New York’s top three institutions for genre-bending presentations, all of which blossomed into unapologetically queer performances with a kinetic energy shared between the dancers and the audience.

At The Guggenheim, Fernandes headlined the prestigious annual Young Collectors Party with an immersive performance of shibari bondage masters erotically tying ballet dancers with ropes. Amidst an audience obeying to the night’s leather-themed dress code, the dancers swung back and forth from a cage-like structure with club tunes permeating the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda. A year earlier, the same stage was claimed by a special fan of Fernandes’, none other than Solange Knowles. After her one-night Guggenheim performance, ‘An Ode To’ in 2017, the R&B singer famously named Brendan Fernandes as an inspiration behind the work. ‘As artists, we don’t have a chance to know who sees our works or how they affect people, so hearing it first hand from someone like Solange was truly amazing.’ 

A sense of trust and empathy lie in his performances, which he notes, ‘start choreographed but evolve into communal gatherings’, whether in a dancer’s gently raised hand or a master’s tight wrapping of a rope. Fernandes still continues to push the boundaries of audience engagement through performances he orchestrates around his sculptures. ‘The Master And Form’, which he exhibited as part of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, resumed the namesake series he had debuted at Chicago’s Graham Foundation a year earlier. Activated by professional ballet dancers, the Minimalist sculpture was a rebellious love song for ballet, his first ‘crush’ which he had to heavy-heartedly leave. He thinks, ‘being told I wasn’t right for ballet has pushed me to challenge and augment the body in unconventional ways.’ 

The notion of community has been instrumental for the 40-year-old in carving a space and voice. His heartfelt persona makes him a sought-after collaborator and friend in art and queer communities in Chicago, Toronto and New York, where he has been dividing his time unless he’s travelling in South America or Asia for his next project. Wherever he goes, though, he leaves a mark. After hosting the queer pool party series, Sungay, at Soho House Chicago – where Fernandes is a committee member – he expanded them to Mumbai, Amsterdam, and New York locations. ‘We didn’t have a large budget for props, so we decided to turn guests into them,’ he explains, in reference to collaborating with swimwear line La Porte to create gender-positive swimwear. ‘I love the nature of the collaboration when the work becomes not mine or yours, but ours,’ he says. 

From colourful parties to museum-quality performances, his vision for organising remains joyfully subversive and thought-provoking. When he interviewed Queer Eye star and stylist Tan France at the Chicago House last year, they talked about fashion’s empowering impact on being queer individuals of colour. For Fernandes, fashion has been the final touch to his persona, an elaborate statement of his mark-making in an often black and white world. As much as he’s known for his Kenzo animal-print sweaters and Dries Van Noten fringed shoes, his signature looks come from his collaborations with Thom Browne. The designer created seven different looks for him during the Whitney Biennial and a silk skirt for his Guggenheim performance. ‘And later, I went to The Eagle in that skirt,’ he smiles when referring to cruising the legendary leather bar in New York.

Dressing up has been a family tradition, a way to show strength and perseverance during the good and bad times. ‘Now, I am lucky to wear designers I’ve always looked up to,’ he notes, remembering another unforgettable fashion moment during last year’s Noguchi Museum gala. The night’s honoree Rei Kawakubo told him she ‘finds his work inspiring’, which was exhilarating to hear from a designer known for pushing boundaries of fashion towards art.  

Beyond acclaim from international stars and exhibitions at powerhouse museums, Fernandes is still the punk Kenyan kid who grew up frequenting Toronto’s anarchist record shops in slogan-filled pins and patches. Commitment to his community and remaining true to his craft remain as priorities for the artist, proven by his recent experiment with a traditional sculpting method with his own twist. In order to cast rope harnesses into bronze sculptures for a recent exhibition, Restrain, at his Chicago gallery Monique Meloche, he assigned a rope master to tie harnesses over blow-up male sex dolls’ chests. The experiment took him back to grad school when he majored in bronze casting alongside dance, only with the kinky accent of sex toys as his models now. ‘I am always interested in the idea of absent body in art history, but in this case, the inflatable bodies popped as I poured metal over them.’