Helena Goldwater, safe keeping, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Future Ritual presents
A year-long programme of performances, exhibitions, artist labs and workshops exploring the function of performance as a modality for gathering, ritual and ceremony amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
CEREMONY is a 12 month programming cycle unfolding in London and Venice across 2024 and 2025.
The cycle will culminate in a new festival of choreographic work, performance art, ritual offerings and sonic activations in April 2025.
CEREMONY began at midsummer with CONSIDERING TIME an intensive workshop for artists led by Marilyn Arsem, and CEREMONY [I], a day of durational actions, memory activations and offerings performed by Arsem, Devika Bilimoria, Helena Goldwater and Sandra Johnston in a pair of dilapidated terraced houses in Peckham (London). Situated in spaces evocative of decay, memory and tenacity, the performances seemed to speak to performance art as a practice of channelling and devotion.
Across the Autumn, we presented a series of two-day artist labs led by Ron Athey and Michele Occelli on Anne Bean, and Claye Bowler who shared their practices and different understandings of art-making as a ritual, ceremony and folk tradition.
Programme Cycle
Upcoming> CEREMONY [II]: Venice International Performance Art Week, 12th to 15th December
> Arcane Portals: an intensive co-creation workshop with VestAndPage - 20th to 26th April 2025
> Future Ritual ~ festival, 23rd to 27th April 2025
Recent
> CEREMONY [I] ~ performances by Marilyn Arsem, Devika Bilimoria, Helena Goldwater & Sandra Johnston.
> Considering Time ~ an intensive workshop with Marilyn Arsem
> Dig me a grave ~ an artist lab with Claye Bowler
> AUTOBITUARIES ~ an artist lab with Anne Bean
> Constructing Phenomena ~ an artist lab with Ron Athey and Michele Occelli
> Whistling as the Night Calls: collaborative photographs by Martin O’Brien & zack mennell ~ 31st October to 1st December
Enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk.
Press: abstrakt@abstraktpublicity.co.uk
Helena Goldwater, safe keeping. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Drawing on our longstanding collaborations with Martin O’Brien and zack mennell, we commissioned an exhibition of collaborative photographic works. The resulting images, made on 35mm Cinestill 800T by mennell and exhibited at VSSL studio, depict actions exhumed from O’Brien’s practice and presented for the ghosts of places of worship and pilgrimage.
The exhibition is open now and continues until 1st December.
In December, we will present Ceremony [II], a performance programme as part of Venice International Performance Art Week.
Following the Easter weekend, CEREMONY will culminate with a weeklong festival (23rd to 27th April 2025), including performances, conversations, ritual offerings, sonic activations and ARCANE PORTALS, an intensive co-creation workshop by renowned performance art pedagogues VestAndPage.
Credits and Support
Joseph Morgan Schofield - CuratorRegina Agard-Brathwaite - Programme Coordinator
Anna Goodman / Abstrakt Publicity - PR
Programme Assistants: Robyn Green, Ewan Hindes, Ash McNaughton, Kane Stonestreet.
Future Ritual: Ceremony is supported with public funds by Arts Council England. Further support towards the programme has been given by Mayor of London.
Enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk.
Sandra Johnston, Agape / Ajar, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
emilyn claid & Heidi Rustgaard, SKINNED, 2024. Image by Cam Harle.
Thursday 12th - Sunday 15th December 2024
Palazzo Mora, Strada Nuova 3659, Venezia, 30121
Full programme information is online now.
Future Ritual is delighted to deepen our collaboration with Venice International Performance Art Week as co-curators of the forthcoming edition, Portals and Constellations.
Thinking of Peggy Phelan’s words, that Live Art is a space wherein loss and death are revealed as the ground from which creativity and love may grow, we have curated CEREMONY [II]. Amidst the participation of performance artists from many contexts and worlds, we hope that this convergence of artistic forces cultivates a space for the (re)awakening and pursuit of authentic desires, the sensing of liberation, and emergence of a temporary artistic community.
Future Ritual is grateful to Arts Council England for supporting our participation in this gathering, and to Venice International Performance Art Week for their many years of collaboration, mentoring and friendship.
CEREMONY [II] is curated by Joseph Morgan Schofield and Regina Agard-Brathwaite.
Participating Artists
Anne Bean, collage, 1982, Photo by Gordon Currie.
Anne Bean
In 1982 Anne Bean made a performance All Communication is Translation in which she thrust her constantly transforming painted face into paper whilst she shouted each syllable of the sentence: 'all com mun i ca ti on is trans la ti on'. She built up an exhibition of 12 'self portraits', during the work, each saying one of the syllables. In the performance of the same name in Venice, the artist will push the notion of transformation and translation further. She will attempt, at certain times, to ambush her own nascent thoughts before the trillions of connections, synapses, translate them into words. A translator will simultaneously attempt to translate all that she articulates into Italian.The 1982 work ‘All Communication is Translation' plus a 2022 version will be on display.
In a monograph on her work, Self Etc., 2018, the writer Dominic Johnson wrote: Anne Bean is a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. The art of Anne Bean makes strange our sense of time, memory, language, the body, and identity, particularly through soloand collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life.
> Future Ritual: Anne Bean
> Anne Bean Archive
emilyn claid & Heidi Rustgaard, SKINNED, 2024. Image by Cam Harle.
emilyn claid
SKINNED (2022) is choreographed in collaboration with Heidi Rustgaard (H2Dance) and performed by emilyn claid. The piece has a commissioned score by queer electro-pop composer Planningtorock. The starting points for emilyn and Heidi's collaboration include queering, as a movement of transformation, unfixing identity, in/visibility, becoming, not being. In the performance emilyn works from a score and intensely relates to an immense piece of fur and latex skin, which acts as camouflage, a cloak, an animal hide. She embodies notions of hunting and being hunted, cruising and crumbling. Set in a night club or gallery, emilyn moves close to spectators who watch from within the space, interacting with them, while maintaining a performing presence. SKINNED also forms part of emilyn's full length work UNTITLED.> Future Ritual: emilyn claid
> @emilynclaid
Future Ritual, ‘A Felling’, 2023. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Ash McNaughton, Joseph Morgan Schofield & Marcel Sparmann
A collective performance initiated by Future Ritual, A Felling explores ideas of death, remembrance, transformation, rebirth and the transferrance of energy between bodies and between the body and the environment.
Artists Ash McNaughton, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Marcel Sparmann co-create an immersive work, inviting audiences to step into a space of contemporary ritual, activated through intense embodied practices and characterised by expressions of compassion, vulnerability, strength and ethical exchange. Through this future ritual we may temporarily inhabit time in a different way, engaging in individual and collective experiences of processing and communion.
> Future Ritual: A Felling
> Ash McNaughton
> Joseph Morgan Schofield
> Marcel Sparmann
'I've been looking for things that last' Performance Salon curated by SERAFINE1369 and commissioned by Home Live Art. Image by Katarzyna Perlak.
SERAFINE1369
The Ways, the Fortune, the Fall (solo fragment) is a work made in Winter feeling for the Spring, listening in the darkness to the subterranean murmurs of things about to emerge that can't yet be seen or touched. A reflection on the reckonings and returns that cycles can bring. They say that it's always darkest before the dawn.This performance is a fragment of a longer, looping choreography usually danced by SERAFINE1369 and two of their long term collaborators - Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome and Steph McMann.
Choreography & Performance: SERAFINE1369
Sound: Josh Anio Grigg
Text: SERAFINE1369
> Basic Tension
> @SERAFINE1369
Funders and support
Future Ritual: Ceremony is supported with public funds by Arts Council England. Further support towards the programme has been given by Mayor of London and VSSL Studio.The performance are offered as part of CEREMONY, a year long programming cycle curated by Future Ritual, exploring how performance and art making can function as modes of gathering, communion and ceremony amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony
Martin O’Brien & zack mennell, WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS, VSSL studio, 2024. Exhibition photography by Marco Berardi.
Final dates ~ Friday 29th & Sat 30th Nov, 12pm to 6pm.
Closing Gathering ~ 2pm, Sun 1st Dec ~ RSVP
> Prints for sale: Whistling as the Night Calls (2024)
> Resonance FM: Martin O’Brien and zack mennell (60 minutes)
Winter Gathering, Sunday 1st December
Please join us from 2pm on Sunday 1st December for a Winter Gathering, marking the close of the exhibition and holding space to reflect on queer community, kinship and memory. Martin O’Brien and zack mennell will have a conversation about the work and their collaborative process and then there will be drinks and music, with donations collected in honour of charities working around HIV/AIDS. > Free, but please RSVP
Footsteps are heard on the stairs, but no one is seen descending. Glasses fall in the kitchen and smash over the floor as if they had jumped themselves. The word ‘fading’ is written on the walls in blood or red paint. The wails of the dead can be heard by the living, and the horrors of life are visible to those who no longer endure it. People once walked these halls. Unholy sounds ring out into the night.
WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS is an exhibition of collaborative photographic works by zack mennell and Martin O'Brien. Shot on 35mm Cinestill 800T, the images document a series of performance actions which haunt the wind-swept skeletal remains of sites of worship and pilgrimage, including the shingle beach of Dungeness, historic churches in Romney Marsh and St Peter’s Seminary, a derelict brutalist college for priests in Cardross, Scotland.
For these new photographs, which extend from their performance making and documentary practices, the pair exhumed strange actions from O'Brien's body of work, situating them amidst the ruins, performing for ghosts and searching for more-than-human presences through mennell's photochemical process.
Historically, some artists working in time-based media expressed an anxiety about photographic documentation, concerned that the image codified ephemeral live art into a final, essential shape - an afterlife, a tomb. In seeking the witness of the lost, the forgotten, the quick and the dead, these works by mennell and O’Brien present an alternative perspective on memory, loss and finitude.
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Martin O’Brien & zack mennell, WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS, VSSL studio, 2024. Exhibition photography by Marco Berardi.
For these new photographs, which extend from their performance making and documentary practices, the pair exhumed strange actions from O'Brien's body of work, situating them amidst the ruins, performing for ghosts and searching for more-than-human presences through mennell's photochemical process.
Historically, some artists working in time-based media expressed an anxiety about photographic documentation, concerned that the image codified ephemeral live art into a final, essential shape - an afterlife, a tomb. In seeking the witness of the lost, the forgotten, the quick and the dead, these works by mennell and O’Brien present an alternative perspective on memory, loss and finitude.
Martin O’Brien & zack mennell, WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS, VSSL studio, 2024. Exhibition photography by Marco Berardi.
WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS marks a decade of collaboration and shared practice between mennell and O’Brien, wherein mennell has witnessed, documented, facilitated and performed in many of O'Brien's live works. This show is the first exhibition of their collaborative photographs.
Future Ritual is pleased to offer 13 of the photographs in the exhibition for sale as limited edition giclée prints. Available in editions of 5, each print is presented on Hahnemuhle Bamboo paper and measure 420 x 297mm (A3) including a 25mm border.
> Prints for sale: Whistling as the Night Calls (2024)
The exhibition is curated by Joseph Morgan Schofield and Regina Agard-Brathwaite.
Press enquiries: Anna Goodman on abstrakt@abstraktpublicity.co.uk
Future Ritual is pleased to offer 13 of the photographs in the exhibition for sale as limited edition giclée prints. Available in editions of 5, each print is presented on Hahnemuhle Bamboo paper and measure 420 x 297mm (A3) including a 25mm border.
> Prints for sale: Whistling as the Night Calls (2024)
The exhibition is curated by Joseph Morgan Schofield and Regina Agard-Brathwaite.
Press enquiries: Anna Goodman on abstrakt@abstraktpublicity.co.uk
Martin O’Brien
Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada, and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2020, and the ICA (London) in 2021. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. He was writer in residence at Whitechapel Gallery throughout 2023. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency. His work has been featured on BBC radio and Sky Arts television. He is currently Head of Drama, teaching on Live Art practices at Queen Mary University of London.
zack mennell
zack mennell is an emerging, self-taught artist whose practice is informed by their experiences of being queer, working-class, neurodivergent, and disabled. zack uses writing, photography and performance to imagine different ways of inhabiting the world beyond the mode of daily survival. Their work often has an uncanny quality, unsettling the familiar and making visible some of the strange aspects and tensions embedded in ‘normality’.
zack often works in documenting performance and live events through photography and writing - their photographic practice is strictly analogue, using 35mm film. zack has collaborated on and frequently documented works by performance artist Martin O’Brien.
zack is part of the 2024/25 cohort of The Other MA (TOMA), is a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, and is a member of the Bethlem Artist Collective.
www.zackmennell.com
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Martin O’Brien & zack mennell, WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS, VSSL studio, 2024. Exhibition photography by Marco Berardi.
zack often works in documenting performance and live events through photography and writing - their photographic practice is strictly analogue, using 35mm film. zack has collaborated on and frequently documented works by performance artist Martin O’Brien.
zack is part of the 2024/25 cohort of The Other MA (TOMA), is a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, and is a member of the Bethlem Artist Collective.
www.zackmennell.com
Martin O’Brien & zack mennell, WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS, VSSL studio, 2024. Exhibition photography by Marco Berardi.
Funders and support
Future Ritual: Ceremony is supported with public funds by Arts Council England. Further support towards the programme has been given by Mayor of London and VSSL Studio.Future Ritual presents
The exhibition is offered as part of CEREMONY, a year long programming cycle curated by Future Ritual, exploring how performance and art making can function as modes of gathering, communion and ceremony amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony
Ron Athey. Image by Roshana Rubin.Artist Lab with Ron Athey & Michele Occelli
Fri 25th & Sat 26th October 2024, 11am ~ 4pm Battersea Arts Centre (London)
> Update: we are running a 5 day intensive deepening this practice, between 17th and 21st February 2025 in London.
This workshop is for artists working in performance and visual arts, interested in experimenting with esoteric and holistic practices as a way to explore new modes of making and being in the world.
We’ll be working with tools of the trade Athey has used for performance-making since 1995, including: somatic therapy, hypnosis sessions, and a program of spiritualist practices such as automatic writing and drawing, non lingual vocals/glossolalia, walking meditation, scrying, and archetype work. We will storyboard concepts for our performances - often, the process is the work!
This format for teaching and making was developed in 2010 for Athey’s Gifts of the Spirit: Automatic Writing in the Great Hall at QMUL and he has been evolving it ever since. This Artist Lab continues Athey’s collaboration with hypnotherapist Michele Occelli. Movement aspects will be co-led by movement practitioner Lewis Walker.
This is not a mortification-of-the-flesh or post-porn workshop but Athey will give short visual lectures containing sexually and physically graphic material. If you have concerns relating to this please reach out to Future Ritual (producing@futureritual.co.uk) in the first instance.
Constructing Phenomena ~ Esoteric Performance Development is offered as part of CEREMONY, Future Ritual’s year-long programme exploring performance as a mode of gathering and communing amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
> about CEREMONY
Key Info
Fri 25th & Sat 26th October, 11am to 4pm.Battersea Arts Centre, SW11 5TN
> Update: we are running a 5 day intensive deepening this practice, between 17th and 21st February 2025 in London.
If price is a barrier please write to producing@futureritual.co.uk.
There is step free access to the main foyer, The Scratch Bar and ground floor public spaces. The first floor performance spaces can be reached via a lift.
The first floor has a designated chill-out space that is available whenever the building is open.
More: https://bac.org.uk/access/
Ron Athey, image by Manuel Vason.
Ron Athey
Ron Athey is a Los Angeles-based artist who has been making performance works since 1981s Premature Ejaculation, an actionist/noise duo with Rozz Williams (his partner and front person of the seminal death rock band Christian Death). Self-taught, Athey’s earliest works were inspired by Johanna Went, Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, and electro-punk/queercore pioneers Nervous Gender. By the 90s the HIV/AIDS pandemic shifted response and this work, the “torture trilogy” became passion plays which were presented in spaces such as ICA London; Cankarjev Dom Ljubljana; PS122 NYC; ExTeresa CDMX. Monographs “Pleading In the Blood” and “Queer Communion” were published in 2013 and 2020 on Intellect Press, followed by retrospective Queer Communion at Participant Inc. NYC and ICA-LA 2021.In 2023 Athey and facilitators launched an annual immersive art making workshop in Athens, Greece titled Darkness Visible. Current videowork includes a series of post-porn-mythologies including Asclepius/Acephale, The Hierophant, and Pasiphae, Witch Queen of Crete: A Gloryhole Origin Story. And in various forms, a sacred modular theater, Hierophant Workings. Athey and collaborator Hermes Pittakos are currently showing a two act performance WILLENDORF (shown in September for a performance event honoring Vaginal Davis’ citywide survey in Stockholm). Ron Athey is represented by Murmurs Gallery, Los Angeles.
Michele Occelli
Michele Occelli’s approach to hypnotherapy utilizes a combination of Ericksonian and ideo-dynamic techniques to enable processes of change and self-discovery. After years of academic research in both eastern and western philosophy (SOAS, King’s College and Goldsmith’s College), he trained as a whirling dervish with the Mevlevi Order of Konya. The study and practice of Hypnotherapy came because of a desire to engage both mind and body as a unity, which is the basis for any form of understanding of both self and the world.> www.micheleoccelli.co.uk
Future Ritual presents
The workshop is offered as part of CEREMONY, a year long programming cycle curated by Future Ritual, exploring how performance and art making can function as modes of gathering, communion and ceremony amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony
Anne Bean and Ansuman Biswas, Candle / Stick, presented at DISCHARGE, Ugly Duck and Future Ritual, 2024. Photo by Manuel Vason.
Thurs 10th & Fri 11th October 2024, VSSL Studio“Since ancient times, ceremony has allowed the processing of potent human experiences such as grief, fear, horror, joy, ecstasy, bewilderment, celebration, love and mystery, through collective acts of ritual. Art, for me, has proved to be a vital space to confront these cavernous expanses and to attempt to meaningfully share my own probings with others.”
In this Artist Lab, Anne Bean will talk about and show aspects of her work, as well as suggest collective actions, as catalysts towards creating our own ceremonies. The lab is offered as part of CEREMONY, Future Ritual’s year-long programme exploring performance as a mode of gathering and communing amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
> about CEREMONY
Key Info
Thurs 10th & Fri 11th October, 11am to 6pm. VSSL Studio, Resolution Way, Deptford (London), SE8 4AL.VSSL is a wheelchair accessible space (enter from Tidemill Way).
> SOLD OUT (£40/£30)
If price is a barrier please write to producing@futureritual.co.uk.
There is a £60 ‘pay it forward’ ticket, which supports us to offer further discounted tickets to those facing economic barriers.
Anne Bean
In a monograph on her work, Self Etc., 2018, the writer Dominic Johnson wrote: Anne Bean is a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. The art of Anne Bean makes strange our sense of time, memory, language, the body, and identity, particularly through soloand collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life.
In 2022/23 she had work commissioned and shown at Turner Contemporary (Margate), the Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Somerset House, the Whitechapel Gallery, Matt’s Gallery, Paris Photo, PhotoLondon, as well as a solo show with England & Co at Frieze Masters.
In 2023 she was commissioned to make a major work for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival In Search of the Miraculous, with a resulting exhibition at England & Co in London and Reflect, a lightwork, for Lumiere, Durham. She has recently show work in Women in Revolt! at Tate.
“Reading Anne Bean’s CV is like following a continuous performance, a continuous response to the world… a ‘magicification’ of the world. The panoply of places she has worked, times of the day ornight, interiors, exteriors, seasons, publics, materials, concepts, tools, is astonishing: all shifting but all attuned to unique situations.”Guy Brett, Autobituary (2006) Monograph produced for solo exhibition at Matt’s Gallery
> www.annebeanarchive.com
> Future Ritual: In Search of the Miraculous
In 2022/23 she had work commissioned and shown at Turner Contemporary (Margate), the Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Somerset House, the Whitechapel Gallery, Matt’s Gallery, Paris Photo, PhotoLondon, as well as a solo show with England & Co at Frieze Masters.
In 2023 she was commissioned to make a major work for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival In Search of the Miraculous, with a resulting exhibition at England & Co in London and Reflect, a lightwork, for Lumiere, Durham. She has recently show work in Women in Revolt! at Tate.
“Reading Anne Bean’s CV is like following a continuous performance, a continuous response to the world… a ‘magicification’ of the world. The panoply of places she has worked, times of the day ornight, interiors, exteriors, seasons, publics, materials, concepts, tools, is astonishing: all shifting but all attuned to unique situations.”Guy Brett, Autobituary (2006) Monograph produced for solo exhibition at Matt’s Gallery
> www.annebeanarchive.com
> Future Ritual: In Search of the Miraculous
Anne Bean, Kicking the bucket, 2016. Mile End Cemetery, London. Image courtesy of the artist.Future Ritual presents
The workshop is offered as part of CEREMONY, a year long programming cycle curated by Future Ritual, exploring how performance and art making can function as modes of gathering, communion and ceremony amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony