performingborders: Body, Politics & Live Art, Barbican 1st & 3rd Dec’22
14th November 2022
We’re excited to announce that we will be running a series of workshops for young people (16-25) at the Barbican Centre, with the Creative Learning department in response to the exhibition Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics.
Join us to reflect on Carolee Schneemann’s legacy, and explore how feminist performance has been carried on by artists working today. For this series of events, performingborders has put together three gatherings that bring together contemporary live artists working on themes of bodies, borders, and politics, continuing conversations that Schneemann was a part of and providing opportunities to engage with ongoing feminist performance practices.
We cannot wait for the programme’s participants to engage directly with the practice of Anahí Saravia Herrera & Jemima Yong, Tara Fathei Irani (screening), Lynn Lu (screening), Jade Montserrat (screening), Helena Walsh, and the performingborders team.
We will be running three separate events in this series – more information & booking links can be found on the Barbican website here. All events are free!
pbScreenings + Long Table conversation: screenings of performances-to-camera by Lynn Lu, Tara Fatehi Irani & Jade Montserrat
18:30 – 20:30 | 1 December 2022 (link for tickets here)
Join us for a screening of performances-to-camera from the performingborders archive, followed by a ‘Long Table’ performance, through which we’ll unpack and discuss the work and its themes. Facilitated by performingborders curators.
Workshop: INSTRUCTIONS FOR DESTRUCTION: feminist anti-capitalist scores for the future with Anahí Saravia Herrera & Jemima Yong
11:00 – 14:00 PM | 3rd December (link for tickets here)
Join us for this participatory workshop where we will read & write manifesto against the patriarchy, thinking with the exhibition Carolee Schneeman: Body Politics.
Talk + practice sharing session: Feminism & Performance – with artist Helena Walsh
15:00 – 16:30 PM | 3 December 2022 (link for tickets here)
In this workshop artist Helena Walsh will share elements of her practice, drawing from her rich experience working on themes of the body, autonomy, resistance, and feminism. It will be an open porous space for exchange and we welcome artists working in performance or with feminist themes to come to learn, ask questions, and exchange with their peers. There will be opportunities to share elements of your work and enter in collective dialogue with the group about what it means to create politically engaged feminist work.
These workshops have been conceived and are being organised for young people between the ages of 16 – 25, however, if you are above the age of 25 and are particularly interested in joining the events, email us at [email protected] and we can arrange!
As well as advertising this programming, we want to be transparent about working with an institution like the Barbican:
We have read Barbican Stories and stand in solidarity with all the staff at the Barbican who have experienced racism and anti-migrant sentiments. We encourage you to read this important publication here.
As a part of our work with the Barbican, we required an additional amount of £500 (equal to g 20% of our fees) for a Solidarity Pot that we are developing, created to provide funds for the artists we work with to cover things such as union fees, legal costs and other expenses related to labor and migrant rights.
We will apply this requirement to any future work with large, public, and private cultural institutions, as we want to ensure that any project we work on in these spaces means the potential to improve material conditions and structural support for the artists we work with.
As a small arts group, we have limited opportunities to run public, face-to-face programmes engaging young people outside of our immediate network and the opportunity to do this is important for us, as we want performingborders and their resources to pollinate and proliferate across as many spaces as possible. For the most part, this is most easily facilitated by large institutions with the resources and infrastructure to run creative learning events. We do not think that this should be the case and will continue to seek out opportunities to continue to engage with audiences outside of work with institutions. However, in this instance we felt that there was an interesting opportunity to engage with an exhibition showing works by an artist whose practice has held so much resonance with many of the artists we work with, creating the potential to connect them and their work to emerging performers and creatives. We will continue to do our best to politicize the spaces we occupy in these institutions and bring necessary critique to everything we do with them.
