Join us for a talk with the artist Sena Başöz discussing with writer and academic Dr Davina Quinlivan – author of ‘Filming the body in crisis: trauma, healing and hopefulness‘ – on the process of creating her new performance commission, Slalom.

We will explore the artist’s performative practice and relation to archive. Concerned with a future impacted by climate change her latest research from the Wellcome Collection archives explores the role of the body practicing ‘care” through the archival process, both as a means of healing and regenerating new futures.

Slalom is commissioned by Block Universe in partnership with Delfina Foundation and SAHA Association (@sahadernegi) and will show at the Wellcome Collection from the 26 – 28 May 2022.

Sena Başöz is a Turkish artist and filmmaker based in Istanbul. Her work investigates healing processes after cases of trauma focusing on regeneration possibilities of what is frozen, dead, stale or lost. The organism’s self-repair and the balance nature obtains in the long run constitute the backbone of the narratives she employs in her works. Her recent solo exhibitions were Clam at Matsuake, Librairie Yvon Lambert, Paris, Astronomical Movements at Bilsart, Istanbul and Ars Oblivionis at Lotsremark Projekte, Basel.

Dr Davina Quinlivan is a writer and academic. Her research explores the correspondences between film, philosophy and literature, especially the representation of the body and the senses. She is the author of several monographs including Filming the Body in Crisis: Trauma, Healing and Hopefulness (Palgrave, 2015), The Place of Breath in Cinema (EUP, 2012), The Spirit of the Beehive (BFI Film Classics, forthcoming) and Joanna Hogg: New British Art Cinema, Female Identity and Aesthetics (EUP, forthcoming). Her work has featured as part of programmed, public events at The Wallace Museum, The Serpentine Gallery, The Tavistock Clinic London, Birds Eye View (Reclaim the Frame) and the British Film Institute. She regularly teaches her film seminar series ‘F: For Flânerie‘ at The Freud Museum and is part of the teaching ensemble for The New School of the Anthropocene. This year has also seen the release of Quinlivan’s memoir,Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration.

© Erhan Arık

Come and watch performers metaphorically slalom towards a future affected by climate change, as artist Sena Başöz investigates how reconsidering the past can be a healing act. Slalom uses movement, sound and Wellcome’s Collection to explore the role of archives in practising ‘care’ and regenerating the future.

Thursday 26th May, 19.00-19.30
Friday 27th May, 13.00-13.30
Saturday 28th May, 15.00-15.30 and 16.00-16.30

UK premiere, commissioned by Block Universe in partnership with Delfina Foundation and SAHA.

Accessibility:
There will be a printed script available for each performance.
The performances on Friday 27th May at 13.00 and Saturday 28th May at 15.00 are relaxed events.

Concept and Direction: Sena Başöz
Choreography: Sena Başöz, Sedef Gökçe, Canan Yücel Pekiçten
Performance and Dance Artists: Sena Başöz, Sedef Gökçe, Canan Yücel Pekiçten

Original Soundtrack: Semih Fırıncıoğlu

Sena Başöz  is a Turkish artist and filmmaker based in Istanbul. Her work investigates healing processes after cases of trauma focusing on regeneration possibilities of what is frozen, dead, stale or lost. The organism’s self-repair and the balance nature obtains in the long run constitute the backbone of the narratives she employs in her works. Her recent solo exhibitions were Clam at Matsuake, Librairie Yvon Lambert, Paris, Astronomical Movements at Bilsart, Istanbul and Ars Oblivionis at Lotsremark Projekte, Basel.

Alex Mirutziu, Doing Sub Thinking, 2018.
Commissioned by Block Universe in partnership with Delfina Foundation and European ArtEast Foundation.

Referencing philosophical thought, national displays of power and collective agency, ‘Doing Sub Thinking’ seeks to illustrate the performative forces at play in society. Exploring the de-personalisation of an individual within a crowd, Mirutziu will bring the audience on a journey to make manifest the intangible gaps between thought and action within group dynamics.

The performance took place in front of Concrete, the OMA-designed building shortlisted for the 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Alex Mirutziu is based in Cluj, Romania. Mirutziu’s practice extends over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, drawing, poetry and performance as well as critical and curatorial projects. In his work he expands on the notions of approximation and proximity in connection to time, dislocating modes of arrival at meaning. He made a collective with a hyper-object — namely himself at 29 – and often operates within this structure. The collectives’ modus operandi is retroactive irony. For Block Universe in Dubai he will show Doing Sub Thinking; a live performance by 3 dancers, originally commissioned by Block Universe in 2018 in partnership with Delfina Foundation and European ArtEast.

Himali Singh Soin with David Soin Tappeser and Shyamant Behal, we are opposite like that, 2019.
Commissioned by Forma Arts, Frieze and Channel 4 Random Acts.

The performance ‘we are opposite like that’ is the live-scoring of the video with poetry, percussion, a harp made of emergency blanket, guitar and a string quartet.

Pairing poetry and archival material, the video recounts the tale of the omnipresent anxiety in Victorian England of an imminent glacial epoch. The disorienting fear of an invasive periphery sent shudders through the colonial enterprise, the tremors of which can be felt in contemporary times. Here, an alien figure traverses the blank, oblivious whiteness, and undergoes an Ovidian transformation into glimmering ice.

This imagery floats above an endangered, soon to be mythical, soundscape: Inspired by field recordings, an original score for string quartet makes audible the sheets of Pancake Ice smashing into each other, the long drone of a boat, the hard timbre of the wind. The tempo is controlled by her shifting latitudes, the dynamics by the temperature variances between the late nineteenth century and her recent expedition.

The performance took place at Concrete, the OMA-designed building shortlisted for the 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. Singh Soin’s work we are opposite like that, 2019 will be brought to the festival by Block Universe. This video work, commissioned for the Frieze Artist Award 2019, will be staged in the form of a performance with live narration and musical accompaniment. Building on her ongoing research into remote areas of the Arctic and Antarctic circles, Soin tells these stories from the nonhuman perspective of ice, a melting fossil that has witnessed historic changes throughout time. For the project, she will also zero in on Britain and the fear of immigration during the Victorian age to try to answer questions such as: Has Britain always feared the encroachment of the outside world?

Eglė Budvytytė’s (LT/NL), Incantation Karaoke, 2018.
Commissioned by Kiasma Theater, Helsinki

Springing from ideas of ecofeminism and finding its power in song, Incantation Karaoke channels multiple beings bruised by modernity or threatened by human hubris—forms of life such as plants and animals, bacteria and fungi, which are crucial to sustaining balance in our ecologies. Through rhyme, rhythm, repetition and vulnerable presence the piece aims to draw the audience into collectivity and singing.

The performance took place at Concrete, the OMA-designed building shortlisted for the 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Eglė Budvytytė is a Lithuanian artist based in Amsterdam. She makes videos and performance situations to explore the relationships between body, architecture, environment and audience. For Block Universe in Dubai, she presents Incantation Karaoke, a performance channeling multiple entities and ideas bruised by modernity and extractivism through a form of a song. The work explores the potential of rhyme, repetition, sonic alteration of the voice and the proximity of the performer to induce the audience into collectivity and singing.

Nkisi is the alias of Melika Ngombe Kolongo, an electronic musician, producer, and artist. Her ongoing sonic research focuses on rhythm as ancestral technology and sound as multi-dimensional intelligence.

Paul Maheke lives and works in London,UK. After studying at ENSA Paris-Cergy, Paris and Open School East, London, Paul Maheke’s works and performances have been shown at Tate Modern, London, the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn, Manifesta 12, Palermo and Chisenhale Gallery, London, amongst others. With a focus on dance and through a varied and often collaborative body of work comprising performance, installation, sound and video, Maheke considers the potential of the body as an archive in order to examine how memory and identity are formed and constituted.

Marijke De Roover (Brussels, BE) is a part-time professional karaoke singer and meme connoisseur, yet currently known mostly for her queer/feminist performance work.

Upcoming projects are among others: MOVE at Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR), ‘I woke up and checked 9 horoscopes until I found one that hurt’ at Arcade, Brussels (BE) and ‘Always go with your worst instincts’ at IKOB, Eupen (BE). De Roover is represented by Arcade, London (UK).

Keiken is a collaborative practice, co-founded by artists Tanya Cruz, Hana Omori and Isabel Ramos in 2015. Based between London and Berlin, they come from mixed diasporic backgrounds (Mexican/Japanese/European/Jewish).

Keiken’s collective title is taken from the Japanese word for experience; the lived experience being an idea at the core of their practice. They are collaboratively building and imagining a Metaverse to simulate new structures and ways of existing and to test-drive possible futures. Keiken creates speculative worlds through filmmaking, gaming, installation, Extended Reality (XR), blockchain and performance. Through these varied mediums they explore how societal introjection governs the way we feel, think and perceive.

Recent selected exhibitions include: 2nd Thailand Biennale, Korat (TH); House of Electronic Arts HEK, Basel (CH); Francisco Carolinum, Linz (AU); Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Penzance (UK); Russian Federation Pavilion, 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice (IT); Koenig Galerie, Decentraland; Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2021, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo (JP) (2021); Yerevan Biennial, Online; FACT, Liverpool (UK); HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (DE); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (DE); transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt HKW, Berlin (DE) (2020); Institute of Contemporary Arts ICA, London (UK); Jerwood Arts, London (UK) (2019).

Zadie Xa was born in Vancouver, Canada on unceded, ancestral and continually asserted territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations and is now based in London, UK. Her work is informed by her experiences within the Korean diaspora, as well as the environmental and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest. Her work often features garments, including cloaks and masks, used for live performance and within installation or moving image. Throughout her practice, Xa uses water and marine ecologies as metaphors for exploring the unknown, whilst also alluding to abstract notions of homeland.

Xa’s practice is highly collaborative, and she has developed ongoing exchanges with dancers, musicians and actors. Since 2006, Xa has worked closely with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo.  Together they have staged live performance, moving image, installations and painting.

UK – £60.00 free standard delivery

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Europe Shipping (tracked) £60.00 + £9.00

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International Shipping (tracked) £60.00 + £12.00

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Jade Montserrat is an artist who works through performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text. Montserrat was the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship for her PhD research, which focused on the development of her practice from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She has exhibited, published and lectured widely; recent projects include the exhibition of the Cage, Clay, Peat trilogy alongside an exhibition of Gainsborough drawings at York Art Gallery. Montserrat lives and works in Whitby, Yorkshire.

Click here to listen.

Block Universe, London’s leading international performance art festival and commissioning body kicks off Frieze Week with Founding Director & Curator Louise O’Kelly in conversation with artist Oliver Beer, known for creating performances focussed on the relationship between sound and space, particularly the voice and architecture.

Listen in on the conversation at The Standard, London’s Library Lounge and hear more about Beer’s upcoming performances and exhibitions that will be taking place at the Louvre and the Opera Garnier this September. Previous presentations have taken place at the Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Vuitton and Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, London amongst others.

Click here to listen to the recording of the talk.

For the fourth edition of You’ve Got Mail!, the artist Brian Fuata, shares the inaugural publication of PEBBLE, an occasional, hard copy, visual poetry mail-out edited by Sydney based artists Mitchel Cumming and Mitch Cairns. It includes contribution from its editors, Brian Fuata, MP Hopkins, Kate Lilley and Zoe M Robertson.

Click here to read the newsletter or here for a closer look at Zoe M Robertson’s proposition.

A new edition will be released every month, so keep an eye on your inbox or subscribe here to receive the latest editions!

For the third edition of You’ve Got Mail!, the artist Nikita Gill shares a video performance that marks the beginning of a new conversation. ‘The Purpose of the Role’ is an ongoing project that sees the artist deconstructing institutional language. Inspired by conversations with artist Jade Montserrat and curator Uthra Rajgopal, Gill considers the barriers to becoming a curator and how the job applications we are so often made to perform for can often times be the first of many barriers for young creatives. In this video performance, Gill deconstructs post Covid-19 job specifications, considering the language used in an industry that claims to centre care. To this end Gill performs the question “What does care look like?”

Click here for the original newsletter.

A new edition will be released every month, so keep an eye on your inbox or subscribe here to receive the latest editions!

Please click here for previous editions of You’ve Got Mail! Our previous contributions were from Himali Singh Soin and Marijke De Roover.

For the second edition of You’ve Got Mail!, the artist Marijke De Roover shares her meme art, alongside current research and experimental writing.

Click here to read the newsletter.

A new edition will be released every month, so keep an eye on your inbox or subscribe here to receive the latest editions!

Please click here for previous editions of You’ve Got Mail! Our inaugural contribution was from Himali Singh Soin.

You can now catch up with Performance Research Network’s roundtable discussions #3 hosted by Liverpool Biennial via the link below:

Speakers: Dr Harold Offeh (Artist), Nikita Gill (Artist) and Julie-Ann Delaney (Art Collections curator at The University of Edinburgh)
Chaired by Dr Samantha Lackey (Director of the Liverpool Biennial)

You can now catch up with Performance Research Network’s roundtable discussions #2 hosted by Block Universe via the link below:

Speakers: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (Artist), Aaron Cezar (Founding Director of Delfina Foundation) and Than Hussein Clark (Artist and founder of London Performance Studios).
Chaired by Louise O’Kelly (Founding Director and Curator of Block Universe)

For the first edition of You’ve Got Mail!, the writer and artist Himali Singh Soin, that we presented during Block Universe 2019 edition, sent us some poetic experimentation from Delhi.

Click here to read the newsletter or here for the complete poem along with the artist’s comments.

A new edition will be released every month, so keep an eye on your inbox or subscribe here to receive the latest editions!

You can now catch up with Performance Research Network’s roundtable discussions #1 hosted by Glasgow International via the links below:

Speakers: Paul Maheke (Artist), Ned McConnell (Curator at the Roberts Institute of Art) and Lauren Wright (Head of Programmes for Metroland Cultures), Zinzi Minott (Artist)
Chaired by Richard Parry (Director of Glasgow International)

Block Universe, London’s leading performance art festival is teaming up with the independent online radio – Know Wave – to delight your ears with a discussion on the mysterious links between performance and transcendence.

On this occasion, Louise O’Kelly, founder and curator of the festival, catch up with two artists from the 2019 edition Paul Maheke and Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) for a mystical exchange.

Listen on Spotify

For more information about Paul Maheke and Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi)’s performance for Block Universe 2019, click here.

The podcast is now also available for you to listen on Spotify and iTunes!

Instructions for Living a Life

Podcast by Sarah Shin & M.J. Harding

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” — Mary Oliver
Instructions for Living a Life is a podcast journey by M.J. Harding and Sarah Shin through inner and outer space bringing together sound, poetry and instructions. A proposal for inhabitation as a practice of freedom and beauty as survival strategy, Instructions for Living a Life explores the coincidence of psychic, geometric and embodied spaces through rituals and exercises of listening, dwelling and breath.

People are unfinished

Livestreamed performance by Jenny Moore w/ Nandi Bhebhe, Tracky Crombie, Sib Trigg, and Rob Bidder (aka housemates)

Part video-collage, part skit, part re-enactment of our new kinds of bodies and movements, and finally a gig in the dining room, think about it like unboxing ourselves after being in the house together for 8 weeks. it’ll start theatrically and end theatrically and there’ll be a moment in the middle where we’ll just play songs and read the YouTube comments.

I’m having trouble with objects and people / peripheral vision, cosmological indecision
I’m having dreams of this never-ending trip / lack of preparation peppered heavy with apparition
Move me out of the house.
I’m holding tight to the skin of my thigh / gradual coming to, pulsing wrist elbow ankle new movement
This is new movement.
This is new. 

I’m having trouble with objects and people / cosmological indecision, peripheral vision
I’m having trouble.
We’re having trouble.
Moving without moving.
We are moving without moving.
This is new.

Tech and livestream support by Rubie Green.

Image credit:
Stills from ‘People are unfinished’.

FERMEN-TOUR

Workshop by Inês Neto dos Santos

Since the beginnings of life on Earth, unseen microorganisms have been performing their collaborative dance on an infinite loop. The process of fermentation taps into the activity of bacteria, yeasts and moulds, teaching us the importance of community, cooperation and the interconnectedness of all things. In this session, we will learn the basic principles for fermenting vegetables, while exploring fermentation as a site-specific practice: a unique map of space-time points which relies on a constant symbiotic relationship linking humans and nature.

You can find the recipe here: Fermentation Recipe by Inês Neto dos Santos

Ingredients & utensils:

1kg of any hardy vegetables, such as: cabbage, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, pumpkin, onions… (just one or a mix!)
1 tbsp of seasoning: garlic, ginger, fresh or powdered turmeric, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, mustard seeds… (possibilities are endless!)
20g of sea salt (fine or coarse, must be non-iodised)

1L jar (or a selection or smaller jars)
1 large bowl
1 chopping board
1 knife
Some freshly boiled water
1 notebook/paper for taking notes (optional)

Image credits
1. Sketch note of the workshop by Elvia Vasconcelos
2 – 4: Stills from ‘FERMEN-TOUR’.

With [the ghosts]
is a digital collage film by Eve Stainton featuring costume pieces by Sophie Donaldson and sound by Caterina Barbieri

[the ghosts] as a queer romantic transmitter, as a mode of intimate teleportation and time traversal, a lockdown mediator. As a volume of horror that can be assigned to a lesbian experience, and as an absurd embodiment of this horror.

[the ghosts] as voices continually made invisible in society, as a volume holding the power to haunt, and bend reality.

As grief, heartbreak, darkness, acceptance.

As a force hanging before disappearance. And as a complicated texture that’s with me, moving me.

With [the ghosts] is a series of digital collage sci-fi choreographies made during lockdown, with love.

Image credits
Stills from ‘With [the ghosts]’.

The full microsite including performance documentation to view through an augmented reality filter is accessible here.

Instructions
On the microsite, you will be able to watch a performance as well as access a filter by scanning the QR code visible on the site, or alternatively via this link. You are invited to view the performance on the screen through the AR Instagram filter, using the back-facing camera. You can also use the front-facing camera to try the character on yourself. Please make sure you have an up-to-date version of Instagram downloaded on your smartphone. If you would like to share videos or photos please tag: @sakeemathecrook @_keiken_ @blockuniverse

Mind, Body and Screen
Mind, Body and Screen explores the interplay between Keiken and Sakeema’s collaboration in the project Feel My Metaverse (Keiken and George Jasper Stone) via a performance with augmented reality (AR), 3D avatars and conversation released via their website here.

This will be a revival of the AR performance of the same title, originally presented at Jerwood Arts in October 2019. Via the website the audience will be able to watch the performance through an Instagram filter, which augments the CGI character of Pando, from the film Feel My Metaverse, onto Crook’s body. The performance, choreographed by Sakeema, is powerfully intimate, exploring the inner, outer and other and crossing the realms of the virtual, digital, future and contemporary. 

On the website, the audience can explore Sakeema’s CGI characters from the present, future and post-human self. There will also be a recorded conversation between Sakeema and Keiken discussing Sakeema’s dance practice, their interconnected collaborative process and the character Pando.

In the film, Crook played the protagonist Pando, named after an 80,000 year old clonal colony of Aspen trees with a shared root system, thought to be the largest living organism on earth. Pando is latin for ‘I spread out’. As part of their collaboration, Sakeema’s dance practice informed the development of the character Pando, and thus it was important to present a physical performance to highlight Sakeema’s dance practice, Mind, Body and Screen at Jerwood Arts. Feel My Metaverse is set in a speculative future where the earth is rendered uninhabitable due to the climate crisis and humans are required to live in a metaverse of virtual worlds. It also explores technology as an emancipatory tool, deconstructing physical limitations through sensory understanding and fluidity. 

The online version of Mind, Body and Screen, including a microsite, performance documentation to view through an augmented reality filter, and an interview between Keiken and Sakeema Crook, was commissioned by Block Universe on the occasion of Sessions.

Mind, Body and Screen was initially developed as part of Keiken and George Jasper Stone’s commission for Jerwood Collaborate! and supported by Jerwood Arts.

Garments by Agf HYDRA ( HYDRA Sartorial Latex uniform offsprings )
Soundtrack by Khidja

Image credits
Stills from ‘Mind, Body, Screen’

A2 sized poster
‘Basic Precinct’, Heji Shin, 2018.
Offset print on paper, 42 cm x 59,4 cm (16.5 x 23.4 in)

A2 sized poster
‘All I Ever Wanted Was Love’, Gillian Wearing, 1992/93.
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
Eliza Douglas in Anne Imhof, Imagine, Anne Imhof, Galerie Buchholz, 2019.
Photographer Nadine Fraczkowski
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
‘A Balloon for Goole’, Scott King, 2020.
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
‘James Baldwin (from the series Great Men)’, Marlene Dumas, 2014.
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
Untitled, William Eggleston, c.1974-75.
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
‘Incidental Self (No. 21)’, Elmgreen & Dragset, 2007.
Photographer Nadine Fraczkowski
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
‘Monkey playing in human mind, UUmwelt’, Pierre Huyghe, 2018.
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
‘A Changeling Can Change’, Mark Leckey, 2020.
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
‘Fatebe Yoga’, Ebecho Muslimova, 2015.
Offset print on paper, 59,4 cm x 42 cm (23.4 x 16.5 in)

A2 sized poster
‘With Hope’, Glenn Ligon, 2017.
Offset print on paper, 42 cm x 59,4 cm (16.5 x 23.4 in)

A2 sized poster
‘still life (Bühnenbild)’, Wolfgang Tillmans, 2020.
Offset print on paper, 42 cm x 59,4 cm (16.5 x 23.4 in)

[Homework 4]

Performative gathering by Rowdy SS & Ekin Bernay with Malthus, Rebecca Bellantoni, Chantel Foo​, Maria Fonseca and Miguel Moreira, Major Zcene, ​tyroneisaacstuart

Rowdy SS & Ekin Bernay have been invited to host an online version of their ongoing project [Homework]. [Homework] is an experimental collaborative project dedicated to creating space for artists from various disciplines, initiated in June 2019 at the home studio of Ekin Bernay as a result of conversations with Rowdy SS and tyroneisaacstuart, in collaboration with Performistanbul. [Homework] is an ongoing series that sees the need for a way for connectivity through collaboration and invites live artists to come together, share, in a live art ‘jam’ and aims to build a community.

Ekin and Rowdy use their respective practices and approaches in tangen to create a meditative space for openings, creativity, an invitation to individual or collective performative energy. Homework is artists taking space and time for experimentation.

For Block Universe : Sessions, ‘​[Homework 4]’​ will be reformatted and hosted on a digital platform. Everyone who signs-up for this event will be part of the performative work itself. This is an opportunity for artists to unite, coexist and co-create globally. We will be creating space within our homes to the potentials of moving, observing, creating within the current situation we are locked in.

Rebecca Bellantoni ​- ​live sound text readings and improvisations

Chantel Foo – ​movement, gesture and performance

Maria Fonseca and Miguel Moreira – movement

Malthus -​ ​vocals

Performative workshop by Jade Montserrat & Nikita Gill

This performative workshop expands upon Drawing as Contagion, a chapter included in forthcoming publication A Companion Guide to Contemporary Drawing, eds Kelly Chorpening and Rebecca Fortnum (2020), written by artist Jade Montserrat considering the inextricable link between drawing, writing and performance. Drawing ‘Out’, ‘From’, ‘With’ – Lips Become The Surface will see Jade Montserrat responding to this text, read aloud by Nikita Gill, where the voice and lips become the surface from which Jade responds to fix charcoal to wall. The audience is invited to become part of the drawing by the very nature of their viewership, and become part of it again, should they choose, by drawing out, from and with text in multiple layered forms.

This workshop invites you to engage in a drawing practice, which can be done on any type of surface you prefer. You are encouraged to bring a surface and drawing materials into the workshop, but this could range from a digital surface like a google doc, a physical surface like a canvas or a piece of paper with chalk or pencils, but also your lips or mind can become surfaces that can function as mediums to translate text into an imaginary or word-based drawing.

Images credits
Stills from ‘Drawing ‘Out’, ‘From’, ‘With’ – Lips Become The Surface’

Performance Electrics will launch POWER NIGHT with a performative intervention in E-WERK’s Turbine Hall and adjunct Engine room. Performance Electrics (Pablo Wendel) will reactivate the mechanical infrastructure of the 1913 power station in order to autonomously power the contemporary art programme. From 14th September 2019 onwards E-WERK will fulfil its long term mission to feed Kunststrom electricity into the national grid on an industrial scale in order to provide renewable electricity into the national grid for local and national distribution.

PERFORMANCE ELECTRICS gGmbH is a non-profit electricity provider, founded by German artist Pablo Wendel (b. 1980, Germany) in 2012. Performance Electrics gGmbH is based in Brandenburg and Stuttgart.

Performance Electrics produces and supplies Kunststrom electricity, a new form of renewable electricity generated through art works and available for public consumption through the national grid. Wendel studied sculpture at the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Stuttgart under Christian Jankowski and at the Royal College of Art in 2009, under Richard Wentworth. Wendel has exhibited internationally, notably at the ICA, London (UK); KunstMuseum, Stuttgart (DE) and Rockbund Art Museum (CHN).

Screening of the Black-and-white video. Duration : 6:03 min

Filmed during floods in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Lightning Dance investigates the influence of the indeterminate electric weather on bodily imagination. The black-and-white video promotes dancehall   choreographers culture; Craig Black Eagle, Oshane Overload, Nick Overload, Teroy Overload who, in the company of the artist, perform solo and group dance routines next to a roadside shack, while heavy rain falls and a billowing, turbulent thunderstorm roars, soaking their clothes. Their movements refer to popular Jamaican Dancehall, a highly sexualized dance style, which Bengolea sees as infused with magical healing powers.

CECILIA BENGOLEA (b. 1984, Buenos, Aires, AR), lives and works in Paris.
She studied Philosophy and Art History at Buenos Aires University and followed the choreographic master Ex.e.r.c.e. by Mathilde Monnier in Montpellier. Bengolea’s video installations and performances have been exhibited at the Gwangju Biennial, Biennale de Lyon, The Tanks and Tate Modern, Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires; Fig-2 25/50 at ICA, London; Block Universe London; Dia Art Foundation; Tokyo Spiral Hall, Biennale de Sao Paulo; The Infinite Mix, Hayward Gallery London; Elevation 1049, Gstaad; Palais de Tokyo; ICA London; Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli and Dhaka Art Summit; TBA21 San Lorenzo Venice; Art Basel Miami Faena; E.A.T Engadin Art Talks; Centre Pompidou; ArteBA Buenos Aires; DesertX; Bienale de Venezia; Der Tank Art Basel; Jean Nouvel train station Geneve Champel. Bengolea has collaborated with french choreographer François Chaignaud since 2005. Their collaborative work Pâquerette (2005-2008) and Sylphides (2009) won the Award de la Critique de Paris in 2010 and the Young Artist Prize at the Gwangju Biennial in 2014. They have co-created dance pieces for their dance company as well as for the Ballet de Lyon (2013), the Ballet de Lorraine (2014) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal (2015). Bengolea collaborates with dancehall artists such as Craig Black Eagle, Bombom DHQ, Damion BG, and with artists Dominique Gonzalez Forster and Jeremy Deller.

Charismatic Megafauna performs a live set of drum-punk-powered missives from their album Semi-Regular as well as more recent compositions. Known for their original costumes, visual projections and anti-establishment energy, the band finds its most vibrant realisation playing live, in the interaction of band, space and audience. Offering a potent mix of girl-gang chants, syncopated drum offensives and mutant synth freakouts, Charismatic Megafauna refract their feminisms through an absurdist lens. This is party music for politically-minded people.

Charismatic Megafauna is Jenny Moore, Georgia Twigg and Susannah Worth, a dance-punk trio from London, UK.

Image: Charismatic Megafauna, by Photo Kate Bones, Styled by Kalina Pulit

As part of her practice Croatian born, Amsterdam based artist Nora Turato, harnesses the versatility of language as an instrument in her absorbing spoken word displays that blur the line between contemporary music and performance art. In her linguistic performances she fuses fragments of advertising slogans, everyday conversations, literature, and social media posts, clichés that culminate in a powerful soundscape to question social norms and patriarchal structures.

Supported by Mondriaan Funds

Nora Turato (B. in 1991 in Zagreb/Croatia), lives and works in Amsterdam/The Netherlands.

Caption:
Nora Turato, the good, the bad and the viscose, 2019, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Photo © Miro Kuzmanovic

Nina Beier’s work test how value is constructed and undone, serving as a meditation on the multitude of power structures that make up our society. Disregarding usual martial arts categorisations of age, gender and weight classes, Beier’s new performance Class, 2019 at E-Werk Luckenwalde’s Turbine Hall, incorporates freestyle wrestlers from the world-renowned Luckenwalder Sportclub, wearing perfumes generally marketed to each their specific demographic. Relying on select rules of the game and the skill sets of the athletes, this charged work bricolages disparate tropes of both violence and identity. While the odours blend, the bodies on display produce a fluctuating image of authority and dominance. The staged nature of Class, 2019 continues Beier’s recurring interest in the possibility of cohabitation of the real and its own representation in the same object or action.

Freestyle wrestlers, carpet, perfumes: Opium, Lynx, Davidoff, Miss Dior, etc
Duration: max. 15 min

With Special Thanks to The World Famous Wrestling Clubs: 1.Luckenwalder Sportclub e.V. & RSV Hansa 90 Frankfurt (oder) e.V

About Luckenwalder Sportclub:

Originated in 1897, “Adler 1897”, The 1. Club for athletes was focused on heavy athletics. International success came to Luckenwalde with the first medal for the European Championship in 1963. Since then, wrestlers trained in Luckenwalde have participated in the World Championships, the European Championships and the Olympic Games.

Caption: Nina Beier, Age, 2015. Performance during Nina Beier: Anti-ageing (2015) seen in Swiss Institute Annual Architecture and Design Series: 2nd Edition, PAVILLON DE L’ESPRIT NOUVEAU: A 21st Century Show Home at the Swiss Institute, New York. Photo: Daniel Perez

Rowdy will inhabit a derelict Bauhaus swimming pool to create a deep space for entanglement, unravelling, connections and disconnections. Somewhere between a happening, performance and installation, we are invited to engage with the space to explore ourselves, our physicalities, and our relationships with technology through a participatory live-soundscape performed by the artist for this unique setting.

*The artist formerly known as Rowdy Superstar.

ROWDY SS (UK), lives and works in London. Rowdy is a multi-disciplinary artist, working with sound, music, dance, installation and live performance. He was a member of Atari Teenage Riot, a Berlin based noise band and has released music on acclaimed indie labels Accidental, DHR and Beat Inc. Rowdy has worked closely with numerous artists and makers including legendary dub creator Lee Scratch Perry, Ron Arad, musicians Eska, Zero 7 and acid house pioneer Adamski and has run successful club nights ‘SOAP’ a no photos, subversive bass heavy alt trap/post-grime night and ‘SONIC’ a club night space for interactive sound/performance art and DJin in London. Recent commissions/works include: Balance – Kottinspektionen Dans, Sweden; 48hours: (w/Last Yearz Interesting Negro), NOW19 Festival, The Yard Theatre; In Movement (w/ Zinzi Minott + Evan Ifekoya) – Somerset House; Fury1 (w/LYIN) – Transmediale Festival, Berlin; Balance – Palais De Tokyo, Paris; Balance (w/ Rebecca Bellantoni) – Block Universe, London; Balance – The Southbank Centre; Balance video screening – CRXSS Platform Festival; WDREV (w/Lol K) – Nuit Blanche, Théâtre de la ville, Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris.

Image: Rowdy SS – Balance – La Manutention, Palais De Tokyo, Paris. 2018. Photo by Ayka Lux

Commissioned in partnership with: Block Universe, Theatre in the Mill, The Yard Theatre, New Queers on the Block, Marlborough Pub and Theatre (UK)

marikiscrycrycry is the performance project of American born, London-based choreographer and artist Malik Nashad Sharpe. Their work operates with an expansive choreographic proposition that utilises dance and live action as a modality that excavates various ontologies around Blackness and Queerness. For POWER NIGHT, they will perform an excerpt from their new work He’s Dead, a work that will evolve over the course of the evening. Beginning with and impossible question ‘Was Tupac depressed?’ traversing a fantastical choreographic landscape that cements in many ways the humanisation of marginal experience. Performed alongside dancer Gareth Chambers, they will investigate defence strategies and the re-cultivation of power through actions and the performing body in E-WERK’s Turbine Hall.

marikiscrycrycry (b. 1992, New York, US), lives and works in London.

Malik Nashad Sharpe graduated with a B.A. in Experimental Dance and Live Art from Williams College, and they hold a diploma in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance. They have shown their work at Tate Britain, London; Block Universe; CCA Glasgow; The Place, London; Théâtre la Chappelle, Montreal; Hackney Showroom, London; Montreal arts interculturels; and Brooklyn Arts Centre, New York, among other festivals and institutions.

Image © Uemura Tadayuki

“Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome together with artist India Harvey and sound designer Josh Anio Grigg invite the audience into an immersive environment combining movement, sculpture, text and sound. a body rites itself – phases of invokes liminal time and tactile materiality, bringing the audience on a sensorial journey. Developed with Producer: Nikki Tomlinson

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s were the most important things come from, where you yourself came from and where you will go “

Rebecca Solnit

Caption:
Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, a body rites itself, 2017, Siobhan Davies Dance, London

Ravioli Me Away will present their brand new opera, which will have its London premiere within the festival, marking the final date of a national tour. The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is a work about freedom, individual and collective aspiration and the cycle of life, taking the audience through a multidimensional journey as ‘the trapped soul of humanity’ searches for a body that can give it meaning. Ravioli Me Away – Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald – have been a band since 2013. They are a high energy collective, undefined by genre, dangerously ambitious, and working with stylistically schizophrenic motifs spanning all-known past, present and future human cultures and sub-cultures.

The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is produced by Ravioli Me Away and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge. Touring and commissioned in partnership with BALTIC Centre For Contemporary Art, Gateshead; The Box, Plymouth; Block Universe, London, with additional support from The Albany, London; Heart n Soul, London; Nottingham Contemporary and The Barbican Theatre, Plymouth. The project is supported with a Grant for the Arts using public funding by Arts Council England.

Photos: Rui Pignatelli, 2019

*New Commission, supported by Arts Council England and Institut Français, London.

Paul Maheke and Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) will collaborate to produce a performance using African cosmology from the Bantu-Kongo and creation stories as its source material. A collaboration of music, design and performance, music producer Nkisi will provide the soundtrack and Ariel Efraim Ashbel the lighting design, within which Maheke will perform. This work is developed in collaboration with Performa in New York, where it will tour after its presentation in London.

Photos by   Manuela Barczewski

Block Universe and Tate invite a selection of artists, curators and writers to reflect on contemporary choreographic practice. Responding to the term ‘post-dance’, coined at the MDT conference in Stockholm (2015), the event considers the implications of an expanded notion of choreography.

Our contributors will be asked to issue provocations and responses that consider choreography in artistic practice. Exploring questions around liveness and the embodied labour of dance, join us in discussing what this means for an expanded understanding of contemporary dance and movement-related practices. Invited to present provocations are artists’ Malik Nashad Sharpe, Paul Maheke, Florence Peake & Eve Stainton from the perspective of their collaboration and academic Amanda Øiestad Nilsen. The event will be chaired by Curator of Nottingham Contemporary, Cedric Fauq.

There will be space for group discussion with the audience during the event. Following the event join us for a performance hosted by CAJ COLLAB in the East Room. CAJ COLLAB is a collaborative platform that invites two artists from different disciplines who have never worked together before to create a piece of performance in one day.

Click here to listen to the conference. Please note the recording is in two parts.

Photos by Manuela Barczewski

UK premiere, supported by Arts Council England. With thanks to Pramma.

Renowned performance artist Michael Portnoy has also revealed the shocking news that he is 35 years older than he has claimed and has been disguising his true age with prosthetic makeup throughout his career. At the festival, in Portnoy (Born 1936) Improvises, he reveals himself for the first time without a mask, improvising and confusing us in his inimitable way with the collision of movement, language and alien logics. Art historian Claire Bishop
will give an introductory lecture on Portnoy’s newly discovered early history in New York in the late 1950s, discussing his influences and antagonisms within the avant-garde communities of dance, poetry and visual art.

Photos by   Manuela Barczewski

This symposium, created in partnership with Goldsmiths Visual Cultures Student Society, will reflect upon contemporary performance practices, looking at the relation of self, identity politics and digital space in the realisation of live work in the UK.

With speakers Isobel Harbison, Hannah Perry, Emily Rosamond, Erica Scourti and Chooc Ly Tan.

Chooc Ly Tan – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://chooclytan.com/about.html

Emily Rosamond – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://www.emilyrosamond.com/

Erica Scourti – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://www.ericascourti.com/

Hannah Perry – Find out more about the artist’s practice here http://www.hannahperry.com/

Isobel Harbison – Find out more about Performing Image here https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/performing-image

Supported by Arts Council England

First UK presentation
Supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute and the Goethe-Institut London, with the additional support of Outset Contemporary Art Fund and the Climavore Residency.

Artist’s talk: Alexandra Pirici in conversaiton with Iwona Blazwick, Director of Whitechapel Gallery.
Monday, 20 May 11am at the Climavore Residency.

Alexandra Pirici  brings the ongoing action Leaking Territories (2017), to London for the first time. Originally made for the decennial art exhibition Munster Skulptur Projekte 2017, The Friedenssaal in Münster’s historic town hall served as the starting point for a work remediating political world events with live bodies, conjuring and linking together actions from different times and spatial realities, revealing the concept of a well delimited, well enclosed horizontal territory and stable identity as a fiction.

Performed by: Luisa Saraiva, Susanne Songi Griem, Boar Beniamin, Pia Wagner, Fang-Yu Shen, Rolando Matsangos.

Photos by Manuela Barczewski

In the 1980s, the influential Performance Magazine (1979-1992) started presenting performance art events in London, including Art in Danger, At the Edge and Last Sweat of Youth at the Diorama and AIR Gallery. This culminated in EDGE 88, one of London’s first site-specific performance/installation festivals and the focus of the recent Edge of an Era project exploring performance art in the late 1980s.

EDGE 88 was a forerunner of London based festivals that emerged in in the 2000s such as Block Universe, Fig 1 and 2, SPILL Festival of Performance, Steakhouse Live, Tempting Failure and others, and this event brings together a panel of artists and curators from the 1980s and now to look at the context that EDGE 88 operated in and how that compares with the current landscape in which Block Universe presents its work. Featuring Rob La Frenais (original director of EDGE and co-curator of Edge of an Era), Helena Goldwater (artist and co-curator of Edge of an Era), Phoebe Patey Ferguson (academic, artist and curator of VFD, London), Louise O’Kelly (Founding Director and Curator of Block Universe) and Alex Eisenberg (LADA and co-curator of Edge of an Era).

Some of the questions that the panel will address are: What are the changes in the artistic landscape and the visibility of performance art practices? What artistic lineages do artists identify with now and how does this affect their relationship to the history of performance? What are the political resonances between the late 1980s and now and how does this impact on the work that is being made and presented?

As part of the evening we will also screen a short film by Morgan Quaintance commissioned for Edge of an Era, 2019, Anne, Paul and Richard, which evokes the spirit of the 1980s through the work of Bow Gamelan Ensemble (Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson).

All photos by Manuela Barczewski except last image: Video still from EDGE 88, Told by an Idiot – Derek Kreckler, Adrienne Gaha and Sarah Miller, 1988.

Supported by Arts Council England

Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick in conversation with Block Universe artist Alexandra Pirici.

Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick and Block Universe artist Alexandra Pirici, for a lunchtime talk, discussed the artists ongoing practice and her work Leaking Territories, on view at London’s Imperial War Museum from 22-28 May, 2-6pm daily.

Alexandra Pirici is an artist with a background in dance and choreography who works undisciplined, across different mediums. Her work has been exhibited within the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017, the Venice Biennale – Romanian Pavilion at the 55th edition, Tate Modern London, New Museum New York, Art Basel Messeplatz, The 9th Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 10, Centre Pompidou – Paris, Museum Ludwig Cologne, the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, Russian Museum St. Petersburg, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, HAU Theatre Berlin, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, among many others. Alexandra Pirici works in museum, theatrical frameworks and the public space. Her performative artworks fuse dance, sculpture, spoken word and music. They deal with monumentality or history, playfully tackling and transforming existing hierarchies; they reflect on the history and function of gestures in art and popular culture, or on questions about the body, its presence, absence or image, and the politics of capture.

Climavore Residency in partnership with Outset.

Photos by Nikos Akritidis

Reading and artist talk with Block Universe artist Sophie Jung at 30 Old Burlington Street (Cork Street Galleries) on Sunday, 19 May 2019.

Sophie Jung read The Bigger Sleep libretto and was joined by Paul Clinton for a conversation, discussing the artists practice and her work The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) which premiered in London with Block Universe on 18 May 2019.

Excerpt: We don’t fall in love with the fictional detective because she knows all the answers and always gets it right. We identify with her because she too is caught in signs, bungling interpretations of words or events, and only occasionally stumbling upon something like a workable meaning. If Jung were pretending not to perform, not to be delivering words for an audience, but just saying them straight and sincerely, in full confidence of their meaning, that would be the real con trick. Authenticity here is in acknowledging the pretence.

Sophie Jung might be the loose end artist. Her way of allowing things to hang is another way of keeping them dynamic, without resolution, not finishing an idea or a work. This suspension, or lack of resolution, is as much a purgatory and limbo as it is a way of keeping things alive and open.

The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) is an adaptation of Jung’s major installation at the Kunstmuseum Basel into a site-specific performance for Block Universe’s 2019 edition.

Programme
12noon Reading by Sophie Jung
1:30pm Sophie Jung in conversation with Paul Clinton

A limited and signed edition of Sophie Jung’s libretto was available during the event.

The set of The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) could be visited daily from 11am to 6pm from the 19 May to 1 June.

We thank Cork Street Galleries / Pollen Estate for generously providing the space.

Photos by  Manuela Barczewski

* Supported by Arts Council England

An afternoon of poetry readings by artists and writers whose work reveal the performativity of language, as part of Block Universe, London’s leading international performance art festival.

The playful relationship between experimental writing practices and performance is enacted as words are transposed across formats, from the page, through the digital and in live utterances. Current Whitechapel Gallery Writer in Residence Rachel Pimm is joined by writers Iphgenia Baal, Himali Singh Soin and Abbas Zahedi.

19 May – 2 June, 11am-6pm daily
Film screenings in partnership with Film and Video Umbrella
Cork Street Galleries, Mayfair, London (downstairs).

Curated by Film and Video Umbrella’s Curatorial Practice Awardee, Cynthia Silveira.

About

Cynthia Silveira is a curator and arts producer with a special interest in film and photography, public programming, and cross cultural collaboration. Cynthia’s work is focused around exploring Black British visual culture and Black diasporic dialogues and also tackling the issues surrounding accessibility and education in the arts.

Inspired by her time studying Design Management & Cultures at the University of Arts London, Cynthia co-founded a curatorial collective called BLXCKOUT and worked on the ‘If we’re going to heal…’ exhibition tour with Black Blossoms.

Film and Video Umbrella                       

Cynthia Silveira is the recipient of Film and Video Umbrella’s Curatorial Practice Award, an annual opportunity to support people from low-income backgrounds into curatorial careers by offering them up to £20,000 of funding, desk space, mentoring, and year-long support from the FVU team, to realise an ambitious project of their choosing.

Film and Video Umbrella is the UK’s premier commissioning agency for artists’ moving-image. We aim to act as a safe pair of hands in which artists/curators can experiment with new ways of working and test out new ideas. We work in partnership with galleries, museums and other cultural partners in the UK and internationally to bring the work of artists working in the moving image to the widest possible audience, and we develop events and workshops alongside each of our exhibitions in order to engage new audiences with that work, and broaden its reach.

This year, Block Universe, London’s leading performance art festival, takes place across three major cultural locations in Europe. As the festival continues to celebrate its fifth anniversary, it will expand internationally to continental Europe for the first time. Following the organisations largest London festival programme to date and an inaugural intervention at the Venice Biennale, both this Spring, Block Universe will present a sister programme of performances and interventions as part of the launch of a major new German institution: E-WERK Luckenwalde. The occasion cements Block Universe’s founding of a new international strand, establishing the organisation further as an international commissioning body. 

E-WERK Luckenwalde is a new Brandenberg institution in a former brown coal power station, with a bi-annual art programme, artist studio programme and commissions. E-WERK Luckenwalde will also produce its own renewable energy that will be fed back into the National Grid. POWER NIGHT, curated by Block Universe, will take place in several locations across the large scale, 10,000m2, E-WERK site and will connect artistic concepts with the real production of energy. The programme will bring together EWERK’s architecture with cutting-edge performance at the cross-section of contemporary art, dance and music for one night. Performers will map the raw spaces of the listed buildings with their bodies, objects, soundscapes and installations, creating live environments across spaces such as a nearby abandoned Bauhaus designed swimming pool and E-WERK’s galleries, which include a 350m2 Turbine Hall and outdoor sites. 

Fittingly, for a curated programme that spans both Europe and the UK in the current political context, the 2019 programme of Block Universe explores the concept of internal and external ‘world-making’ by looking at the diverse environments and realities we create for ourselves to exist within, whether those be mental, physical or virtual spaces. Taking place alongside Berlin Art Week, this first edition of POWER NIGHT will reflect on the vision of sustainable futures in the context of a historic power station, whose very fabric carries a wealth of history and collective memory. Taking E-WERK’s position as a new sustainable institution and power station, the performance programme asks us to consider our role in shaping the world that we live in.

Curated by Block Universe’s Founding Director and Curator, Louise O’Kelly and Curator and Director of International Programme, Katharina Worf, POWER NIGHT included new commissions and premieres by eight international artists and collaborators.

The programme took place during Berlin Art Week 2019 on Saturday 14 September, with performances running from 6pm to midnight. POWER NIGHT included Nina Beier (DK), Cecilia Bengolea (AR/FR), Charismatic Megafauna (UK), Marikiscrycrycry (US/UK), Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome (UK), Performance Electrics gGmbH (GER), Rowdy SS (UK) and Nora Turato (CR/NL).

Block Universe consists of an all-female team: Founding Director & Curator Louise O’Kelly; Katharina Worf, Curator & Director of International Programme; Xica Aires, Head of Production, Tatjana Damm, Managing Director, Nicola Jeffs; Press Relations and Sara Muthi; Communications Assistant.

EWERK’s Team: Helen Turner, Pablo Wendel, Adriana Tranca, Myrina Andrack, Maike Carstensen, Courtney Russel, Jen McHugh, Clair Boetschi and all EW volunteers.

POWER NIGHT is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and supported by Mondriaan Fonds

With Special Thanks to Edelmat Veranstaltungstechnik and The World Famous Wrestling Clubs: 1.Luckenwalder Sportclub e.V. & RSV Hansa 90 Frankfurt (oder) e.V., Campari, Nordholz, the city of Luckenwalde, Absolut, Feldschlossen

Territorial Symphonies is a new commission by Indrė Šerpytytė, produced by Block Universe. The commission is presented in partnership with Dubai-based Alserkal, with the additional support of the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the High Commission of Cyprus, UK. 

All performances will take place on the Rio dei Giardini.
Wednesday, May 8: 3–4:30pm
Thursday, May 9: 10:30–11:30am in front of the Navy Officers Club and 3-4:30pm
Friday, May 10: 3–4:30pm

During the 58th Venice Biennale Indrė Šerpytytė presents Territorial Symphonies. This new commission explores inclusion and exclusion in the biennale, one of the most prominent moments in the international arts calendar. In Territorial Symphonies a brass band plays national anthems of the more than 60 countries that came later to his world stage. Not having the luxury of a permanent space, their pavilions lie outside of Giardini.

Taking this as a starting point, this new work seeks to highlight the power dynamic between the countries on the inside and outside. As an act of protest, the performers will play outside the bounds of the Giardini, highlighting the countries’inability to have a presence within the grounds itself. Forming a continuous fanfare to the missing and absent, the work asks us to reassess the established borders and territories that govern geopolitical landscapes and ideologies.

Countries in full:

Albania, Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Chile, China (People’s Republic of), Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Kiribati, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Seychelles (Republic of), Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa (Republic of), Syrian Arab Republic, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Wales, Zimbabwe.

The Bigger Sleep – rehush (hush) is an adaptation of Jung’s major installation at the Kunstmuseum Basel into a site-specific performance for Block Universe.

While in the former iteration, ‘Frau Welt’, the languid protagonist of the piece, resided in her glamorously furnished “now-a-clock”-mansion, her delusion has now visibly cracked. We are asked to enter the psychological space of a starkly lit basement below a vacant building, in which the lethargic haggle between presence and absence, or the speculative and the substantive has become undeniable. A redundant figure, still posturing as rulingly classy, Frau Welt reads her script, veers off, sings and sighs, shrugs and goes on rehearsing for a future that has long been cancelled while her unnamable servant serves her “burbon after borbon after burbun after borbun”

Harnessing the complexities of language, Jung makes subtle alterations to open up new dimensions of meaning, that throw the theatricality of the real and the authenticity of play-acting into relief in a glossy but crumbling world of anticipatory grief, derailed by the “vacuous promises and looped distractions of terminal capitalism”, in which nothing seems as it is.

The set could be visited daily from 11am to 6pm from the 19 May to 1 June.

Performance schedule:
Saturday, 18 May 2019, 9pm
Wednesday, 29 May 2019, 9pm
Thursday, 30 May 2019, 9pm
Saturday, 1 June 2019, 9pm

Special Event (Free):
Sunday, 19 May 2019, 12:00 Reading, 1:30pm Sophie Jung in conversation with Paul Clinton

Cork Street Galleries, 30 Old Burlington Street, London W1S 3AR

* UK Premiere -
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Swiss Cultural Fund and National Culture Fund, Luxembourg (FOCUNA)

Liz Glynn will produce a site-specific performance work that raises questions of how we articulate and share our respective cultures through objects, whether it is in the past, present or in the future. The work was developed out of research undertaken during her residency at Delfina Foundation in 2018, as part of the ‘Performance as Process’ series.

Biography
Liz Glynn (b. 1981, USA) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College (2003) and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2008). Glynn has participated in residencies at Delfina Foundation, London, and Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida. She has received several awards including California Community Foundation, Emerging Artist Fellowship (2010) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Associate Artist Fellowship (2007). She is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

Her recent solo exhibitions include, The Archaeology of Another Possible Future, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2017); Open House, a project of the Public Art Fund, New York (2017); The Myth of Singularity, LACMA, Los Angeles (2016); and RANSOM ROOM, SculptureCenter, New York (2014). Glynn’s work has been presented in group exhibitions at venues including the Barbican Arts Centre, London; New Museum, New York; MoCA, Los Angeles; Petit Palais, Paris; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Reviews of her work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, frieze, The New York Times and Vanity Fair, among others.

In partnership with Protein Studios, Shoreditch

This edition presents:
Season Butler, Evan Ifekoya and Harun Morrison

HOTLINE aims to be a critical space for discussion and disagreements, not an artist talk. An itinerant space for provocations & opinions, beyond your bedroom, books, bad journalism and your social media feed.

HOTLINE is a constantly shifting format for a public conversation, a space to share in the love the hate the ambivalence and the complexity of things, hosted by Jamila Johnson-Small and Sara Sassanelli. HOTLINE now happens subject to invitation by a space/individual/festival.

We are interested in why people do what they do, how the particular logics are formed that drive and direct decisions/actions/tastes and art-making. We are interested in shifting needs provoked by the contemporary condition and looking for ways to collectively re-organise and think through conversation, to encourage generative exchange and live encounters that can serve to activate bold creative action.

We are disinterested in the growing demand for artists to be present in ways beyond the show/exhibition/text that create spaces and exacerbate systems of unequal exchange. At HOTLINE we invite, and expect, everyone present to bring what they’re bringing, supported by the presentations offered by three people each session. 

Drinks reception and the last chance to see Alex Mirutziu’s exhibition “Between too soon and too late” at Delfina Foundation – and hear from the artist – on the final day of the show.

The event followed Alex Mirutziu’s newly commisioned performance work, showing between 3pm and 4pm in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of the Arts as part of Block Universe festival. The work, Doing sub thinking, explores the de-personalisation of an individual within a crowd and is co-commissioned with Delfina Foundation and European ArtEast Foundation.

*New Commission in association with Studio Voltaire, Supported by Battersea Power Station Foundation, Aziz Foundation and Lambeth Community Events Fund

This new performance was initiated by an invitation to community activist groups across London to attend a series of free stand–up comedy workshops led by professional comedian Logan Murray. Participating groups include Migrants Organise, Indoamerican Refugee and Migrant Organisation Brixton, the Independent Workers Union, X–Talk and the Latin American Women’s Rights Service.

Amongst the participants are a Bulgarian cleaner turned small business owner, a rat–catcher, a refugee living in an East London anarchist squat, a sex–worker, a freelance writer and a Deliveroo courier. The performances comprise a series of five minute routines presented in the gallery which has temporarily transformed into a comedy club, guest compered by The White Pube.

ROUTINE offers a platform for Londoners living precariously to practice comedy as a vehicle to address the politics and intersection of self–representation, migration and the gig economy. It is a live element of They Are Here’s project Laughing Matter (24 May–10 June 2018), which also includes an installation of sculpture, soundworks and video.

Laughing Matter is the culmination of In Residence, a new strand of Studio Voltaire’s Participation Programme, which supports artists with a particular focus on public and social practice, connecting the gallery with our locality over an extended period of time.

Supported by Battersea Power Station Foundation, Aziz Foundation and Lambeth Community Events Fund.

Special thanks to Battersea Arts Centre, Somerset House Studios and MayDay Rooms.

*New Commission in partnership with Delfina Foundation and European ArtEast Foundation.

To coincide with his exhibition at Delfina Foundation, Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu will present a new performance work in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Referencing philosophical thought, national displays of power and collective agency, Doing Sub Thinking seeks to illustrate the performative forces at play in society. Exploring the de-personalisation of an individual within a crowd, Mirutziu will bring the audience on a journey to make manifest the intangible gaps between thought and action within group dynamics.

You would almost expect to find it warm (2018) by Laura Wilson is a site-specific commission from Block Universe and Franck Bordese, with the support of the British Museum, Institut Français and Arts Council England. Thank you to Jean-Marc Choblet, Anne Hansen (in honour of) and Mr & Mrs B. Bordese.

Performed by Elina Akhmetova, Kirsty Arnold, Iris Chan, Adam Moore, Daniel Persson and Piedad Seiquer. With thanks to Yeast Bakery.

Giselle Stanborough (b.1986, Waratah, NSW, Australia) is an intermedia artist based in Sydney. Her works combine online and offline elements to address how user generated media encourage us to identify and perform notions of self, and the relationship between connectivity and isolation. Motivated by a curiosity in the increasing indeterminacy between the private and public spheres, Stanborough’s work often addresses contemporary interpersonal experiences in relation to technology, feminism and consumer capitalism. Her work has featured in the Washington Post’s “Pictures of the Day” and has been shown at major venues in the Asia-Pacific region such as Australian Center for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, Australia (2017); Houngcheol Choi, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) (2017); Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia (2015) and Next Wave Festival 2014, Melbourne, Australia (2014).

Curator Vanessa Boni in conversation with Block Universe artist Hanne Lippard.

Join Bristol’s Spike Island Curator Vanessa Boni and Block Universe artist Hanne Lippard for a lunchtime talk, discussing the artists ongoing practice in relation to storytelling, immateriality, absurdity, black humour and what it means to solely use the voice as artistic medium.

In partnership with Somerset House, supported by Goethe Institute.

Hanne Lippard (b. 1984, Milton Keynes, UK) is a British Norwegian artist based in Berlin who focuses on the production of language solely through the use of voice. In performances, installations, videos and audio pieces, she arranges, composes and combines her own wordplays with words by others. Fragments from everyday speech, sourced from various online platforms, are constantly reworked through the use of repetition, pronunciation and rhythm. Phrases and images associated with contemporary topics such as work, success, and lifestyles are evoked. By merging content and form and through a gentle rhyme, her vivid words begin to lose their prescribed value and modify to take on new meanings. With an almost hypnotic, cleansing approach, the vocal sequences sink into the listener’s mind and create a free-form, associative pattern of melodic, linguistic formulas.

*New Commission in partnership with Gaia Art Foundation.

Last Yearz Interesting Negro / Jamila Johnson-Small  (b. London, UK), is an artist of Caribbean descent based in London, who works with in-between spaces; with things that exist in and through cracks in time, memory, attention, syncopation, trance states, internal narratives, electronic music and two-step dances, navigating bodies as object, animal, human, machine, environment, and energy to build atmospheric landscapes created by the live unfolding of the tensions between things that produce meaning. Johnson-Small has formed long-term collaborations with other artists including Project O with Alexandrina Hemsley, immigrants and animals with Mira Kautto (2009-2016) and more recently work with Fernanda Munoz-Newsome, HOTLINE with Sara Sassanelli, and GUSH, a semi-regular low-key DIY event. Recent performances have been shown as part of Fierce Festival, Birmingham, UK (2017) and the ICA, London, UK (2018). Upcoming residencies and performances include Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire, UK; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France and The Showroom, London, UK (all 2018).

*New Commission

With thanks to Doxy and Sh!

A workshop with Block Universe artist Maria Hassabi in collaboration with Siobhan Davies Dance Space.

London’s leading International Performance Festival, Block Universe, and Siobhan Davies Dance invite you to a two-hour long workshop with acclaimed choreographer and artist Maria Hassabi (b. 1973, Cyprus, lives in NY). Over the years Hassabi has developed a distinct practice that utilizes slowness and stillness, as techniques in choreographies that oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, live body and still image. Most recently, she presented her works at K20, Düsseldorf,​ ​and ​Documenta 14, Kassel, where dancers moved their bodies at slow, sometimes imperceptible velocities, enacting choreographic cycles that looped throughout the museum’s opening hours, creating a recurrent form that occupied a specific space and seemingly unbroken time.

​As a response to this year’s festival theme, ​which addresses the ways that we relate to one another and examines personal relationships​, Maria Hassabi will ​take her own practice as a starting point and will explore  everyday movements that can be used to stimulate creativity​. Much of the emphasis will lie on breathing, weight, muscular strength and the sound of the body, with the aim of making us more deeply aware of the body.

*New Commission in partnership with Outset Contemporary Art Fund

Gery Georgieva (b. 1986, Varna, Bulgaria) new piece of live work will transform the premises of the Oval Space with a multimedia installation. Taking inspiration from the wellspring or public tap as a traditional site of encounter and intrigue, she will explore the relationship between heritage, folk culture and individualistic empowerment through the figure of the diva. Featuring a soundtrack of new musical collaborations with Endgame and Junior XL as well as a selection of Bulgarian covers, the artist will use her own voice and body as a site for these considerations and reconfigurations. Selected solo exhibitions and projects include: Swimming Pool Projects, Sofia, Bulgaria (2017); Hunter / Whitfield, London, UK (2017); (AND/OR), London, UK (2016) and Frieze Film commissioned by Random Acts Channel 4 for Frieze Art Fair (2015).

Block Universe’ evening of performances and launch of the festival took place at 180 The Strand and featured special interventions, performances and DJ-sets by:

Josephine Chime (In Flames)
Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome
Rowdy SS feat. Rebecca Bellatoni
Zoee featuring Rafal Zajko
Englesia

Thank you to all the incredible artists who kicked off the festival.

*New Commission supported by Mondriaan Art Fund

Nora Turato (b. 1991, Zagreb, Croatia) is a  performance artist based in Amsterdam. As part of her practice she harnesses the versatility of language as an instrument in her absorbing spoken word displays that blur the line between contemporary music and performance art. She is a graphic design graduate of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Werkplaats Typografie, and is currently in residence  at the prestigious Rijksakademie. Additionally recording as Turato91, she released her debut Girls Gotta Look Out For Each Other Thats All in 2016.  Turato has performed internationally, at venues such as: Museion Bozen, Bolzano, Italy (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2017); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (2017); Kunstverein Cologne, Cologne, Germany (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2017) and the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial (2016). Forthcoming projects include a performance at LISTE Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria and Manifesta, Palermo, Italy (all 2018).

In association with Studio Voltaire, Supported by Battersea Power Station Foundation, Aziz Foundation and Lambeth Community Events Fund

Screening and Discussion with Nina Power, Rosalie Schweiker, Harminder Judge and They Are Here.

Taking its cue from They Are Here’s new work, Welcome (2018), inspired by a line from Homer Simpson in the episode Mom & Pop Art (1999), the artists have convened a panel of Simpson’s enthusiasts. Their discussions will touch on the Lisa Simpson Book Club, notable predictions of the future in the series and the recent documentary The Problem With Apu (2017). Attendees will be welcome to share their favourite clips via youtube.

The Simpson’s Symposium is part of the events program for They Are Here’s project Laughing Matter and the Block Universe 2018 Public Programme. Laughing Matter forms part of  In Residence, a new strand of Studio Voltaire’s Participation Programme, which supports artists with a particular focus on public and social practice.

About the panel

Rosalie Schweiker is an artist. Her contribution to the Simpson’s Symposium is in collaboration with her Simpson’s obsessed brother Stefan Schweiker.

Nina Power is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton and the author of many texts on philosophy, politics and culture.

Harminder Judge is an artist working across performance, installation, sculpture, print and video. He is currently undertaking a postgraduate fine art programme at the Royal Academy. In the last 6 months he has been developing material techniques inspired by Indian Tantric painting, continuing ongoing explorations of Western esotericism and Eastern mysticism.

They Are Here is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker and Harun Morrison. They are currently based in London and on the River Lea. Their works can be read as a series of context specific non-narrative conceptual games.

Ahead of Maria Hassabi’s first performance ever in London, Tate Curator Catherine Wood will be in conversation with the artist at The Store X, 180 The Strand, London.

26 May – 3 June 2018

The Block Universe Satellite Programme is a new addition to the festival and highlights events, performances and exhibitions at the following venues: Bold Tendencies, Bosse & Baum, Kunstraum, Tenderpixel and Ryder Projects.

Friday, 18 May – Saturday, 22 September 2018
BOLD TENDENCIES 12th Summer Programme
Art – Orchestral music – Opera – Architecture
7th-10th Floors Multi-Storey Car Park, 95a Rye Lane, London SE15 4ST

Bold Tendencies is excited to present ten new commissions from international artists in the rooftop spaces of the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park for our most ambitious summer project to date. Working across art, orchestral music, opera and architecture Bold Tendencies will open to the public 18 May – 22 September 2018.
The focus for this year’s art commissions is Ecology and the commissioned artists are:  Johann Arens, Sian Lyn Hutchings, Irina Kirchuk, Lawrence Lek, Arjuna Neuman, João Vasco Paiva, Sterling Ruby, Emilija Škarnulytė, Jenna Sutela, and Richard Wentworth.

Wednesday, 30 May 2018
Caterina Silva & Andrea Koch
STORM II
Bosse&Baum, Bussey Building, 133 Rye Ln, London SE15 4ST

This is a public event, but booking recommended.

Bosse & Baum will present the work STORM II, a performance of sounds and words by Andrea Koch (musician and sound-maker) & Caterina Silva (visual artist). Beginning as an attempt to describe the evolution of Caterina’s creative process through language, Storm II becomes a dialogue and a fight, in which theory, chemical formulas, storytelling and poetry are transfigured into sound and music. The time-lapse between the voice and its implosion generates a distance, a state of quietness, similar to the moment that takes place just before a storm hits. The work will be part of a series of performances on occasion of Caterina Silva’s solo exhibition, Impressione, at Bosse & Baum.

Saturday,  2 June 2018, 2-4pm
Sara Rodrigues and Tyler Eash
Allusion to a Body No Longer Present
Produced by   Kunstraum  at:
St Giles Church, Fore St, Barbican complex, London EC2Y 8DA

This is a public event, no booking necessary.

“When she died at 3 in the morning, the doctors came along and I said: ‘open the window let the soul out’ and I thought after this: ‘Why did I say that?’ I don’t really believe in it do I? But I said it and I still wanted the window open and I can’t explain that sometimes.”
‘Allusion to a body no longer present’ is a collaboration between artists Tyler Eash and Sara Rodrigues, curated by Camille Bréchignac and produced with Kunstraum for the satellite programme of Block Universe.
Initially conceived for the Swiss Church in London, the performative installation will be reworked within Saint Giles, a 14th Century Gothic church at the heart of the Barbican. The performance, featuring the artists alongside Rodrigo B. Camacho and Alexandra Baybutt, is comprised of spoken text, music, choreography and sculpture. The script is derived from interviews with members of the Swiss Church congregation on the significance of self, search for meaning, and remembrance after death.

Sunday, 3 June 2018, 6pm
Anna Zett
Particular Experience
Produced by Bosse&Baum
Play-Co Studio,  68 Broadwick Street, London, W1F 9BF

This is a public event, but booking recommended.

Bosse & Baum will be hosting a public presentation and discussion around the practice of Anna Zett, as part of the research programme, Micro Social Cultures. This research-based series has been curated by writer Jamie Sutcliffe, and will involve collaborations with the artists, Hamish McPherson, Jenny Moore, Adam James & Sarah Jury. The event is limited to 20 spaces, please RSVP by emailing the gallery. 
Anna Zett is an artist, writer, director of films and radio plays, born in Leipzig and living in Berlin. Working alone and in teams, Zett combines historical research and symbolic reflection with a performative practice rooted in the unscripted, undetermined present situation. In 2014 she published her first two longer videos, both dealing with the dinosaur as an imperial emblem, which were screened internationally in various contexts and art institutions. Since then her focus shifted from imaging technologies to voice and body as complex human media linking improvised process and symbolic control. In recent years Zett has written and directed two radio dramas for the German public radio, and (co-)hosted various participatory formats ranging from dance to story telling. There will be an artist talk on 4th June, 7pm, at Play Co. Studio, Soho. Please RSVP by emailing the gallery.

Saturday, 26 May 2018, 4-6pm
Tenderpixel
Book Launch
Tenderbooks, 6 Cecil Court, London WC2N 4HE

This is a public event, no booking necessary.

Please join us for the launch of Chateau Récit No.1: Eau! by Billie Muraben. Eau! considers the tricksy history of the dancing fountain. From its origins in Ancient Greece, through Renaissance Italy and Louis Vuitton’s Paris fondation; to theories of a flat earth, and the Tower of Babel; Louis XIV’s Les Grandes Musicales at the Château de Versailles and Steve Wynn’s Fountains of Bellagio: “How cool is that?!”  Chateau Récit is a new series of quarterly photo-text essays from Chateau International.

Tenderpixel’s current series loos at the notion of the ‘Hangover’ as a viscreal, bodily metaphor for our times often also called the Anthropocene. With interlinking exhibitions and events the series unfolds how being able to exist on this planet is so evidently contingent on sharing it: as bodies as well as social beings, economic and ecological factors, our fate is bound to other entities. Tenderpixel will release events including screenings and talks as part of the Block Universe programme.

Saturday,  2  June 2018, 12-8pm
Secret Anthem for a World of Values
A collaborative project by: Andrés Pereira Paz and Juan Diego Tobalina
The Ryder Projects,  19a Herald Street, London E2 6JT

This is a public event, no booking necessary.

Andrés Pereira Paz (Bolivia, 1986) has conceived Secret Anthem for a World of Values, a unique event for Block Universe Festival that entails a participatory performance and a resulting audio piece at the end. Upon their entrance to the gallery, visitors will be given a set of instructions in order to trigger their thoughts about the emotions felt before moving to somewhere else, at the very moment leaving behind a place that meant something for them. A big roll of paper will be placed throughout the gallery space for the audience to write a sentence that can relate to that farewell situation before experiencing a territorial transition. Once the participant has written it, the information will be rolled and hidden to the next participant, following a similar dynamic as in an exquisite corpse. The text left by the intervention of all visitors will be converted in an audio piece sent via email to each participant during the month of July 2018.

The Morning After Breakfast Club
Sex Stories hosted by Jenny Moore and Chloe Cooper
Free to attend, you buy your breakfast  

In that early hour between the walk of shame and the water cooler, meet us at People’s Choice café for confessions, trips, insights, gossip, spoilers, scoops, lies, jokes and fantasies-cum-reality or the ones that stay imaginary.  With special guest storytellers, sex tales will be told and heard. Fry ups, croissants, coffee, diet coke, bloody mary’s – whatever your poison, come and be with us in the waking hour. It’s the morning after and we’re here for you.

With stories by Hannah Witton, Bwalya Newton, Eleanor Sikorski and Jessie McLaughlin. *Special placemat for attendees with text by Sophie Risner.

The Morning After is a breakfast club inspired by Jenny and Chloe’s work with Bedfellows – a group of people making tools to re-educate themselves about sex.  Since we are the queer babies of a heterosexist, racist, abelist, classist patriarchy, we’ve gotta find other ways to learn about sex in a way that celebrates all our bodies, all our genders, all our desires.

Block Universe   x   Goldsmiths, University of London

Here is the recording of the panel discussion:

To coincide with the launch of the fourth edition of Block Universe, London’s leading International Performance Art Festival; this panel discussion will bring together a number of contributors across disciplines to discuss past and current dynamics of performance art in the UK, and providing a platform to consider the historical significance of the ephemeral nature of performance art, through the lens and personal accounts of artists, critics, curators and academics.  

The participants include the subversive 1980s performance group The Neo Naturists; Ellen Van Schuylenburch, one of the founding members of Michael Clark Company, Jane Pritchard, curator of dance for the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Lois Keidan, director of the London-based Live Art Development Agency – LADA, as well as artists Evan Ifekoya & Victoria Sin, who are both contributing to this year’s edition of the Block Universe.

Together we will explore ideas of an active, living archive,  one that takes into account the ability of performance to sustain itself and live on through the body rather than the record, thus re-positioning the body as the centre for knowledge in place of the archive. Can we take the inherent choreographic vocabulary in dance as an example? How can performance as memory exist?

The talk will be moderated by Louise O’Kelly, founder Block Universe and hosted by Astrid Schmetterling, Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, followed by an informal drinks reception to be held at the Student Union Bar.

This event is supported by Goldsmiths, University London and Outset.

* UK Premiere commissioned in partnership with The Store X, supported by Mid Atlantic Art Fund

Thursday 24 May 2018, 7pm
Artist Talk: Maria Hassabi with Tate Curator Catherine Wood
The Store X, 180 The Strand, London WC2R 1EA, UK

Monday 28 May 2018, 2pm-4pm
STAGING: A Movement Workshop with Maria Hassabi
Siobhan Davies Dance, 85 St George’s Rd, London SE1 6ER, UK

*UK premiere

Made possible thanks to the support of Gaia Art Foundation.

Working with choreography as an open source method, the UK premiere of Q&A is a game in which the audience participates by asking questions while Rawls responds. Through this interaction, an event unfolds that weaves together thoughts, desires, prompts and opinions from those present. Through this practice, Rawls employs choreography as a way to question the roots of authorship, embodied labour and the indeterminate interpretation of art.

Image credit: Arron Leppard

*New commission

Co-commissioned by Block Universe and Open Space Contemporary with the support of Gaia Art Foundation.

Block Universe and Open Space Contemporary present the performative dinner Pluto’s Kitchen by Işıl Eğrikavuk. Drawing parallels between Pluto’s demotion from the solar system and the UK’s strategy to exit the European Union, this event will bring audiences and cultures together through the sharing of a conceptual menu.

In 2006, scientists from NASA announced that Pluto was a dwarf planet, and no longer one of nine planets recognized in our Solar System. On 23 June 2016, following a referendum, the United Kingdom declared it no longer wished to be a member of the European Union. These shifting borders and geographies, which currently determine not only the status of countries as well as celestial bodies but also their imagined living conditions, inspired Eğrikavuk to produce the performative dinner Pluto’s Kitchen in collaboration with chef Vidar Begum. Cultural identity is inextricably linked with the politics of food and the sharing of regional cuisines across borders. In this work, Eğrikavuk will examine the alternative, by envisioning what form the kitchen and cuisine of an isolated planet, and thus an isolated nation, could take.

Following this performative dinner,  Art Monthly writer Chris McCormack will be in conversation with Turkish artist Işıl Eğrikavuk reflecting on her performative piece in relation to the current political climate.

Performers:
Ada Burke
Artunç Yavuz
Leto Dietrich
Malina de Carlo
Onur Şafak
Takunda Kramer
Tuba Tırpan

Image credit: Arron Leppard

*UK premiere

Produced by MDT, NorrlandsOperan, Inkonst and Zimmer with support from the Swedish Arts Council, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, the City of Stockholm and Stockholm County Council. This premiere has been made possible thanks to the support of the Embassy of Sweden, London, the City of Stockholm and Gaia Art Foundation.

This UK premiere, Shapes of States, traces the historical and political writing of the body by connecting Swedish public health ideologies from the 1920s with contemporary training ideals. With a starting point in Meyerhold’s biomechanics, the dancers in Shapes of States develop a movement vocabulary far from any idea of natural behaviour. In a series of dances, they tell the broken story of a human belief in the disciplining of the flesh. This performance is visually described by the dancers and suggests interpretations of what is happening on stage, what is happening in the world and what is happening in our fantasy.
Performance and visual interpretation: Sandra Lolax, Sindri Runudde, Andrea Svensson and Stina Nyberg. Set design: Tove Edlund Dreiman. Light design: Josefin Hinders. Costume: Tove Edlund Dreiman and Sandra Leandersson

Image credit: Arron Leppard

*London premiere

Made possible thanks to the support of Gaia Art Foundation.

In the London premiere of Liz Magic Laser’s Political Therapy workshop, Primal Therapy and meditation techniques will be used to elicit connections and conflate personal experiences with political beliefs. Laser has enlisted drama therapist and actress Louise Platt to guide participants through activities that facilitate the expression of frustrations related to Brexit and other current events.

Developed by Arthur Janov in the 1970s, Primal Therapy was a radical approach that involved abreaction, the cathartic re-experiencing of a traumatic event. Laser adapts this palliative method of clarifying emotional expression into effective communication, offering it as a means toward embodied political discourse. Therapeutic props such as pillows and stuffed animals based on political party logos can be hit or embraced in Laser’s version of political Primal Therapy.

Similar workshops have taken place at Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, in advance of the 2016 presidential election and in the UK before Article 50 was initiated at Grand Union, Birmingham. Forthcoming workshops will take place at CAC Brétigny between the first and second round of France’s presidential elections and at Jupiter Artland Foundation, near Edinburgh, where participants will address the debates surrounding Scottish independence.

With thanks to Jupiter Artland.

Image credit: Arron Leppard

Marking the culmination of the third edition of the festival, Block Universe presents an evening programme of film screenings that explore the complexities of communication and representation whilst touching on identity politics and issues of place-making. Hosted by The White Building and organised in partnership with SPACE Art + Technology Programme, the screening draws from this year’s participating Block Universe artists including Liz Magic Laser, Rory Pilgrim, Eglė Budvytytė, Zadie Xa and will feature special invited guests as well as two audio pieces by Hanne Lippard.

For Primal Speech (2016), Liz Magic Laser assembled a pseudo therapy group composed of actors with opposing political convictions about Brexit and other world events. In the cinematic, surrealist fiction film In the Absence of Miracles: the Twilight and the Loop (2016), the Dutch / Lithuanian artist duo Bart Groenendaal and Eglė Budvytytė play with the idea of the city as a post-apocalyptic landscape. American actors employing Brechtian theatricality perform a script that conveys hints at the social disintegration of Europe in a fairytale about a car-borne cornerstone family getting lost on it’s way to a birthday party. British artist Rory Pilgrim contributes with his film The Open Sky (2016), that introduces five women who lived through the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. In Moodrings, Crystals, and Opal-coloured Stones (2016), Zadie Xa undergoes initiation rituals for mudang, or Korean shamen, channeling her interest in magic, witchcraft, and astrology.

Explore the individual nature of imagination, enter a futuristic version of a primal scream room, experience an immersive vocal mantra, venture into Korean Shamen and find yourself in an absurdist road-movie, all in one Sunday Screening.

Image credit:  In the Absence of Miracles: the Twilight and the Loop, 2016. © Bart Groenendaal and  Eglė Budvytytė

The Mechanical Body by Swedish artists Stina Nyberg and Andrea Svensson takes as its starting point the physical practice established during the making of the performance Shapes of States, performed at the Tabernacle on May 29th as part of Block Universe 2017. As associative take on the 1920s movement of the Meyerhold’s Biomechanics used by Soviet actors, the workshop will delve into the language of this specific theatre training technique by exploring its highly stylised forms, duets and acrobatics and will essentially create a contemporary adaptation of it. Participants will engage in a warm-up eclectically mixing Qi Gong, conversations, visual interpretation and burpees.

This workshop is open to all, no prior movement experience required.

Image credit:  Stina Nyberg, Shapes of States, 2016. © José Figueroa