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emilyn claid & Martin O’Brien, DISCHARGE, 2024. Photo by Manuel Vason.
DISCHARGE
Symposium and performances at Ugly Duck02.03.2024
Marking the end of Martin O’Brien’s year-long Whitechapel Gallery residency (An Eternity of Nothingness or The (Im)possibility of Living On), this was a special day of presentations, conversations and performances reflecting on sickness, sex, disability, mourning and practices of living and dying queerly.
This event was a reprise of a notorious performance art event series curated by O’Brien and hosted in kink and fetish clubs in London in the early 2010s. 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.
Co-curated by Martin O’Brien and Future Ritual
Produced by Future Ritual in partnership with Ugly Duck; Programme assistance - Ewan Hindes; Documentation - Fenia Kotsopoulou, Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi
Enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk.
DISCHARGE was 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.
www.uglyduck.org.uk
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
16:00: Live Art, Dead Art panel with Anne Bean, Oreet Ashery, Rubiane Maia and chaired by Lois Keidan
19.00: performance art actions, sonic activations, dance and kinky goings on from: Anne Bean and Ansuman Biswas, Ash McNaughton, Electric Adam, Emilyn Claid and Martin O’Brien, Maya Williams, Pianka Pärna and zack mennell.
Anne Bean & Ansuman Biswas
Candle / StickTwo performers in a blackout with a candle between them. They make vocal sounds which disturb the candle flame and occasionally extinguish it. It spontaneously re-ignites repeatedly. The piece ends when there is no more candle left.
Artist Index: Anne Bean
Artist Index: Ansuman Biswas
Anne Bean and Ansuman Biswas, Candle / Stick, DISCHARGE, 2024. Videography by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Ash McNaughton
DredgeMcNaughton’s 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.
Artist Index: Ash McNaughton
Ash McNaughton, Dredge, DISCHARGE, 2024. Videography by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Electric Adam
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.Artist Index: Electric Adam
Electric Adam, DISCHARGE, 2024. Videography by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Electric Adam, DISCHARGE, 2024. Photo by Manuel Vason.
emilyn claid & Martin O’Brien
RawhideThis collaboration continued and was deepend through claid’s work The Trembling Forest (2025).
Artist Index: emilyn claid
Artist Index: Martin O’Brien
emilyn claid and Martin O’Brien, DISCHARGE, 2024. Photos by Manuel Vason.
emilyn claid and Martin O’Brien, DISCHARGE, 2024. Videography by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Maya Williams
FuneralA performance obituary. Williams’ 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.
Artist Index: Maya Williams
Maya Williams, DISCHARGE, 2024. Photo by Manuel Vason.
Maya Williams, DISCHARGE, 2024. Videography by Baiba Sprance and Marco Berardi.
Pianka Pärna
Of Salt on my SkinLöyly began the journey,
Salt on the lips
Sweat emanating
Venturing through the wind and water droplets
Astray along the skin
For years longing
A departure bitter
An arrival much sweeter yet further away.
of salt on my skin
I yearn one more time
Until no more
Until my body is all but
of salt on my skin.
Artist Index: Pianka Pärna
Pianka Pärna, Of Salt on my Skin, DISCHARGE, 2024. Photos by Manuel Vason.
Video documentation available on request.
zack mennell
spit it outArtistic expression is, for me, a way to make sense of the world and an attempt to contextualise who I am within it. In stepping into difficulty and pain through artmaking, I attempt to understand life through a different register to that of daily survival. I want my work to have an uncanny quality, that it might temporarily unsettle familiar places, making visible some of the strange aspects and tensions embedded there.
Artist Index: zack mennell
zack mennell, spit it out, DISCHARGE, 2024. Photos by Manuel Vason.
Video documentation available on request.
Panels
Video documentation of the presentations is available on request - producing@futureritual.co.uk.
DISCHARGE symposium, 2024. Photos by Manuel Vason.
An Eternity of Nothingness or The (Im)possibility of Living On
2023/24This year long project, led by Martin O’Brien and produced by Future Ritual, explored life and death and the queer space in between. Alongside DISCHARGE, the project involved: