gustaf broms. Photo by Irene Arango.

Amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life and the ossifying effects of capitalism in the metropolis, CEREMONY was imagined as an invitation to cross a series of thresholds, to awaken desire, and to rekindle enchantment.

This multi-day offering, curated and produced by Future Ritual, featured the participation of artists including Alastair MacLennan, Anne Bean, emilyn claid, gustaf broms (SE), kane stonestreet,  Liz Rosenfeld (DE), Marilyn Arsem (US), n:u, Pianka Pärna, Raisa Kabir, Rubiane Maia, SERAFINE1369 and VestAndPage (DE/IT) with Ash McNaughton and Joseph Morgan Schofield.

Future Ritual also offered two intensive artist development workshops across those days - Arcane Portals with VestAndPage and On Practice with Marilyn Arsem. Powerful interventions were also made in the gallery by participants in the Arcane Portals workshop: Amy Mauvan, Aparna Ashok, Caro Ruoff, Cherlynn Zang, Frauke Huhn, Izzie Major, Joana Cifre Cerdà, Johanna Peltonen, Johanne Sundfør, Kelvin Atmadibrata, Marta Lodola, Olivia Hassett, Ruth Biene, Spirit Doll, Tania Camara and WOJAK.

Alongside the performance programme at Copeland Gallery, there were further conversations and gatherings exploring ideas of memory, time and endurance held in the gallery and at Live Art Development Agency and Queen Mary University.

CEREMONY was the culmiation of a year long programme of activites curated by Future Ritual, exploring art making as a mode of gathering and ritual in this fragmented age. Across the festival the individual contributions of the presenting artists and the attentive presence of our audiences generated a potent collective energy, sharing myriad approaches to ideas of ritual, art, belief and ceremony.

Credits

Curated and produced by Future Ritual.

Joseph Morgan Schofield, Director
Regina Agard-Brathwaite, Programme Coordinator
Rachel Shipp, Production Manager
Ash McNaughton, Artist Liaison Manager
zack mennell, Artist Liaison Manager
Ewan Hindes, Audience Liaision Manager
Abstrakt Publicity, PR Manager
Arthur Morris & AJ Thwaites, Placements

Funders and support

Future Ritual: Ceremony was supported with public funds by Arts Council England. Further support towards the programme has been given by Mayor of London. The programme has been organised in partnership with the Live Art Development Agency and BLOC (Queen Mary University of London).

Schedule

18th April: an evening with Marilyn Arsem
19th April: STRATA by VestAndPage
23rd April: kane stonestreet + emilyn claid and co.
24th April: n:u + emilyn claid and co.
25th April: SERAFINE1369 + Anne Bean
26th April: Gathering (Marilyn Arsem, Anne Bean, emilyn claid, Martin Hargreaves, Live Art Development Agency, Joseph Morgan Schofield + Martin O’Brien) + Arcane Portals. Then Alastair MacLennan, gustaf broms + Liz Rosenfeld
27th April: Marilyn Arsem, Raisa Kabir, Rubiane Maia + Pianka Pärna. Then VestAndPage with Ash McNaughton + Joseph Morgan Schofield

(dis)closure by kane stonestreet 

kane stonestreet is a transdisciplinary artist. Their work seeks to pervert time, dilated through altered states. By attuning to a drip from a block of ice or touching a single frond of moss, kane uncovers slower ways of being. Their actions take place in the city time but their mind is in techtonic time.

kane’s practice is based in collaboration. They have established connections with strangers, friends and lovers, through which they find new entanglements. Their performances are containers for collective creation, built on an invitation for witnesses to act as interpreters. Their ritual actions are a process of survival.

> kanestonestreet.com

kane stonestreet, (dis)closure, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

The Trembling Forest by emilyn claid & company

Turn your face towards the tombstone blues of left over time, forever, nowhere, nothing time, the crumbling perpetual of graveyards and ashes. Step lightly into long time, still time. Turn up the music and begin a slow dance. Welcome the pale grey, the shivering grey of a longed-for landscape, cold, silent, beautiful, like snow on hills under a darkening sky. Connect with me here, embrace me there, enmeshed, in a dance of twists and turns, like the underground roots of a trembling forest.

The Trembling Forest is a live art ballet directed by emilyn claid and devised in collaboration with Azara, Eve Stainton, Martin O’Brien, Ming and Orrow Bell. The work draws on the spontaneous physicality of live art practices together with the scenic, choreographic structures of balletic traditions. Encounters between this company are staged amidst a forest of queer people, including ‘the Liminals’ (Anno Bolender, Claudia Palazzo, and Lavinia Co-op), each painted with clay, who crack, shiver, tremble and decay. The Trembling Forest evokes a macabre, surreal, grotesque and beautiful world, where life force and death drive intertwine.

Design by Shanti Freed
Sound design by Lottie Poulet
Lighting design and production management by Rachel Shipp

The Trembling Forest has been produced by Future Ritual, London and co- commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre and Future Ritual. The project is supported by Arts Council England and Knotenpunkt, with further support given by The Place, Rose Choreographic School and Queen Mary University of London.

On Substance by n:u

The stool of a chief, a statue used for worship, an ancestor’s image, a pipe with tobacco still in it, a comb, a vessel to contain food
YOU HIDE ME by Nii Kwate Owoo (1970)

At the border of the land flowing with milk and honey* discourses around acquisition, conservation, patrimony and their definitions that are torn in a personal and global tracing of lineages of substance (ab)use. Staple food elements such as butter and flour - echoing extractivism - are juxtaposed with some of their ancestral, ceremonial, and ritualistic usage. Consumption of culture, gender, spirituality, race, religion, and food is questioned in this offering. With vulnerability and complicity, n:u interrogates healing as destruction and destruction as healing.

*Here referring to spiritual justifications of expansionist and genocidal governments.

n:u, atmosphere-maker, interrogates situations where healing, intimacy and altered embodiment can be experienced and what those co-created moments allow. Collaborating with space, companion-materials, and witnesses, n:u breaks what is understood as active or passive agency creating sculptural scenes -  growing new meaning and purposes, away from binary and linear processing. Power is constantly re-positioned as something malleable and fluid that could be used to repair if we were present to different choices.

> https://www.atmosphere-maker.org/about

n:u, On Substance, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

What is that damned beast? Anatomy of performance by Anne Bean

“This is a search, a hunt, for the beast that has plagued and soothed me, seared me and haunted me, filled me with unease and with tenderness,  with fear and quietude, with disturbance and focus, with bewilderment, with perplexity, with astonishment. It has offered me doorways to transcendence and banishment. This fire-spitting, shape-changing, teeth baring, ecstasy inducing beast will be encountered in some of its manifestations in my lifeworks.”

In a monograph on Anne Bean’s work, Self Etc., 2018, the writer Dominic Johnson wrote that: 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 solo and collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life.

> http://annebeanarchive.com/
> Future Ritual: Anne Bean

Anne Bean, What is that damned beast? Anatomy of performance, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

(my body / running wild / this animal) glorious by SERAFINE1369

I cannot escape it, dancing is always there, the calls of my body, the calls of all bodies compelled by the weather of the cosmos and its directions.

A group work in process.

SERAFINE1369, (my body / running wild / this animal) glorious, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

SERAFINE1369 is a choreographer. They work with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence. Cycles, time and haunting are recurring themes in their work which they describe as being an oracular practice. Their current research is thinking of the intimate technology of dancing as a form of dowsing.

SERAFINE1369 makes work that deals in intensities; atmospheres created by the tensions between things that make meaning, implicating the bodies of audiences as well as performers.

Their work is underpinned by their interest in the invisible systems and structures that choreograph bodies in life.

> Basic Tension
> @SERAFINE1369

Performed by Steph McMann, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Eve Stainton, Darcy Wallace and Natifah White
Light Design by Jackie Shemesh
Sound Design by Josh Anio Grigg with SERAFINE1369
Concept and Choreography  by SERAFINE1369

(my body / running wild / this animal) glorious is a Making Waves R&D Commission by Battersea Arts Centre. Made possible with funding by Arts Council England and Cockayne Grants for the Arts

Arcane Portals

Participants in Arcane Portals workshop made a collective work looking at the (re)invention of rites of passage and rituals through performance art. Participating artists: Amy Mauvan, Aparna Ashok, Caro Ruoff, Cherlynn Zang, Frauke Huhn, Izzie Major, Joana Cifre Cerdà, Johanna Peltonen, Johanne Sundfør, Kelvin Atmadibrata, Marta Lodola, Olivia Hassett, Ruth Biene, Spirit Doll, Tania Camara and WOJAK.

OUROBOROS pt.2 by gustaf broms

gustaf broms works in the borderlands between performance, video and installation. He was born in Sweden in 1966, currently lives and works in the Vendel forest. gustaf’s practice is engaged with the exploration of the nature of consciousness, the dualistic concept of Being NATURE (the biological process of body), and being MIND (as intellect interprets experience). In his practice, he started off working photography and installation, but two work in particular led him to work with the more formless processes of performance.

In 1991, Broms burned all of his work, and in doing so realized that theintensity of the action and the remaining ash far outdid anything he had previously made. In 2005, he completed a series of works entitled“5 Faiths for a Brave New World” in which he worked with objects that were physically too heavy for the body to move. These two experiences created a longing to explore the formless and led up to the project entitled “A Walking Piece” made with Trishula Littler, in which the two artists spent 18 months walking across Eastern Europe. The result is considered a drawing. Currently, Broms’ continues to work with his own body as the tool for examining what this living thing is.

> www.orgchaosmik.org
> The Guardian: the fearless artistic life of gustaf broms

gustaf broms, OUROBOROS pt.2, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

I N  PAEAN by Alastair MacLennan

Alastair MacLennan was born in Scotland and has lived and worked in Belfast, N. Ireland, since 1975. His achievements as an artist have had a significant influence on performance art, nationally and internationally.

Performing in diverse contexts, his works convey political, social and cultural conditions. His Actuations (performance/installations) seek to fuse interrelations.
 
Alastair would like to acknowledge the support of members of the Bbeyond Performance Art organization and charity, from N.Ireland and beyond.

> The Alastair MacLennan Archive

Alastair MacLennan, I N  PAEAN, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Tremble by Liz Rosenfeld

Flutter. Shutter. Quiver. Throb. Vibrations oscillate between all the holes and all the folds. This is not a memorial to what was once possible, but rather, a proposal to what this space can still become. Always an infinite hole. Always a threshold. The vibrant material of fat and flesh rock in service to ecologies and bodies not yet known.

Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin based transdisciplinary artist who works with performance, moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space.

Performers: Temitope Ajose, Joanna Lindsey, Tamm Reynolds and Liz Rosenfeld

> www.lizrosenfeld.co

Liz Rosenfeld, Tremble, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Marilyn Arsem, Voices, Future Ritual: Ceremony [I], 2024. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Marilyn Arsem

Marilyn Arsem (1951) has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the world.  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. In 1975 Arsem established a collaborative of artists now known as Mobius Artists Group, who create experimental art in all media.  From 1987 to 2014 Arsem taught performance art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  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.  

> https://marilynarsem.net

Raisa Kabir, Utterances, 2023. Liverpool Biennial. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Raisa Kabir 

Raisa Kabir is an artist and weaver based in London. Kabir uses woven text/textiles and performance to materialise multiple concepts, concerning the interwoven cultural politics of cloth. Kabir’s work draws on textile mobilities, embodied archives, and geographies of anti-colonial resistance.

Kabir’s (un)weaving performances and tapestries use queer entanglement to complicate structures of power, global networks of production/extraction, and the relationships between craft and industrialised labour.

Kabir has exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, Liverpool Biennial, Arnolfini, Whitechapel Gallery,  British Textile Biennial, Glasgow International, Australian Design Centre, Asia Art Now Paris, HH Art Spaces Goa, India. Yorkshire Contemporary. The Craft Council Gallery London, CCA Glasgow, Archive Berlin, Ford Foundation Gallery NYC, Textile Arts Center NYC, and the Center for Craft Creativity and Design U.S.

Rubiane Maia, The Tongue Bends Whenever It faces Whats Is Unquestionable Or What Has Been Cursed, Book- Performance, Chapter VI, 35th São Paulo Biennial. Photo by Levi Fanan / SP Biennial Foundation.

Rubiane Maia

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian multidisciplinary 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.

> www.rubianemaia.com

Pianka Pärna, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.

Pianka Pärna: Mother, don’t forget me yet II

“An uncanny echo permeates. Hanging dolls, hollow yet clinically aligned, awaiting their turn to scream. Wooden planks like carcasses along the hard stone-cold floor. A gentle hum of a folklore story welcomes the astray visitor. The crimson red hue of the Matryoshkas dance with the greens, blues and yellows of their glistening lacquered shells, adding speckles of light among ominous and alluring shadows. A pervertedly poignant stew of sweet nostalgia, foreshadowed by an occult presence emanating a sense of gender(less), childhood, home, and crackling skulls in the firepit. A haunting safe yet summoning, unsure of its possibility to belong but aware of its embodied becoming of something other than.”

Pianka Pärna is a non-binary post-Soviet artist from Estonia, exploring Baltic/Slavic mythologies, queer grief & gender non-conformity through performance. Their body-based practise intertwines folklore, ritual, mythological storytelling, and endurance to challenge hegemonic heteronormative narratives & post-Soviet cultural silencing while engaging in un/worlding—balancing creation, disintegration & collective transformation.

By often incorporating elements of body piercing and modification, their performance practise further examines ideas of control and reception of pain/pleasure modalities to acquire agency to the existence within the self(ves) among others.

VestAndPage, Under Scars, 2022. Photo by Lorenza Cini.

VestAndPage: BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT

This participatory closing performance, conceived by VestAndPage in collaboration with Ash McNaughton and Joseph Morgan Schofield, intertwines alienation with intimacy.

Longing for visions of critical utopianism, we create a space where individual and collective experiences converge. We are guided by the transgressive energy of breath, a form of communication and communion. Bodies are suspended in surging, viscous substances emblematic of our epoch—accumulative, smelted, hard coagulate, bound together by a stickiness that remixes the natural and the synthetic in grotesque, poetic hybridity. The audience participates in an immersive unveiling through guided participatory acts, embracing transformation through vulnerability. BREATHE FEAR IN. BREATHE GOLD OUT evokes a collective process of imagining, becoming, and nurturing tender connections.

Peal, reveal, uncover. Breathe.

“VestAndPage show us that the need to exist as an individual willing to open up and exorcise all fears is more acute than ever in the twenty-first century, despite all the cultivated illusion of the cocooned global village.” – Dana Altman

Transdisciplinary artists and curators of the tender collaborations in the ephemeral and immaterial, VestAndPage are Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes. They have been working together nomadically since 2006, using performance art, film and installation centred around critical bodies and sites to express philosophical and ecological thought. They have produced site-responsive, performance-based art in polar, subterranean, military, clinical, volcanic, megalopolitan and other critical milieus, focusing on art's ritual and liminal nature, and collective imaginings.

Marilyn Arsem, 100 Ways to Consider Time, Day 95: Black Sand, February 14, 2016. Photograph by Nick Procopi.

Marilyn Arsem: 100 ways to consider time

> Fri 18th April 2025, Live Art Development Agency

Across a 100 day period in 2015-16, Marilyn Arsem created one hundred different six-hour performances which took place daily in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Each of these durational works represented a different inquiry on the nature of time.

For this special evening, Arsem presented an artist talk reflecting on this body of work and sharing her research on performance art and time in conversation with curator Joseph Morgan Schofield.

> https://marilynarsem.net

VestAndPage, STRATA, 2024. Still from video. 4k Digital, 16:9, colour, stereo, 75 minutes.

VestAndPage: STRATA

Sat 19th April 2025, BLOC at Queen Mary University of London

In a film of philosophic poetic action, a collective of performance artists root out the liminal, spectral and ritual of art in prehistoric Ice Age caves. The hybrid of performance art and film shows caves as proto-spaces for altered states and sites of knowledge-making and human becoming.

Following the screening, curator Joseph Morgan Schofield chaired a conversation with VestAndPage. 

> www.stratafilm.de

Anne Bean & Marilyn Arsem, Gathering: On Tending & Enduring, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Anne Bean & Marilyn Arsem

chaired by Joseph Morgan Schofield

The artists joined in a conversation on time, space and collaboration. Video documentation to follow.

Anne Bean & Marilyn Arsem, Gathering: On Tending & Enduring, Future Ritual: CEREMONY, 2025. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

emilyn claid & Martin O’Brien

chaired by Martin Hargreaves

The artists, who had collaborated on The Trembling Forest, which premiered during the festival, joined in a conversation on queerness, legacy and deviance. Video documentation to follow.

These conversations were followed by  ‘On Tending’, a group conversation about endurance of practice through a challenging landscape, and what we might need from one another as collaborators in this work. This was facilitated by Live Art Development Agency.

Future Ritual presents

The performances 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