Workshop

2012

REVERIES ON VISIBLE THINKING by Julia Bardsley (28th - 30th July Folkestone)

︎︎︎ PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK

E.M. Parry + Adrian Coto + Ernst Fischer + Julia Bardsley

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A proposition for three days of process, generating visual vocabularies and spatial grammars of materials, actions, mark-making, objects, body, maps, diagrams, sound, space and time. Each participant will bring their own discrete practice and aesthetics into dialogue with a common set of provocations - working individually but within a coexistent frame. We will be accruing our coexistent thinking in the space and over time, through processes of - generating + disturbing | layering + disrupting | erasing + collision”

Images: REVERIES on VISIBLE THINKING workshop outcome, Julia Bardsley, Adrian Coto, E.M. Parry and Ernst Fischer, 2021. Photos by Manuel Vason.

Julia Bardsley is an artist working with the interplay of performance, pinhole photography, video projection, sculptural objects, psychological garments and hybrid personae. Works include: The Divine Trilogy: Trans-Acts, Almost The Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture) and Aftermaths: a tear in the meat of vision (London, Glasgow, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Croatia, Belgium, Italy); meta-FAMILY (Brazil, UK, Belgium, Slovenia) and Medea: dark matter events (Brazil & London). A book of her pinhole photographs, u See The Image Of Her i, was published in 2016.

In a new phase of work, under the creative umbrella The House of Wonder & Panic, she has developed a series of durational process events entitled Reading Rooms. The Reading Rooms have repurposed a political, a philosophical and an entomological text. The third of the series, An Apian Paradox, conjures an apicultural world that offers a feminine ecology of creativity, pleasure and female bee-ing and has been presented in London, Lisbon and at Fierce! Birmingham.
Her work tests coexistences and antagonisms across the nature/culture & animal/human spectrums. She is currently exploring ways of appropriating and folding rewilding principles of disturbance and succession into her creative process.

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Workshop

2012

Re:STORE (trust) by Sandra Johnston (25th - 27th August 2021, Folkestone)

︎︎︎ PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK

Monstera Deliciosa + Ash McNaughton + Helen Davison + Kajoli Ilojak + Conor Baird + Sandra Johnston

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“In the unfolding circumstances of the past year where interpersonal connections have been negatively impacted by the pandemic, how can performance art be reconfigured to address an uneasy new body-phobic social consciousness? I suggest that one of the central ideas that gives performance art agency as a discipline is the range of intimacies that can be tested and opened up through myriad acts of close witnessing. In this workshop we will explore together various ways that trust might be reconstructed, or restored between self and others, including more-than-human relationships and perspectives. Moving between a scale of viewing distance, touching distance, breathing distance, with the aim not to rupture but to respect the parameters of how we sense these sensitive borders, we will consider how intimacy might be redefined. Furthermore, can we still trust ourselves to engage through attuning practices?”

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Workshop

2012

Layers of Time by Rubiane Maia (21st-23rd May 2021, Folkestone)

︎︎︎ PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK

Chinasa Vivian Ezugha + Pierce Starre + Sylvia Morgado + Ash McNaughton + Maria Clara + Rubinae Maia

(original copy)
“The notion that the past is a vital force that moves incessantly inside and outside us, coexisting and actualising itself through our bodies continuously has been a fundamental aspect in my current artistic production. I am particularly interested in the idea that the moment a memory is actualised through an action, it ceases to be a memory and becomes perception. In this sense, we could consider the body as a channel with infinite layers of time - a primordial device that never stops to launch us towards the future. My proposal is to develop an immersive and practical study around collective and individual memories using empirical exercises of telepathy and telekinesis. Throughout the workshop we will be practicing actions that involve acuteness, permanence and physical-mental resilience.”

images: The Table, ‘Layers of Time’ workshop outcome, Rubiane Maia, 2021. Photos by Manuel Vason.

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian visual artist based in Folkestone, UK. She completed a degree in Visual Arts and a Master degree in Institutional Psychology at Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil. Her artwork is an hybrid practice across performance, video, installation and text, occasionally flirting with drawing and collage. She is attracted by states of synergy, encompassing the invisible relationships of affect and flux, and investigates the body in order to amplify the possibilities of perception beyond the habitual. More recently, she has been researching the concept of memory and its resonances in our way of existing.

In 2015, she took part at the workshop 'Cleaning the House' with Marina Abramovic and participated at the exhibition 'Terra Comunal - Marina Abramovic + MAI', at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo with the long durational performance ‘The Garden’ (2 months). In 2016, she worked on the project titled 'Preparation for Aerial Exercise, the Desert and the Mountain' which required her to travel to high landscapes of Uyuni (Bolivia), Pico da Bandeira (Espírito Santo/Minas Gerais, BRA) and Monte Roraima (Roraima, BRA/Santa Helena de Uyarén, VEN). In the same year she completed her second short film titled 'ÁDITO'. Since 2018 she has been working on the creation of a ‘Book-Performance’, a series of actions devised in response to specific autobiographical texts particularly influenced by personal experiences of racism and misogyny.

Studio Bursaries at VSSL Studio

2012

Kelvin Atmadibrata + Adriana Disman

︎︎︎ PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK

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In collaboration with VSSL studio, our sister-space in Deptford (London), we invited Kelvin Atmadibrata and Adriana Disman to undertake 7 month studio bursaries. Kelvin and Adriana presented performance works during the PSX photography exhibition at VSSL.

Kelvin Atmadibrata, PSX: Photography exhibition, VSSL studio, 2021. Video by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.

Kelvin Atmadibrata (b.1988, Jakarta, Indonesia) recruits superpowers awakened by puberty and adolescent fantasy. Equipped by shōnen characters, kōhai hierarchy and macho ero-kawaii, he often personifies power and strength into partially canon and fan fiction antiheroes to contest Southeast Asian masculine meta and erotica. He works primarily with performances, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed media collages and objects compiled as installations. Approached as bricolages, Kelvin translates narratives and recreates personifications based on RPGs (Role-playing video games) theories and pop mythologies.

Adriana Disman, PSX: Photography exhibition, VSSL studio, 2021. Video by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.

Adriana Disman is a performance art maker, thinker, and writer. Her practice searches for minor modes of resistance as she seeks liberation – an interdependent and as yet un-imagined state – through refusing to adhere to the logics of power. Often engaging with self-wounding, her work is minimal, poetic, and intense.

Disman’s writing on performance can be found in both academic and arts publications, and she is currently co-editing a book entitled "50 Key Performance Artists" for Routledge with T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko. Currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London under Dominic Johnson, Disman writes on the pathologisation of self-wounding performance art.

Residencies at ]ps[

2012

Jade Blackstock + James Jordan Johnson

︎︎︎ PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK

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“We hosted the artists Jade Blackstock and James Jordan Johnson for a shared residency month at ]performance s p a c e[ in June 2021. Jade and James’ projects are ongoing and this page will be updated with further information at a later time.” 

James Jordan Johnson. Photo by Alex Gulino.

James Jordan Johnson (b. 1997, London, UK) is an artist working in performance and sculpture. He explores how personal/collective memory and mythmaking informs historical experiences within Black life (specifically Afro-Caribbean life). Through this, he uses his practice as a way to think about the embodiment and unnamable ties between objects and people within life-cycles.

Cummndazz, Jade Blackstock, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jade Blackstock (B. 1993, Birmingham, UK) is a British Jamaican performance artist. Her work explores questions of the body and identity in relation to historical, cultural and personal events and experiences. Her practice is particularly anchored in exploring Afro-Caribbean customs, rituals and material, and attempts to discuss how prejudices and colonial histories continue to impact the lives and current representations of Black people and people of colour. She seeks to highlight how the body, material and space have shared capabilities of holding, transferring and embodying collective pasts or memories, which bears importance in our understanding of selves and each other. Themes of race and Black identity, feminism, ownership, class and loss are present in her work.