performingbordersLIVE19 Programme

performingborders and Foreign Actions Productions present

performingborders | LIVE 2019

Round-Up Video

FINAL COMMISSIONS, DOCUMENTATION, AND FILMS:

Performance to camera commission: BORDERLINE DIALOGUE by TARA FATEHI IRANI

Performance to camera commission: MOEBIUS STRIPPING by ISTANBUL QUEER ART COLLECTIVE

Digital conversation commission: ALL THE TEA IN CHINA by BURONG

Digital conversation commission: PATROLLING by CRITICAL INTERRUPTIONS

Public conversations:

Nima Sene & Tuna Erdem at Queer Contact in MANCHESTER

Annie Jael Kwan & Sim Chi Yin at Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in BRIGHTON

osborn&møller & Anti-Cool at Toynbee Studios in LONDON

CURATING BORDERLESS SPACES – WRITTEN RESPONSE by SEASON BUTLER

Curating Borderless Spaces Day at Live Art Development Agency – documentation

From February until July 2019, we present a programme of events and artist commissions that bring outside of the online realm urgent conversations and extraordinary artistic practices happening within the UK experimental live art sector around notions of cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, physical, and everyday borders.

Curated by Alessandra Cianetti and Xavier de Sousa, performingborders | LIVE draws from the curatorial research platform ‘performingborders. conversations on live art | crossings | europe’ that since 2016 has been gathering original interviews, writings and experimental responses from live artists, academics and art professionals on physical and conceptual borders within an increasingly shared feeling of uncertainty. As an attempt to make sense of an ever-developing present that hugely impacts on minority and oppressed communities, performingborders | LIVE brings those discussions into venues in Manchester, Brighton, London and Nogales (US/Mexico border wall) to widen the conversation and create a broader inclusive discussion that will also be freely accessible online.

As part of the programme two commissions for original performance to camera will be created by the Istanbul Queer Art Collective and artist Tara Fatehi Irani and shown at the Beyond the Wall / Más Allá del Muro Festival in Nogales at the Mexico/US border wall (May 2019), and previewed in London for the at the performingborders | LIVE final event ‘Curating Borderless Spaces’ at the Live Art Development Agency, London, on 22nd June 2019.

To widening the discussion around borders and include uncharted perspectives, performingborders | LIVE invites proposals for two digital conversations on Live Art and borders. The international live art community is invited to bring their own perspective into the word ‘border’ and what it means in their practice and lived experience. The two final digital pieces will be published on both the performingborders and the Live Art Development Agency websites as free to access resources.

Free movement workshops about systemic racial, gender and xenophobic oppression and its impact on the body will be held by Camille Barton/The Collective Liberation Project. Embodied Movement for Social Change workshop uses ‘somatic exercises and dance to explore how oppression is rooted in the body and how we can shift its hold on our lives using mindful attention and movement’ and will be freely accessible in both Brighton (21 March 2019, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts) and London (6 July 2019, Deptford Lounge).

Everyone is welcome! performingborders | LIVE welcomes people whose practice, research and life have been shaped by experiences of migration and borders.

Participants artists and curators: Anti-Cool, Camille Barton, Burong, Season Butler, Critical Interruptions, Tuna Erdem, Tara Fatehi Irani, Istanbul Queer Arts Collective, Bojana Janković, Dr. Anna Marazuela Kim, Annie Jael Kwan, Marikiscrycrycry, Dana Olărescu, osborn&møller, Raju Rage, Nima Séne, Sim Chi Yin, Kai Syng Tan, Helena Walsh.

Presented by performingborders and Foreign Actions Productions

in collaboration with

Live Art Development Agency (London, UK), Contact Theatre (Manchester, UK), Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (Brighton, UK), Artsadmin (London, UK), Deptford Lounge (London, UK), Beyond the Wall/Más Allá del Mur Festival (Nogales, US/Mexico), and the Centre for The Study of Sexual Dissidence (University of Sussex, UK). Supported by the Arts Council England.

PROGRAMME (February – July 2019)

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Sat 9 February 2019 |1.00pm-2.00pm | performingborders | LIVE | Manchester
Queer Contact Festival at YES Theatre
A conversation between Glasgow/Berlin-based live artist Nima Séne and curator and artist Tuna Erdem from the Istanbul Queer Arts Collective.

Read Xavier de Sousa’s reflections here

MagnumFoundation-CounterHistoriesSymposium-photo by Cao Mengwen
Photo by Cao Mengwen

Tue 19 March 2019 |7.00pm-9.00pm| performingborders | LIVE | Brighton
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts
A performative reading by Nobel Peace Prize photographer and artist Sim Chi Yin, who will be in conversation with curator Annie Jael Kwan from Something Human and Asia-Art-Activism. The Q&A will be chaired by academic, thinker and activist Dr. Anna Marazuela Kim.

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Embodied movement for social change. Photo by Chani Bockwinkel

Embodied Movement for Social Change Workshop dates:

SOLD OUT! Thu 21 March 2019 |6.00pm-9.00pm| performingborders | LIVE | Brighton
Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts

COMING | Sat 6 July 2019 |1.00pm-4.00pm| performingborders | LIVE | London

In the Embodied Social Change workshop by Camille Barton, dance, somatics and mindfulness are used to explore how oppression is rooted in the body and how we can shift its hold on our lives using mindful attention and movement. The work is intended to generate new approaches to activism that focus on the body, as well as the mind. After all, systems of power and oppression are reproduced by our bodies on a daily basis.

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Anti-Cool, On Returning, 2017 (still from video)

Wed 24 April 2019 | 7.00pm-9.00pm| performingborders | LIVE | London
Toynbee Studios
A conversation between interdisciplinary artist Anti-Cool and curators osborn&møller (UK/Denmark), presenting the UK premiere of Anti-Cool’s three-screen video installation On Returning, which explores the history of several British families and couples, separated and disrupted by current immigration policies.

Since the financial requirement was introduced in 2012 for those with family members from outside of the EU countries, 20,000 families who cannot meet the threshold have been facing separation from their family members. Many of them can only speak to their children on Skype. Using raw and often blunt interview footage of participants who are in the middle of such disruptions, On Returning investigates their true feelings about borders, human rights and families. Although highly prevalent in today’s political climate, such stories are still unknown by the majority of the people in the UK. While investigating the difficult issues of immigration the work also uses experimental visual elements of the British landscape and physical/performative actions to explore the highly emotive side of the subject matter.

BTWALL_OK

Sun 5 May 2019 | performingborders | LIVE | US/Mexico border wall
Nogales Arizona/Sonora
performingborders | LIVE conversations and performance to camera commissions will be presented as part of the second edition of the Más Allá del Muro / Beyond the Wall Festival.

Más Allá del Muro / Beyond the Wall,  which is run by a coalition of local and international artists, aims to showcase authentic, diverse, local perspectives on life at the US/Mexico border through local artists and youth. We know there is more to life at the border than the wall: our work offers locals a chance to celebrate and reconsider the narratives around local life, and non-locals an invitation to connect to authentic local stories and reconsider their perspective on life at the border. In 2019, we are hosting a binational pen pal program with high school students, and hosting the 2nd annual Beyond the Wall Festival, a binational art and culture festival in Nogales AZ/SON, where the wall bisects the city. The festival centerpiece is a performance of 15-foot tall puppets of children created with local youth; the puppets come together at the wall, reframing it as an object of play.

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Image credits: Istanbul Queer Art Collective, photo by Eda Sancakdar. Image design by Mid’A Design.

22 June 2019 | Final event: Curating Borderless Spaces| London
Live Art Development Agency, Free
Join performingborders | LIVE final event, Curating Borderless Spaces. The day will focus on highlighting and platforming urgent voices and discourses within the Live Art sector on how we can work together in creating collaborative borderless, anti-racist, non-binary, feminist, non-ableist, post-colonial spaces.

Kicking off the day with a keynote by interdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist Raju Rage, the event will see the premiere of commissioned performances-to-camera by Istanbul Queer Arts Collective and Tara Fatehi Irani, along with new digital conversations on Live Art and borders by Burong and Critical Interruptions. Everyone is invited to participate in a communal live group conversation dotted by the interventions and provocations of guest artists Bojana Janković, Marikiscrycrycry, Dana Olărescu, Kai Syng Tan and Helena Walsh. Writer in Residence Season Butler will respond to the discussions and exchanges of the day through live writing and she will close the event with a performative response to the day’s proceedings. Curating Borderless Spaces is part of Antiuniveristy 2019. More info here