2021


The 2021 iteration of the Stanley Picker Public Lecture Programme continued our programme of ACTS, inviting selected practitioners to consider what it means to stage an online event as a way to distribute artistic knowledge. 


ACT IV (15/11/21) Alice Gale-Feeny, and mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson, ACT V (13/12/21) Rindon Johnson



Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)
Alice Gale-Feeny (2021)










Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)
Alice Gale-Feeny (2021)


Edited by Alice Gale-Feeny. Performances and writing included by Manuela Albrecht, Svenja Buehl, Michaela Gerussi and Alice Gale-Feeny.


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‘Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)’ is thirty minutes long. About the length of the performance practice ‘Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)’ (2021). It is a work that uses recursion as a method of writing and re-writing a framework for being with objects, and with each other.

Recursion is about addition and recalibration. New knowledge destroys a previous model, and writes a new one. 'Speaking through events creates new starting points'.

Through a practice with objects, the work asks what becomes of us as we practice writing about and with, a series of containers, that we spill in and out of.

I wanted to work on a series of live screen recordings where I (re)compose a series of videos that were made to accompany the performance 'Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)', as well as retrieving earlier recordings from the studio when the work began on my own body, working solo. I bring the live performance documentation next to the videos - creating loops within loops, densifying a practice that is already about the emergence of material between bodies objects and voices - and I am testing how they operate in a flattened compositional space of the screen. Trying to broaden that space to include my own body when editing.

In the original performance we were dealing with edges and boundaries. But edges and boundaries mean different things in the context of the online space; within screen(s).

I am also dealing in some way, with an archive of live performance documentation. I’m trying to think through what an online ACT may be in relation to the multiple time periods in which these documents span, and the editing process itself; looking at multiple videos at once as a form of accumulation and recalibration, asking what 'forms' emerge when I do this.

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Alice Gale-Feeny is an artist and writer working with performance, dance, facilitation and video. She is interested in devising frameworks for emergent processes to take place; where language and material form, construct and transform realities and build fictions, leading towards live outcomes that continue to recalibrate through their presentation. She draws from perspectives within the fields of New Materialism, Posthumanism, Somatics and Semiotics to think through bodily and linguistic relations.

Her most recent performance ‘Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)’ was presented at Seventeen, London in August 2021 on the invitation of David Hoyland, as part of Performance Exchange, curated by Rose LeJeune. Alice is a Lecturer in Ba Fine Art at Kingston School of Art. She lives and works in London.

www.alicegale-feeny.com

Performers in ‘Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)’
Manuela Albrecht @manualbrecht
Michaela Gerussi: @mgerussi
Svenja Buehl: @svenjabuhl



How to be Afraid?

mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson (2021)





Excerpt from 'How to be Afraid?' online performance by mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson with collaborators Akeim Toussaint Buck, Seke Chimutengwende, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot and Amy Voris from May 28, 2021. Video edited by George Maund.



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‘How to be Afraid?’ investigates the afterlife of the transatlantic slave in relation to body, time and space. Over the past four years, iterations of this project have manifested in in a number of international contexts.

This iteration explored somatic responses to the turbulent politics and pandemic conditions of the past year and how it has shifted perspectives and realities.

The project revolved around the nature of fear itself. How do we navigate this time when political and societal pressure needs to be released? How do we recover from a fear of intimacy, if we are afraid, after a year of lockdowns and physical distancing?

Due to pandemic circumstances, this project was delivered transatlantically in hybrid mode, with mayfield brooks based at Center for Performance Research in New York and Mary Pearson and other collaborators at Siobhan Davies Studios.

This iteration of How to be Afraid? was co-produced by Mary Pearson, mayfield brooks and Independent Dance in partnership with CPR – Center for Performance Research (New York), The Bluecoat (Liverpool) supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with support from Creative Land Trust.

mayfield brooks improvises while black, and is currently based on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are faculty at Movement Research NYC and Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal. brooks is also the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award in dance granted by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their dance film, Whale Fall. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, Improvising While Black (IWB).

Mary Pearson is a performance maker and dancer/researcher working with Contact Improvisation and related dance practices, comedy, visual art, voice, and devising. Her solos FAILURE, The Sand Dog Cometh and FoMO, mofos! have toured internationally. Fascinated by collaboration as a complex and coordinated practice in survival, Mary is co- curator of Con|VERGE, REMIX collaborative performance residencies at Ponderosa Dance (DE). She teaches improvisation as a FAILURE Lab in universities and art contexts such as Improspecjie festival (Croatia), contactfestival Freiburg (Germany), WCCIJam and PADL West (CA, USA), Ponderosa P.O.R.C.H. summer school (Germany), and Live Art Bistro (UK). As a qualified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, she facilitates release of trauma held in the body.

George Maund is a cross-discipline artist, performer and broadcaster based in Liverpool, north west Europe since 2005. His most recent set of work is subtitled 'Psych Capital' and deals in subversive mixed-media interventions into and concerning the realm of neoliberal encroachment on 'the counterculture', taking inspiration (or lack thereof) from billionaire wellness retreats and late-stage capitalism's strange excesses and obsessions. In working life George has moved from touring musician to programming 'in-person' live music venues, to facilitating online iterations of performance and hybrid events, specialising in remote audio-visual broadcasts that retain an air of playful flair with room for creative manoeuvre for collaborators and audiences alike. George has been part of the team behind the Popular Music Show - UK radio's longest-running alternative music programme - at BBC Merseyside since 2017, currently presenting on a bi-monthly basis. He currently hosts and/or co-hosts several shows out of Melodic Distraction, Liverpool's internet radio station.

mayfield and Mary’s collaborators:

https://annegaellethiriot.tumblr.com
https://www.amyvoris.com
https://www.toussainttomove.com
http://www.sekechimutengwende.com




The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves (recorded live event)
Rindon Johnson (2021)










The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves (recorded live event)
Rindon Johnson (2021)


For the event, Johnson shared insights into the research process behind his new Chisenhale commission, The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves, as well as some of his references and ways of working in an experimental online format. Recording made on the 13th of December 2021.

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Chisenhale Gallery presents Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves, a new commission and first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Berlin-based artist Rindon Johnson. The first iteration of this commission — Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies — was presented at SculptureCenter, New York, earlier this year. Johnson’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery and SculptureCenter.

Moving between physical, object-based works and immersive, virtual space, Johnson’s work cuts through assumed realities and examines how virtual and physical spaces are intimately aligned. His work is couched first in language; in the ways that language fails, contradicts or empowers. Through modes of expression spanning publishing, virtual and augmented reality, to working with materials such as leather, wood and stone to create sculptures and installations, Johnson’s works explore the impact of capitalism, climate and technology on how we see and construct ourselves.

Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery and SculptureCenter, New York.

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Rindon Johnson lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Selected exhibitions include; Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies, SculptureCenter, New York (2021); Away with You, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC; This End The Sun, New Museum, New York (both 2020); Circumscribe, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (All 2019); New Black Portraitures, Rhizome, Online; and NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (both 2017).

www.chisenhale.org.uk