The 13th Chair

Video
Author:Villanueva, Maria, AS-Art (ARTD)University of Virginia
Abstract:

The 13th Chair reimagines the Last Supper as a contemporary meditation on transformation and cultural threshold. This multimedia performance work, integrating live performance, video, installation, and abstract movement, uses the biblical gathering as a lens to examine our present moment of necessary change.
The piece centers on performers embodying geometric forms that continually reshape and reconfigure, representing the tension between preservation and release, between accumulated history and demanded evolution. As participants in our generation's own "last supper," the work interrogates the objects, beliefs, and systems we have invested with meaning, asking what must be carried forward and what must be relinquished.
The titular thirteenth chair stands empty, a provocative void that invites multiple readings: audience witness, internal betrayer, failing systems, or our own complicity in transformation. Through this experimental framework, the work poses essential questions not only about what we must become, but what we must confront and reckon with in the process of becoming itself.

Keywords:
performance, digital art, projection
Rights:
All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Virginia
Published Date:
December 01, 2025