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A year-long programme cycle exploring performance in times of fragmentation.
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Sandra Johnston, Agape / Ajar, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
CEREMONY [I] a day of durational performances in Safehouse (Peckham)
23.06.2025
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.
Curated and produced by Future Ritual
Curator: Joseph Morgan Schofield
Programme assistance: Robyn Green, Ewan Hindes and kane stonestreet
Documentation: Fenia Kotsopoulou, Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi
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 project was produced in partnership with Live Art Development Agency, Queen Mary University of London, Stanley Arts, Venice International Performance Art Week and VSSL studio.
Enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk.
CEREMONY [I], Safehouse, 2024. VIdeography and editing by Baiba Sprance & Marco Berardi.
Marilyn Arsem
VoicesThe abandoned house felt like a living presence to me. In some places it was stripped to its skeleton, wooden lathes exposed, floors missing and only joists remaining. Some walls still had plastered sections, but even those were crumbling and scarred. Chimneys were sealed, and windows were nailed shut with no way to breathe. My room had an old floor – wide, plain boards. They were a dull grey color with years of dust and grim ground into them. But they still smelled of wood, of trees. I wanted to touch the house’s skin, comfort it, heal some of its wounds.
And what of the people who had once lived there? Do they ever return to the house? Can their presences be felt? We looked for the grave of a man who had lived there for many years, but the section of the cemetery where he was buried was overrun by brambles obscuring tumbled and broken gravestones. It felt equally abandoned.
I spent six hours in the room, blindfolded. I sat quietly, waiting. I inhaled the breath of the room, letting the house enter me. I ingested it through all my other senses beyond sight. It was a quiet performance, often still, with small movements, pauses, listening. I whispered to the room, to those who had lived there, listening. I crawled into corners, smelled everything, poking between gaps in the floorboards and into holes in the wall. Always listening. I touched the room’s wounds as gently as I could, feeling cracked plaster, splintered wood, nails, and things unknown. There were presences in the room with me during those six hours. I was never entirely sure who they were.
I wished that I could have opened the windows.
What might have the wind restored?
What would have been released?
Artist Index: Marilyn Arsem
Devika Bilimoria
OfferingsSQUAT / THROW / SOUTH / MILK / HANDS / OPEN MOUTH / HUM
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.
Artist Index: Devika Bilimoria
Devika Bilimoria, Offerings, Future Ritual, 2024. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
Helena Goldwater
safe keepingCharacteristically, my performances feature the materials of the body, for example, water, milk and hair, within which I immerse myself in relation to a space. Sometimes I focus on a detail of the body, such as my mouth, other times the materials dominate the body - all directly reference the erotic alongside the grotesque, and the epic and uncanny. Sometimes I am silent, sometimes I connect with audience members, either through words or actions which offer moments of exchange.
Helena Goldwater, safe keeping, Future Ritual, 2024. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.
I am concerned with what is hidden, unseen, and how it is both impacted upon and by a space, through the revelation and/or transformation of materials. The internal body, if you like, in relation to the space’s external body.
Artist Index: Helena Goldwater
Sandra Johnston
Agape / AjarSandra 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.
Artist Index: Sandra Johnston
Sandra Johnston, Agape / Ajar, 2024. CEREMONY [I], Future Ritual. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.