This week Nick Cave chats with Brian and Ryan about his career-spanning survey exhibition Forothermore at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Cave shares his process conceiving of his dazzling soundsuits and sculptures, as well as how to find exuberance in resistance and activism within a work of art.

This week Maryam Taghavi casts a spell over Brian and Duncan. Will they recover? We don't know. What we know is this... Taghavi plays and pulls codes at the edge of beauty and language. What about languages beyond languages? In her work she uses and recreates a language of the occult practices derived from Islamic mysticism. Her sigils promise to evoke real and active metaphysical powers. These forms become channels, lovely and beyond form itself – concept to volition, presence to absence. The works are a wish invoked. The conversation a wish fulfilled. Will Brian and Duncan ever be the same?

https://www.maryamtaghavi.com/

https://artadia.org/

The Bad at Sports crew is joined by Azadeh Gholizadeh. Her works explore the body, landscape, and the fragmentation of memory. Her works use weaving and needle work to generate and worry her images and objects. The works call to mind a powerful connection to place and dismantle that connection through a glitchy digital memory and build towards a reassembled experience. Azadeh Gholizadeh is a Chicago-based artist and educator, and a 2022 Artadia awardee.

https://www.azadehgholizadeh.com/

https://artadia.org/

Splitting her time between Spain and Chicago, Selva Aparicio is a research based interdisciplinary artist, whose work includes sculpture, installation and performance. On today's episode of Bad at Sports Center, Jesse and Ryan speak with Selva following the announcement of her 2022 Artadia Award. We discuss the origins of her medical research, the ethical means by which she sources her materials, and the context of community and place in her practice.

https://www.selvaaparicio.com/

https://artadia.org/awards/

Everything Must Go, so let's. Jeffrey Michael Austin — interdisciplinary artist and musician — joins Ryan Peter Miller and Jesse Something Malmed to talk about their reflective new exhibition at the Chicago Art Department. Hope in the dark, illusion, allusion, elusiveness, late capitalism, climate crisis, the collective, the needing-tending, the tenderness of a phrase like *help wanted* and enduring questions of scale and capacity guide our winding conversation. What else?

https://www.jeffreymichaelaustin.com/

https://chicagoartdepartment.org/

Bad at Sports welcomes Ashanté Kindle and Josie Love Roebuck from LatchKey Gallery and their exhibition "CROWN" at Expo Chicago 2022.

Working from a place of healing, "CROWN" explores and rejoices in the legacy of Black hair. The exhibition, named after the CROWN Act - a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination which is the denial of employment and educational opportunities because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including braids, locs, twists or bantu knots - luxuriates in the scope, range, beauty, and legacy that is black hair.

https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/

https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/woks-by-ashant-kindle

https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/artist-josie-love-roebuck

https://www.gioswaby.com/

https://www.claireoliver.com/artists/giovanna-swaby/

This week on Bad at Sports, Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney, the filmmakers behind Make A Distinction, join Jesse and the Block Museum's Curator of Media Arts, Mike Metzger. Make A Distinction is an innovative, hybrid non-fiction feature that blends together strains of essayistic, observational and agitprop filmmaking into a blistering montage. Political in a capital P way, it's urgent for most everyone, especially those of us in the so-called Chicago universe.