SPOILER ALERT!
Mia Debenham and Marie Saint-Yves: Neptune-Ball AEGAGROPILE & Co v The ANTHROPOCENE WORLDWIDE CORPORATION performed by Arthur Wickham
A lecture from a lawyer about microplastics and how we end up becoming our rubbish by eating it. It could be seen as a combined demonstration of the persuasive arts of our time: medicine, law, environmentalism and science. All executed under the rubric of rhetoric. It is left up to the audience to decide their fate once the legal argument has been completed.
Molly Lau: Eon City
A video installation which showcased an imaginary city that was powered by bioluminescence. An investigation of architecture through light, evoking a European tradition and architectural imaginary of light which dates back to at least Saint Denis and Abbot Suger.
Gabriella Day: The ladder is an A
A video of the performer reading out a script which begins in darkness with a headlight focused on the page and ends with the same vision. First light and then reading. The body emerges out of darkness into the light and the text and then disappears into darkness from the light and the text. Is this an investigation of the before and the after of reading, its construction, origin and ending, its enabling by light and the body?
Beth Simcock
A read piece accompanied by a video of the art of the artist. The drawings drew an expression of admiration from my friend
Arthur Wickham: Bian Lian
A performance in which the artist peels off several masks off his face, does a handstand, dances and wears a building on his face too. There was a mention of the grotesque in art and how it relates to the culture of the spectacle, which perhaps explains the form of the masks. The dynamic appeared to be unveiling and its frustration as each time the mask was removed, there was another mask underneath. Eventually however, we see the face of the artist with the suggestion that under the art, the artist stands exposed, the striptease of the face appropriated to challenge gendered conventions of performance?
Da In Park: Entangled Steps, A Salt Prayer for the Haunted Garden: Reconciling Colonial Legacy and War Memories behind the Beauty of Cherry Blossoms. (For more, Saltprayer.com)
A mesmerising silent protest against Japanese colonialism and the implication of UCL within this with its Japanese garden through Korean ritual. The salt prayer is a ritual to cleanse ‘colonial rot’. The silence of the moment reflects the silencing of the colonised and invites reflection and healing for oppression.
Margot Wilson: Sacrificial Package. With Eva Titherington and Juliet Dodson
Two ladies in red overalls wind shrink wrap around the artist to the sound of some cassette players. Is this about the packaging of the female body and its commodification, the packaging of the artist? Is it about how plastic is reimaging the body in the era of the anthropocene? The two cassette players compete with each other and we see the slow circling of the female body by the two women. Because the artist has told me that she is a sculptor that works with shrink wrap and we see sculpture in the round, maybe this is a reflection on the process of creating sculpture for the round and on its viewing. Also perhaps a reflection on how this is the era of transparency, with plastic and glass, a reflection on its restriction for the human body as the artist tries to walk with the shrink wrap around her and her movement is severely impeded.
Juliet Dodson: Stage Fright
Persuading a large red curtained box to get into the spotlight when it does not want to. And therefore an exploration of visibility and disappearance on the public stage, the coercions of visibility and the association of invisibility with what? Freedom or insignificance and obscurity? The artist’s dilemma.
Rosalind Wilson: Stack
Building things with sticks which keep on falling down. A metaphor for something? The futility of human endeavour? A feminist comment about women in art? The life of the artist? An exploration of construction and destruction? The ephemerality of art?
Lily Hosotani: How old is this ___? With Molly Lau
An oversized tape measure which the performers measure tools with. I get the feeling that there is a sexual innuendo that informs this – the measuring of ‘tools’ by women. At the end of the performance, the performers measure themselves. An element of disruption is perhaps intended. In constructing something, it is usually space that is measured, not the tools that will be used to work on the space. And then why would measuring be extended to the self if there was some work of construction? Of course, the Ancient Greeks might be being invoked in a feminist revision – ‘(wo)man is the measure of all things’?
Eva Titherington: Running for the Hills
A group of figures huddled together with a painting of a red hill attached to them so that they are faceless. They all keep on repeating ‘she is running for the hills’. Seems to be a literal meditation on the repetition compulsion behind language and idoms. These idioms and language itself is created through endless repetition so the performers do it ad nauseum to build up the image of the red hills and insist upon it, highlighting how metaphor and visual imagery is also crucial to the act of repetition itself. So an investigation of the dynamics of language and their intersection with the visual, how we create shared images in our minds and thoughts.
Munaye Lichtenstein: The End is Knot in Sight
We see the performer pulling at the rope and then as the rope takes centre stage, eventually we see what she was pulling – herself. A comment about how we have to pull ourselves along through life, the struggle to get through things, a comment about the burden of the self in the journey through life.
Hannah Stanley: Billy & CO
A composer with an orchestral band that aims to control them but produces the worst music in the entire world. About control and consequence.
diary of a lone man 