Helena Goldwater, safe keeping, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Future Ritual presents
CEREMONY
A year-long programme exploring time, memory, decay and the transferrance of energy.
Future Ritual: Ceremony is supported with public funds by Arts Council England. Further support towards the programme has been given by Mayor of London.
Joseph Morgan Schofield - Curator
Regina Agard-Brathwaite - Programme Coordinator
Future Ritual is delighted to announce CEREMONY, our forthcoming annual programme of performances, exhibitions, workshops and reading groups, exploring time, decay, memory and the transferrance of energy.
The programme beganaround 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 by Arsem, Devika Bilimoria, Helena Goldwater and Sandra Johnston.
Our Autumn offering will be announced shortly.
Enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk.
The programme beganaround 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 by Arsem, Devika Bilimoria, Helena Goldwater and Sandra Johnston.
Our Autumn offering will be announced shortly.
Enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk.
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings; Helena Goldwater, safe keeping; Sandra Johnston, Agape / Ajar. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
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.
Marilyn Arsem CONSIDERING TIME
Intensive Workshop
Mon 17th - Fri 21st June, London
SOLD OUT: Workshop Fee - £150 (£110 concession)
Considering Time was presented as part of Future Ritual: Ceremony, a year-long programme exploring time, decay, memory and the transferrance of energy and
> about Future Ritual: Ceremony
Bodies in the Land, 6 day/59 hour durational performance by Marilyn Arsem. The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas, USA. September 13-18, 2022. Photo by Jared Sorrells.Our lives are ruled by time’s inevitable, relentless passage. Always we have less of it than we had a moment ago. How do we move through time? How does time move through us? What is its effect on the actions and body of the artist? What is its impact on the audience? How might we more consciously use time as an element in performance?
Nothing exists outside of time. Time operates on multiple scales simultaneously and is revealed through different manifestations. Everything around us has a life of its own, sometimes considerably shorter than ours and sometimes much longer.
The presence of time becomes apparent through material and physical processes. What happens when we allow processes to unfold in the time that they need? What occurs when we impose different timeframes on them? Is it possible to control or manipulate time? How does working with extended time alter the execution and implications of our actions?
This workshop examines the significance of time in live performance. We will explore a variety of ways in which we can use time as an active element in our work. Working with time, against time and through time, we will investigate how actions, sites, objects and ourselves are impacted and altered. Serving as witnesses to each other’s work, we will also delve into the effects that playing with time has not only on ourselves as performers but on viewers as well.
The presence of time becomes apparent through material and physical processes. What happens when we allow processes to unfold in the time that they need? What occurs when we impose different timeframes on them? Is it possible to control or manipulate time? How does working with extended time alter the execution and implications of our actions?
This workshop examines the significance of time in live performance. We will explore a variety of ways in which we can use time as an active element in our work. Working with time, against time and through time, we will investigate how actions, sites, objects and ourselves are impacted and altered. Serving as witnesses to each other’s work, we will also delve into the effects that playing with time has not only on ourselves as performers but on viewers as well.
Seven Disappearances, Durational performance by Marilyn Arsem. TIME SPACE BODY OBJECT – Part 4, Isles Art Initiative, Spectacle Island, Boston Harbor, MA, USA. August 1, 2015. Photo by Nabil Vega.We ask audiences to spend their time with us. What allows them to feel that it was worth giving a portion of their lives to the experience of the work? It is important to know why you want the presence of a witness when you perform, and what you want from them. What do you offer in return?
A significant component of the workshop will be private reflection and writing, as well as group discussions on questions related to the topic of time, not just in the context of creating performances but in our everyday lives as well. We cannot separate our performance art from our daily life. Our lives continue to proceed even as our performances unfold through time.
A significant component of the workshop will be private reflection and writing, as well as group discussions on questions related to the topic of time, not just in the context of creating performances but in our everyday lives as well. We cannot separate our performance art from our daily life. Our lives continue to proceed even as our performances unfold through time.
Participation
The Workshop
This is an intensive, process driven workshop considering time, duration and their impact on material and physical processes.
If you have questions around accessibility, please be in touch with Joseph (producing@futureritual.co.uk).
The workshop is for practicing artists of any level of experience who have an understanding or appreciation of durational methodologies, and who are ready to commit to a rigorous exploration of time.
The workshop is offered in English.
We will work every day from Monday 17th to Friday 21st June. We will meet at 10am on the first day and finish by 6pm on the final day.
Travel to and from the workshop, food and accommodation in London are the responsibility of the participants.
To Participate
The five day workshop is priced at £150 (£110 concession).
This is a subsidised price and all income goes towards the cost of putting the workshop on.
We are accepting a maximum of 16 participants on a rolling basis. We anticipate interest in the workshop will be high, so please be in touch soon.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please complete this form, which asks for a brief statement outlining your interest in and experience of the workshop themes. If you would rather send a video or voice recording please note the link and any password in that same space. Please DO NOT send wetransfer or expiring download links.
A deposit of £50 will be requried to secure your place on the workshop, with the balance payable by May 15th.
SOLD OUT
Marilyn Arsem
Marilyn 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
Adrift, durational performance by Marilyn Arsem. First Biennial Festival of Performance Art and Sound, Contemporary Arts International, Acton, MA, USA. September 7, 2013. Photo by Chelsea Coon.
Martin O’Brien, An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance), 2023. Photo by Zack Mennell.
Curated by artist Martin O'Brien and hosted by kink and fetish clubs in London, DISCHARGE was a notorious performance art event dedicated to presenting difficult, radical and marginalised performance work. DISCHARGE embraced the endless possibilities of the performance space for aesthetic, physical, and political art and experimentation.
Marking the end of a Martin’s project ‘An Eternity of Nothingness or The (Im)possibility of Living On’,
DISCHARGE returns with a special one-off event holding space to think about living and dying queerly.
The talks, conversations and performances reflect on sickness, sex, queerness, death, disability, mourning and (im)mortality.
> Book Tickets
If you face significant financial barriers, please email producing@futureritual.co.uk and we can arrange a reduced price or free ticket.
Martin O’Brien, Overture for the End (An Ashen Place), Whitechapel Gallery, 2023. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.Programme
Full day pass // 14.00 to 22.30 // £16 / £20 / £25
Symposium
14.00 to 17.00- 14.00: arrivals & welcome
- 14:15: An Eternity of Nothingess keynote by Martin O’Brien
- 14:45: End(ing) Times panel with Kelechi Anucha, Patricia MacCormack, Sam McBean and chaired by Swati Arora
- 15:45: Break
- 16:00: Live Art, Dead Art panel with Anne Bean, Oreet Ashery, Rubiane Maia and chaired by Lois Keidan
Tickets: £8-£10
Performances
19.00 to 22.30Performance art actions, sonic activations, dance and kinky goings on from: Anne Bean and Ansuman Biswas, Ash McNaughton, Electric Adam, Emilyn Claid, Maya Williams, Pianka Pärna and zack mennell.
Tickets: £12/£15/£18
Artists & Contributors
Anne Bean
(panellist & performance)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 Beanmakes 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 HattonGallery, 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 wascommissioned to make a major work for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival In Search of theMiraculous, with a resulting exhibition at England & Co in London and Reflect, a lightwork, for Lumiere, Durham. She currently has work showing at Women in Revolt! 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 butall attuned to unique situations.”
Guy Brett, Autobituary (2006) Monograph produced for solo exhibition at Matt’s Gallery
www.annebeanarchive.com
Photo: A Transpective, Anne Bean, Queen Mary Jewish Cemetery, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Ansuman Biswas
(performance)Ansuman Biswas works in a wide variety of media, but his central concern lies between science, work and religion. He is interested in traversing, transposing and translating across many different kinds of border. To paraphrase the 13th Century Zen philosopher Dōgen: “Before my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams. During my search mountains are no longer mountains and streams are no longer streams. After my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams.”
www.ansuman.com
Photo: Ansuman Biswas, In Search of the Miraculous, 2023. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Ash McNaughton
(performance)Ash McNaughton (b. 1990, Scotland) is an action-based artist currently situated in Folkestone, UK. Their practice is a process-led exploration of materials, gesture, movement, and sound. Site-responsive, durational and ritualisic in nature; Ash implements methods of endurance, repetition, and resistance to access altered states of being while reaching out into the spaces in-between. Their actions encourage a synergetic exchange between their physical, psychological and spiritual body and the environments they inhabit. This practice is an attempt to articulate that which escapes us. A poetics of a fluid presence in a fixed world.
Ash is an independent artist, producer, and project manager. They are co-organiser of SITE - a platfrom for collective site-responsive art interventions - and a member of the international Anam Cara Collective. They are associate director at ]performance s p a c e[ and in 2024 launched a new festival and platform for queer art and performance in Folkestone called Queer Call.
https://ashmcnaughton.com/
Photo: ]performance s p a c e[, 2021. Photo by Manuel Vason.
Electric Adam
(performance)Electric Adam is a London based artist, their practice combines sculpture, wearable art and installation for liveperformance. Adam creates wearable latex pieces and performs them as living sculpture. They seal themselfinside the airtight latex and using their breathing, pump the air out, slowly vacuum packing themself into asculptural form.Emerging from the London fetish scene, performing at parties and events such as Torture Garden, Adam’swork came to a wider audience in the live art world. They have performed and exhibited nationally andinternationally from the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Theatre Studio in London, to Cirque DuSoleil headquarters in Montreal and New Zealand's World of Wearable Arts Award show.Their work explores themes around fetish, sexuality and the body, influenced by religious imagery, ancientsculpture and a pop culture sci-fi aesthetic.
http://electricadam.com/
Photo courtesy of the artist.
emilyn claid
(performance)emilyn claid’s career stretches back to the 1960s when she was a ballet dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and the 1970s when she was co-founder of experimental collective X6 Dance Space in London, a pioneering organisation for New Dance. In the 1980s she was artistic director of Extemporary Dance Theatre and in the 1990s choreographed for companies such as Phoenix and CandoCo. Working as an independent dance artist emilyn made and performed a series of iconic solo works in which she found an authentic voice as a lesbian-queer artist. emilyn is also an emeritus professor and a Gestalt psychotherapist and has recently published FALLING Through Dance and Life, (Bloomsbury 2021), a book that re- thinks Western culture’s physical, metaphorical, and psychological relationship to gravity. Working between live art and dance theatre, emilyn is currently touring a solo show ‘emilyn claid, UNTITLED’.
@emilynclaid
Photo by Henri T.
Kelechi Anucha
(panellist)Kelechi Anucha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University, having completed her PhD in English at the University of Exeter as part of the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times Project. Her doctoral project examined the temporalities of end of life writing, bringing together thinking from Black Studies, Disability Studies and Critical Medical Humanities. She is a member and co-lead within the Black Health and Humanities Network, a member of Mad Feeling Collective and co-convener of an online seminar series - Cultures of Madness. She is currently working on a project entitled ‘Madness in Black British Literature and Cultures: Genre and Counter-psychiatric frameworks’.
Photo by Genexus Photography.
Martin O’Brien
(keynote speaker)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. He was artist in residence at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles) in 2015. 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. 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.
@martinobrienart
Photo by Zack Mennell.
Maya Williams
(performance)Maya Williams (they/them) is a contemporary dance artist. Their work is informed by Afro-Caribbean diasporic spirituality, the decriminalization of Sex Work and Queer cultural identity. Their practice includes contemporary erotic performance, release technique, pole dance and Turning Looks as a radical practice of gender non-comforing.
Maya has performed and curated creative events at Ovalhouse, The Barbican, Ugly Duck and Camden Roundhouse. With Fimbo Butures at Camden People’s Theatre, Vault Festival, The Place, Camden Roundhouse and Assembly Festival at Edinburgh Fringe. Under the name Heaven (she/her) they’ve performed at Sex Worker Pride 2023, The Kit Kat Club, The Windmill, The Gaslight and Sophisticats and share their visual art on Patreon.
IG: @High_Priestexx
Patreon: high-priestexx
Photo by Billy Nesbitt.
Oreet Ashery
(panellist)Oreet Ashery is a visual artist who works across established art institutions and grassroots social contexts. Using film, photography, performance, image and textiles. Ashery narrates stories of precarious identities, featuring real life participants, combined with fiction. Ashery was awarded the 2017 Jarman Film Award for Revisiting Genesis (2016), a web series that questions how the boundaries between dying, care and self are affected by digital technologies. In 2020 they were a recipient of the Turner Prize Bursary for the exhibition Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery (2019), Wellcome Collection, London. Their monograph How We Die Is How We Live Only More So (2019) was published by Mousse.
Image: Selfish Road, video still, KW Institute for Contemporary Arts commission, 2022, courtesy of the artist and KW.
Patricia MacCormack
(panellist)Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophy, feminism, queer and monster theory, animal abolitionist activism, ethics, art, occultism, and horror cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her newest book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene. She recently completed a Leverhulme Fellow researching and developing Death Activism.
Image courtesy of the speaker.
Pianka Pärna
(performance)Pianka Pärna is a queer non-binary performance artist working primarily in the medium of body-based practices. Born and raised in Estonia and trained as a professional ballet dancer for 7 years, Pianka explores their post-Soviet upbringing as the foundation of their practise through endurance, duration, repetition and ritual. To understand the complexities of being a post-Soviet body, they examine the interrelations between Baltic mythology, nostalgia, queerness, BDSM, and movement.
As a recent graduate from an MA at Queen Mary, Pianka continues researching the sociopolitical implications of the post-Soviet and the construction of home outside the bounds of the biological to re-envision collective queer livelihoods. Pianka’s works exert fear to activate queer futurities whilst confronting the various nostalgic narratives which emerge to consequently distort and subvert its perceptions. Altogether, the body harnesses its grief to reclaim agency and community-feeling in the spaces it continually inhabits.
www.piamperformance.co.uk @piankamperformance_
Image courtesy of the artist.
Rubiane Maia
(panellist)Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian transdisciplinary artist based in Folkestone, UK. Her work is a hybrid between performance, installation and other forms of expression, such as writing, photography, video and painting. In general, she is interested in the body, language, memory, phenomena and organic matter, being attracted by different states of perception and synergy through the relationships of interdependence and care between human and non-human beings, as minerals and plants. She often develops research in site specific contexts, always considering the elements, the landscape and the environment as guide and co-creators of her artworks.
In 2015, she took part at the exhibition 'Terra Comunal - Marina Abramovic + MAI', at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo with the long durational performance ‘The Garden’. Currently, she is part of the 35th São Paulo Biennial 'Choreographies of the Impossible', 'Ana Mendieta: Silhouette in Fire | Terra abre caminhos' exhibition at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, and 'Fazer o Moderno, Construir o Contemporâneo: Rubem Valentim' exhibition, Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho, Brazil.
www.rubianemaia.com/
Photo: The tongue bends whenever it faces what is unquestionable or what has been cursed, Book-Performance, Chapter VI, 2023, Photo by Bruno Makia.
Sam McBean
(panellist)Sam McBean is Reader in Gender, Sexuality, and Contemporary Culture at Queen Mary University of London and co-chair of the Sexual Cultures Research Group. She is the author of Feminism’s Queer Temporalities (Routledge, 2016) and has published on feminist theory, queer theory, and contemporary literature and visual culture in journals including Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Contemporary Literature, and Feminist Media Studies. She is also a death doula and is currently working on an autoethnographic project, ‘Queer Death’, which explores end-of-life care, death, and loss from a queer perspective.
zack mennell
(performance)zack mennell is an emerging, self-taught artist using writing, photography and performance to explore queerness and neurodiversity in relation to presence and visibility. zack frequently collaborates with performance artist Martin O’Brien, notably in his recent works at Whitechapel Gallery as writer-in-residence, Sanctuary Ring (SPILL Festival, 2016) and The Last Breath Society (ICA, 2021). Other significant collaborations include those with Leon Clowes (ongoing), Baiba Sprance (2022), Kane Stonestreet & Phoebe Patey-Ferguson (ongoing), and Joseph Morgan Schofield & Fenia Kotsopoulou (2019-2021). zack often works in documenting performance and live events through photography and writing - their photographic practice is strictly analogue, using 35mm film. They are a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre and a member of the Metal New Artist Network and the Working Class Creatives Database.
www.zackmennell.com
Photo: zack mennell, (para)site, 2022. Photo by Milo Robinson for Thames Festival Trust.
Funders & Support
DISCHARGE is curated by Martin O'Brien and presented by Future Ritual in partnership with Ugly Duck. It is supported with public funds by Arts Council England.
Ugly Duck is a London based arts organisation that supports under-represented voices and emerging artists. Established in August 2012, their programme enables makers, community groups, professionals and the public to come together around unique cultural experiences and curated events. They have converted a beautiful empty Victorian warehouse in SE1 into a busy creative space which became, and still is, the home to countless rising artists. Recent events include Pretty Doomed, Otherness Archive, @Disturbance, Performance Space, Franko B (With A/Political), Shocked Quartz.
> www.uglyduck.org.uk
> @weareuglyduck