Bimbola Akinbola: You Gotta Know It: a durational moving meditation on (Black) collectivity, labor, and joy

You Gotta Know It is a durational, moving meditation on Black collectivity, labor, and joy. Spanning the seven-hour period of the museum’s open hours, Bimbola Akinbola performs the 18-step version of the line dance known as the Electric Slide with a small ensemble of Black women performers. The performance uses the shared choreography of the Electric Slide to explore the labor and joy of being in community. You Gotta Know It is accompanied by a constantly shifting soundscape, created by Elise Hernandez, which includes music from across the Black diaspora, poetry, pop culture sound bites, and ambient noise.

This performance is free and open to the public. Visitors are invited to join the performance for as long as they wish over the course of the day.

You Gotta Know It is presented as part of Chicago Performs, the MCA’s annual weekend of groundbreaking new performances by Chicago artists. Each year, three artists share new works of performance, including pieces developed through MCA’s In Progress series and the New Works Initiative Chicago Commission.

Chicago Performs is organized by Tara Aisha Willis, Curator, with Laura Paige Kyber, Curatorial Assistant.

About the Artist

Photo: zaikkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal.

Bimbola Akinbola is a Chicago-based visual artist, performance maker, and scholar. Her artistic and scholarly work is concerned with the complicated and nagging nature of belonging, queerness, and the concept of family. Incorporating a variety of practices ranging from drawing and painting to rubbing her make-up stained skin across surfaces, her work explores mark-making and performance as modes of organization, remembrance, and repair. Bimbola has shown work at the MCA, Center on Halsted, The Riverside Arts Center, and Compound Yellow, and has collaborated on creative projects with universities all over the country. She is an assistant professor of performance studies at Northwestern University.