From February 20–28, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute presents Staging Grounds, a nine-day festival of installations, performances, and public programs that examines how cultural memory is shaped through acts of return, reenactment, and transmission. The festival brings together five international artists—Korakrit Arunanondchai, Jewyo Rhii, Na Mira, Samson Young, and Li Yi-Fan—whose work engages with history as something activated in the present.
Curated by Katherine C. M. Adams, Associate Curator of Time-Based Visual Arts at EMPAC, Staging Grounds unfolds across the building’s theaters, studios, and public spaces, treating the center itself as an active framework for meaning-making. “Staging Grounds is built around practices that return to the past—as ghosts, archive, transmissions—not to freeze history, but to move through it,” Adams says. “Each artist activates EMPAC as a site where memory is staged in the present.”
The festival is anchored by two major new commissions. In the EMPAC Theater, Korakrit Arunanondchai presents “The Ghost Will Take Us by the Hand,” a performance that places the audience onstage while video, sound, light, and choreography unfold across an otherwise empty auditorium. Developed with collaborators Tosh Basco, Aaron David Ross, and DUCKUNIT, the work explores theatrical mythmaking as a vehicle for collective memory, followed by an installation extending its themes through thermal imaging and spectral environments.
In Studio 1, Jewyo Rhii’s Wing Theater transforms the space into what EMPAC describes as “a living site of process, reflection, and storytelling.” Drawing from Rhii’s long-standing investigations into mobility, displacement, and artistic labor, the installation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States in more than a decade and is accompanied by performances and public programs.
Additional installations and screenings expand the festival’s geographic and conceptual reach. Na Mira examines contested military landscapes in Seoul through a live transmission staged in the EMPAC Theater Lobby, while Samson Young presents a multi-part sound work tracing the former border between Mainland China and Hong Kong, Liquid Borders. In Studio 2, Li Yi-Fan screens What Is Your Favorite Primitive, a film built in a video-game engine that reflects on virtual production and digital identity.
Installations are open daily, with performances, artist talks, workshops, and a free community lunch scheduled throughout the festival. All installations are free and open to the public; select performances are ticketed. More information and reservations are available on the EMPAC website.
