Performance by Tris Vonna-Michell on Sunday, September 28, at 3 p.m. in the Museum Theater, with a reception to follow in the Bancroft Lobby.

Each story told is an act of shaping the world. Bending the Word brings together four artists who employ a range of media—including video, live performance, installation, drawing, and small-scale publications—to actively reinterpret larger shared narratives, ranging from ancient fables and religious texts to official histories and current events. They do so by commingling fact and fiction, recovering lost histories, inserting the deeply personal and anecdotal, connecting disparate narratives, or collapsing time and space. These kinds of pointed narratives make known the machinations of imagination and analysis, the relationships of concrete truths and abstract notions, that individuals face in making sense of the world and their place in it. The artists have something to tell us about what we may not be seeing for ourselves, how a straight view of the world can be bent to prismatic effect, weaving new meanings, opening up critiques, and making space for the multivalence of individual experience.

Tris Vonna-Michell’s performances capitalize on the energy of a live situation to shape each telling and retelling of a narrative. hahn/huhn, evolving since 2004, is delivered rapidly and densely, with slides, photographs, and props, to weave intricate fusions and confusions of identity in the biographies of three individuals in postwar Germany: Reinhold Hahn; Reinhold Huhn; and Otto Hahn. His delivery is intense, at times clearly articulated, at times a blur of staccato rhythm, producing the effect of an aural collage of representative passages juxtaposed with abstract fields of sound. But the narratives are there, advancing forward, curling back onto themselves to repeat, growing exponentially, their fragmentation suggesting some aleatory impulse. By the end one realizes they instead follow a logic of coincidences discovered or invented between facts and fictions, present and past, anecdote and personal experience, engaging with the complex relationship between resolution and dissolution of form and content, sound and image, narrative and structure.

Film screening with Martha Colburn at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 2, in the PFA Theater.

Special Evening of Confabulations with writer Kevin Killian and special guests on Saturday, January 31, at 7 p.m. in the Museum Theater.