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.
Future Ritual is delighted to announce our first annual programme CEREMONY, which will take place in London and Venice across 2024 and 2025.
The full programme cycle will be announced shortly, including 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).
Programme Cycle
Upcoming> DIG ME A GRAVE : an artist lab with Claye Bowler - 28th & 29th September
> AUTOBITUARIES: an artist lab with Anne Bean - 10th & 11th October
> WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS: collaborative photographs by Martin O’Brien & zack mennell ~ 31st October to 1st December
> Future Ritual x 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] - 23rd June 2024
> Marilyn Arsem: CONSIDERING TIME - 17th to 21st June 2024
Enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk.
Sandra Johnston, Agape / Ajar and Helena Goldwater, safe keeping. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
The programme cycle continues in the Autumn with a pair of artist labs led by Anne Bean and Claye Bowler, exhibition of collaborative photographs by Martin O’Brien and zack mennell, and a series of performances presented at 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
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.
Martin O’Brien & zack mennell, WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists.
Open Thursdays through Sundays, 12pm to 6pm.
Activations
Opening ~ Thursday 31st October, 6pm ~ 9pm ~ RSVP
Closing ~ Sunday 1st December, 1pm ~ 5pm
Press enquiries: Anna Goodman on abstrakt@abstraktpublicity.co.uk
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
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 religious sites, including 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
The exhibition is curated by Joseph Morgan Schofield and Regina Agard-Brathwaite.
Press enquiries: Anna Goodman on abstrakt@abstraktpublicity.co.uk
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).
> Tickets (£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.
Claye Bowler, Buried Self, 2023. Jerwood Newlyn Residency. Photo by Claye Bowler.
In this two-day artist lab led by Claye Bowler, we will delve into the intersections of queer/trans/disabled experience, memory and materiality through engagement with practices of casting, collecting and archiving.
The lab offers an in-depth exploration of Claye’s practice and current research which current investigates themes of forced waiting, using the symbol/metaphor/actual space of an open grave. Not dead, but also not quite alive enough to leave the grave. Activities tbc but prolly include: Looking & discussing Claye's and other artist's work, watching lil films, visiting a cemetery, digging holes, casting soil, having a nap, exploring folk songs, and more! Full schedule will be sent in advance.The lab is offered as part of CEREMONY, Future Ritual’s year-long programme exploring performance as a mode of gathering and communing in times of fragmentation.
> about CEREMONY
Things to Note
Dig Me a Grave will include: some time working outdoors; some time working with materials like plaster and latex (weird textures, but can be avoided); working with themes that could be triggering including queer/trans/disabled experience, dysphoria, death, suicide. The Lab is open to all, but is aimed at those with lived experience of being queer, trans and/or disabled.
Key Info
Sat 28th & Sun 29th Sept, 2pm to 8pm. VSSL Studio, Resolution Way, Deptford (London), SE8 4AL.Dig Me a Grave will be relaxed and accommodate for any breaks from the space. VSSL is a wheelchair accessible space (enter from Tidemill Way).
> Tickets (£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.
Claye Bowler
Claye Bowler is an artist based in the UK. His practice centres on collection and documentation of experience, memory and the remnants of humanity.
Bowler uses sculptural practices to highlight stories that are not historically collected through institutional means, often working with narratives of queerness and disability. Whilst also working in museum registration, Bowler often incorporates, yet questions, the ethics, administration and aesthetics of museum collecting in his work. Bowler has a strong connection to sound and music, increasingly integrating these elements into his work, using field recordings and traditional British folk song.
Recent work includes- Performance: Tate (2023) Residency: Jerwood Arts, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange (2023), Porthmeor Studios (2024) Arts Right Truth, YSP x Uni of York (2024), Solo Exhibition: Henry Moore Institute (2022), Group Exhibitions: Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2022), Attenborough Arts Centre (2022), Ugly Duck (2022). He was recipient of ACE DYCP Grant (2023) and Jerwood New Work Fund (2023) to realise a touring Solo Exhibition (2025-26).
> www.clayebowler.com
Bowler uses sculptural practices to highlight stories that are not historically collected through institutional means, often working with narratives of queerness and disability. Whilst also working in museum registration, Bowler often incorporates, yet questions, the ethics, administration and aesthetics of museum collecting in his work. Bowler has a strong connection to sound and music, increasingly integrating these elements into his work, using field recordings and traditional British folk song.
Recent work includes- Performance: Tate (2023) Residency: Jerwood Arts, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange (2023), Porthmeor Studios (2024) Arts Right Truth, YSP x Uni of York (2024), Solo Exhibition: Henry Moore Institute (2022), Group Exhibitions: Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2022), Attenborough Arts Centre (2022), Ugly Duck (2022). He was recipient of ACE DYCP Grant (2023) and Jerwood New Work Fund (2023) to realise a touring Solo Exhibition (2025-26).
> www.clayebowler.com
Claye Bowler. Photo by Rachel Adams.
Sandra Johnston, Agape / Ajar, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.Ceremony [I]
Sun 23rd June 2024, London
On the midsummer weekend, Future Ritual presented CEREMONY [I], a day of durational performances in a pair of dilapadated Victorian houses in South East London. Slow actions by artists Marilyn Arsem, Sandra Johnston, Helena Goldwater and Devika Bilimoria unfolded in long form performances evocative of memory, decay, and endurance. As the year turned, we invited long breaths, attuning with these old spaces, and inviting reflection and connection.
CEREMONY [I] was the first event in a year long programme of activites curated by Future Ritual, including performances, exhibitions, workshops and reading groups, exploring time, the transferrance of energy and memory and the potential of performance and contemporary art as modes of ceremony.
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony
CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual, 2024. Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Participating Artists
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Marilyn Arsem
Marilyn ArsemMarilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally.
Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and have been created in response to specific sites, engaging with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use or politics. She incorporates a broad range of media, and often engages all the senses. Her performances are designed to implicate the audience directly in the concerns of the work, to create an experience that is both visceral and intellectual. Sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the United States, a 15th century Turkish bath in North Macedonia, an aluminum factory in Argentina, the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in Poland, the site of the Spanish landing in the Philippines, and an abandoned Russian mining outpost in the Arctic Circle.
Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and have been created in response to specific sites, engaging with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use or politics. She incorporates a broad range of media, and often engages all the senses. Her performances are designed to implicate the audience directly in the concerns of the work, to create an experience that is both visceral and intellectual. Sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the United States, a 15th century Turkish bath in North Macedonia, an aluminum factory in Argentina, the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in Poland, the site of the Spanish landing in the Philippines, and an abandoned Russian mining outpost in the Arctic Circle.
Arsem is a member of Mobius Artists Group, an interdisciplinary collaborative of artists, which she founded in 1975. Arsem taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for 27 years, establishing one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually-based performance art.
She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and grants since the 1980s. She was awarded the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for which she created 100 Ways to Consider Time. The work consisted of 100 different six-hour performances by Arsem on the nature of time, performed in 100 consecutive days.
A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.
> http://marilynarsem.net
She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and grants since the 1980s. She was awarded the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for which she created 100 Ways to Consider Time. The work consisted of 100 different six-hour performances by Arsem on the nature of time, performed in 100 consecutive days.
A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.
> http://marilynarsem.net
Devika Bilimoria
Devika Bilimoria (b. Fiji 1985, Gujarati descent) is an X-disciplinary artist who engages performance, image-making and installation to explore notions of queering, materiality and body-ing. Devika enlists chance-based methods of making, participation, improvisation and somatic listening as tools to shift encoded embodiments of separateness, hierarchies and gestures across socio-cultural conditions. Raised in Naarm Melbourne and trained in the South Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, as well as both BA in Fine Arts and Media Studies at RMIT University, their practice spans two decades of exhibiting, tuition, research and commissions. In 2022, Devika earned their BA Fine Arts HONS (1st Class) at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, and was a recipient of the Rodger Davies Award for their durational performance installation, Offerings.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Offerings is a durational performance installation structured as a ritual-like game of dice. This work collapses shared gestures found across chance methods in art and cultural rites in an activation of randomised choreography with sanctified materials. Here, the substances and gestures of the Hindu offering ritual pūjā are enfolded in a task-based procedure where Devika generates and enacts successive ‘offering scores’ derived from ritualised and quotidian attributes in a perpetual act of offering. The work explores immanence, indeterminacy and suspension by invoking randomisation as an instrument of agitation in an attempt to commune with the haunt of embodied cultural inscription, agentic matter and entangled lineages—to reimagine what is given.
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Helena Goldwater
Helena Goldwater makes performance art, installation, and paintings. Since the 1980s, she has worked minimally, focusing on the quality of certain materials inhabiting a space. Her work ponders slowly, through repetition and a dedication to process.
Helena GoldwaterHer work has been shown at many galleries and festivals, nationally and internationally, including, Action: A provisional history of the 90s, MACBA: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; gut flora, MOCA, London; 1st Venice International Performance Art Week, Italy; If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, de Appel, Amsterdam; and at the Tate [Britain + Liverpool].
Helena Goldwater, safe keeping, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
She also researches and compiles material on UK performance art histories of the ‘70s and ‘80s. She co-curated (with Rob La Frenais, Alex Eisenberg/ Live Art Development Agency) an online resource about 1980s UK-based Performance Art, Edge of an Era, which also commissioned new works, and programmed a series of events: www.edgeofanera.co.uk
Goldwater is Course Leader for BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Sandra Johnston
Sandra Johnston has been active internationally since 1992 as an artist, researcher and educator working predominantly through performance art, video installations, drawing and writing. Johnston’s practice is rooted in processes of improvisation and typically actions involve a sparsity of materials and attentiveness to context. The physical somatic aspects of the work develop from an ethos of attrition – consciously attempting to use a minimum of available resources, intersecting with a desire to leave little or no trace. This approach of provisionality insists upon a speculative relationship to the emergence of narratives and meanings being formed directly, and conjointly, between artist and audience. 
Sandra Johnston, Agape / Ajar, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.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.