3XSANGUINATION

This event archive unfolds through individual posts for each artist, beginning with performance documentation from Exsanguination, followed by biographies and archival images used for event promotion.

E X S A N G U I N A T I O N

Hairpin Arts Center | November 15 | 2025

Above photos: Exsanguination | Hairpin | Photo by Charlie Arsenault

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Roberto Sifuentes is an interdisciplinary performance artist. His work fuses highly charged cultural issues with a wild pop culture aesthetic. From homeland security to extreme reality television – from video games to military training – from fetishism to evangelism – Sifuentes creates interactive performance installations where personas wind their way through psycho/sexual/political/ universes. The result is a cinematic style that uses satire, humor, and spectacle to peel away the viewer’s protective layers and reveal society’s desires, fears and obsessions.

image credit: #exsanguination, Roberto Sifuentes, Pictura Dordrecht, Netherlands. Photos by Joseph Ravens

Sifuentes’ recent projects include: #exsanguination, a collaboration with new media artist jonCates and Aram Han Sifuentes (present); “Reculmulations: Digital Avatars and Performance objects” A collaboration with digital artist Claudia Hart and composer Edmund Campion (Black and White Gallery NYC).

A founding member of La Pocha Nostra performance troupe (San Francisco), Sifuentes has collaborated and performed with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra throughout at over 800 venues throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. Projects with La Pocha Include: “Corpo Illicito” (2009-2011), “The New Barbarians Collection Fall ’07 X-teme Fashion show and Human Auction” (Arnolfini, 2007), “Divino Corpo” (NRLA, 2008) “The Mapa/Corpo Series: Interactive rituals for the new millennium” (2005-2009), The Mexterminator Project (1997-2001), BORDERscape 2000

(1998-99), The Temple of Confessions (an interactive performance/installation which opened at the Corcoran Gallery in October 1996), El Naftazteca: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 AD, and The Dangerous Border Game.

Sifuentes has co-authored two books: Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy (Routledge 2011), and Temple of Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (Powerhouse Books 1997).

Sifuentes is a Collected Artist of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

From 2001-2006, Sifuentes was in residence at LaMaMa ETC in New York as Artistic Director of The Trinity College/La MaMa Performing Arts Program NYC. He was the 2008 Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Eminent Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbus State University, Georgia.

Sifuentes is currently a tenured full Professor and Chair of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.robertosifuentes.com | @rsifuentes

*Sifuentes’ performance is related to SAIC's Faculty Sabbatical Triennial

image credit: #exsanguination, Roberto Sifuentes, Pictura Dordrecht, Netherlands. Photos by Joseph Ravens

about the work | TRIGGER WARNING: BLOOD AND LEECHES

In this performance, the bleeding body stands in for the displaced, invisible, and forgotten, and becomes a site for activism, penance, and reinvention.

Responding to hyper-mediatized, colliding images, and sensory overload of global despair, Roberto Sifuentes (in collaboration with Aram Han Sifuentes and Jon Cates) has been working on a performance called #exsanguination since 2017.

In this performance leeches are placed on Roberto's body to (re)create various iconic and familiar tableaus of violence seen and unseen in the popular media. Source material comes from popular sensationalist tabloids from Mexico and other parts of Latin America depicting cartel violence, autopsy drawings depicting wounds from police involved shootings of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and others. Leeches are placed below his eyes in performance in reference to the painful tears shed as a result of this contemporary horror.

Initially the leeches were used as a tool to incite an abundant flow of blood, with their strong natural anticoagulant. However, as we continue to use leeches, our performance incorporates and responds to the history of bloodletting, biological characteristics of the leeches, and the metaphors associated with the parasitic worms.

Above photos: Exsanguination | Hairpin | Photo by Charlie Arsenault

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Odette Stout is an artist and drag performer emerging from Chicago underground nightlife. They stage intermedia performances that cast collaborating artists as otherworldly living artworks, called on to help tell stories from spaces where self-creation is a survival art practice. Their runway events synthesize fashion, digital installation, dance, drag and poetry. Afterwards, garments from these projects become part of a costume library, lended out of their studio to local performers and artists. These wearables are documented through their many lives and uses as they gradually degrade and vanish into underground lore.

Notable exhibitions and performances include The Sculpture Center, Currents New Media, Roots and Culture, Co-Prosperity, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Ars Electronica, Kinsey Institute, and Hyde Park Art Center. Partners in support include 3Arts, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago Artists Coalition, ACRE and Southern Graphics Council International. Their project Local Legend, a mixed-reality runway performance dramatizing their queer family’s last year in Indiana, was featured in the Reader’s annual Best of Chicago issue as the “art show that flexed on Chicago’s place in the new media landscape.” Stout’s writing has been published in WUSSY magazine and featured at Poetry Foundation. They teach digital media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.odettestout.com | @000.dette

Above photos: Exsanguination | Hairpin | Photo by Charlie Arsenault

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Ále Campos (b. 1994, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker whose elastic studio practice is anchored in the vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste’. They generate live performance works that are often rhapsodic and mediated by technology, unfolding from and into the mediums of sculpture, sound, text, video and installation. Their work tends to dissect perception and relationality, both aspects that are inherent to the medium of performance. Drag is a conceptual framework through which they consider performance making, specifically the stage and its borders, the malleability of the gaze, how to de/construct an image and how to handle time. Drag is a necessary instrument for them to step into liveness. It is their approach to challenging how we are witness to ourselves and each other, on and off stage.

They received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022). Their work has been shown at The Poetry Foundation, Hyde Park Arts Center, NO NATION, Comfort Station, Heaven Gallery, Ruschwoman, Chicago Artists Coalition, Jude Gallery, Roots & Culture, Elastic Arts, SITE/less (Chicago, IL), Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO), Collar Works (Troy, NY), September Gallery, The 405 Project (Hudson, NY), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), SS Gallerie (CDMX), BMOCA (Boulder, CO), Pamplemousse Gallery (Richmond, VA), Public Space One (Iowa City, IA), Crab Shack x Fjord, and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). They’ve attended ACRE Residency and are a recipient of the 2022 James Nelson Fellowship Award at SAIC and the City of Hudson’s Tourism Board Grant (2021). They were a 2023 BOLT artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition and were named one of the ten New City 2023 Breakout Artists of Chicago. www.ale-campos.com | @celestes.wrld

about the work |  Through Maseca takes on the form of a multimedia ritual performance that magnifies and exaggerates the traditions of making masa. This work is as much about an ecstatic queer longing for reconnection to ancestry as it is about wrestling with a material that represents a colonized and manipulated identity. Extending this tradition from the hands, Campos’ entire body becomes a tool to generate their body weight in masa.

Above photos: Exsanguination | Hairpin | Photo by Charlie Arsenault

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Joseph Ravens (b.1968) earned a B.F.A. in theater, worked as a dancer in Milwaukee, and studied audiovisuals at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam before completing an M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. An internationally recognized artist, curator, and academic, Ravens is the founder of Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery and a faculty member in the Performance Department at SAIC.  www.josephravens.com | @josephravens

image credit: Joseph Ravens | Dirt Nap | Photo by Derick Smith

about the work | Sitting somewhere between cabaret, burlesque, and butoh, CURTAINS CALLING is a new piece by Ravens that reflects on ambition and fame. You got big dreams?

Above photos: Exsanguination | Hairpin | Photo by Charlie Arsenault

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Nikki Telegan is an embodied performance artist who examines the perversity of the wet and messy as both form and fetish. Through the lens of childlike-sensibilities, their work investigates allure of the abject, the call of the void, and the extent to which the body-image can and does exist across space and across time. This strategy is often executed through the use of multi-channel simulation, material play and exploration, layered with notions of death, degradation, pleasure and release.

They hold a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their work has been exhibited in spaces such as the LookOut Series at Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago, IL), INVERSE Performance Art Festival at the Momentary (Bentonville, AR), the Spring Exhibition at Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery (San Luis Obispo, CA), and In Other News Gallery (Kansas City, MO), among others. 

nikkitelegan.com | @pusssygrime_

Performance | Imprinting

Imprinting is a contemplation of what is possible when the body’s material production of nurture and care is redirected and transformed. People who are breastfeeding produce an average of seven gallons of milk over the course of one month’s time of feeding a new human. For these humans, the biological impulse towards love and devotion is attached to the transubstantiated gift of fluid and bond. Through this durational experience of a repetitive, child-like gesture, this work invites others to contemplate our collective capacity for communal love. A queering what it means to nurture, birth, and feed.

defibrillator performance art gallery proudly presents

E X S A N G U I N A T I O N

One blood. One body. Five artists.

Ále Campos | Joseph Ravens | Roberto Sifuentes | Odette Stout | Nikki Telegan

SAT 15 NOV 2025 | 8PM

Hairpin Arts Center | 2810 N Milwaukee Ave | Free

In a layered, immersive environment at the Hairpin Art Center, five Chicago-based artists fracture and recombine the body, a ritual, and the giving of self. Within this performance art exhibition the body stands in for the displaced, the invisible, and the forgotten. It becomes a site for activism, penance, and reinvention.

The event title derives from a particular work within the exhibition. Responding to the hyper-mediatized collision of images and the sensory overload of global despair, Roberto Sifuentes has toured the performance project #exsanguination in various forms since its premiere at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in 2017. This evening marks the conclusion of that project and celebrates its origins by bringing together Chicago-based artists for a one-night-only event.

Exsanguination presents performance art that foregrounds our shared corporeality and vulnerability. Through gestures of giving, exposure, and the literal or metaphorical offering of blood, the artists reveal that beneath differences of identity, gender, politics, or social division, our bodies and spirits are deeply connected. Blood becomes a symbol of empathy, universality, and the fragile, unifying thread of humanity in a time marked by division, hatred, and dehumanization. In opening our veins to the audience and to each other, we acknowledge our shared flesh and recognize our shared compassion.

The Hairpin Arts Center is a Chicago 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization with a performance and exhibition space overlooking the six-corner intersection of Milwaukee Avenue, Kimball Avenue, and Diversey Parkway—a fitting home for visual art, performance, installation, hybrid forms, and community-engaged projects. Located on the second floor of a restored 1930s Art Deco flatiron building, the Center is dedicated to empowering, engaging, and transforming communities through the arts by offering space, resources, and time for artists and arts organizations across the performing, visual, technological, and healing arts. Visit www.hairpinartscenter.org or follow @hairpinartscenter.