Contributors Biographies

National Review of Live Art 2008
Performing Rights Glasgow

 

The Live Art Development Agency offers a portfolio of Resources, Professional Development Schemes, Projects and Initiatives for the support of Live Art practices and discourses in London, the UK and internationally. The Agency also runs Unbound, an online shop for Live Art books, and dvds. www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk www.thisisunbound.co.uk



Cabula 6 is a collaboration between the artists and activists Jeremy Xido and Claudia Heu and focuses on the border between reality and fiction and the uneasy dialogue between a person's private sense of identity and its dynamic reception in a broader social context. We search out non-traditional performance spaces that make it possible to walk this line, between what is real and what is constructed and which can bring audience members face to face with their assumptions and expectations about who they are. We create films, installations and performance pieces for the stage and on location.  We are dedicated to principles of delight, humour, investigation and adrenalin. We love to play. www.cabula6.com

 

Richard DeDomenici recently disavowed his mission statement of six years, which described him variously as an 'anarcho-surrealist' and a 'one-man-subversive-think-tank'. People were beginning to take it too seriously, he claims. Thus he is presently seeking a replacement ideology with a new angle that will appeal to the man on the street, whilst not alienating the sophisticated pricks. Currently there is no market for DeDomenici's work. He is described by people who know him as one of the most beautiful men who ever lived. www.dedomenici.co.uk

 

Yara El-Sherbini lives and works in London and has shown work nationally and internationally including Joking Aside - Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery; Artsadmin  - London; System Error - Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena; Toyko Wonder Site, Japan; Who are you? Where are you really from? - Whitworth Art Gallery; and Late at Tate - Tate Britain. Commissions include Breathing Space; Arnolfini, BBC's Power Of Art artist tours, and TAGGED - Space Media Arts. Sheikh 'n' Vac, an artists' book commissioned by Book Works, was published in July 2005. www.yaraelsherbini.com

 

Adalet R Garmiany is originally from Kurdistan/Iraq and came to UK in 2000. He studied for a High Diploma in Fine Art in Kurdistan and a BA (Hon) in Fine Art in the UK. Through his artwork Adalet attempts to interpret cultural ideas from Kurdistan into a western context. Using various media and sound within performances and installations, his work references historical and religious beliefs, such as Zoroastrianism and Sufism, and explores these in relation to the current, often clashing and globalised, world. Adalet is also the director of ArtRole, a UK based art organization developing cultural exchanges with the Middle East. www.artrole.org

 

Ori Gersht was born in Israel but has lived and worked in London for the last fifteen years, studying for his MA at the Royal College of Art. His work, in both video and photography, has been shown extensively. Solo exhibitions include: The Clearing at the Photographers' Gallery, London; History in the Making at Photo España, Madrid; Afterglow at Tate Britain and Pitch at Chisenhale Gallery, London. His work has also featured in major group shows such as Independence at the South London Gallery, and Reality Check, a touring exhibition organised by The British Council and The Photographers' Gallery. His work is held in a range of national and private collections. Three books have been published on his practice: Afterglow, (August Publications, 2002).

 

Guillermo Gómez-Peña is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. His pioneering work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, cultural theory and radical pedagogy, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, "extreme culture" and new technologies. A Macarthur fellow and American book award winner, he is a contributor to National Public Radio, and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). www.pochanostra.com

 

Adrian Heathfield writes on, curates and creates contemporary performance. He co-curated Live Culture at Tate Modern with the Live Art Development Agency in 2003, Small Acts at the Millennium with Tim Etchells and Lois Keidan in 1999, and Forced Entertainment's twelve-hour durational performance-lecture Marathon Lexicon. He is the editor of Live: Art and Performance (Tate Publishing, 2004), Small Acts: Performance, The Millennium and the Marking of Time (Black Dog Publications, 2000), and co-editor of On Memory, an issue of Performance Research, and of the box publication Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance (Arnolfini Live, 1997). He is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at Roehampton University
www.adrianheathfield.net

 

John Jordan merges the imagination of art and the social engagement of politics. Co-director of social practice art group PLATFORM (1987-1995) he then went on to be a co-founder of Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000). He is interested in the role of the artists dissolving into social movements, applying creativity directly to activism and social change. In 2003 he co-edited the book We Are Everywhere - the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism published by Verso and now being translated in 7 languages. More recently he co founded the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. He is currently traveling around Europe in the Paths Through Utopias project, searching for ways of living despite capitalism.

 

Margareta Kern is a London based, interdisciplinary artist whose works question ways in which personal and intimate spaces are influenced by socio-political movements. Kern has exhibited nationally including the Tate Modern, Djanogly Gallery and Castlefield Gallery, and internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Banja Luka, Bosnia & Herzegovina. She was the recipient of the Open Society scholarship for students from the former Yugoslavia whose academic studies were disrupted by the civil war and has recently received funding from the Arts Council England for Clothes for Death (2006/2007) and the British Film Institute for the production of short films Coffee and Desa (2005). www.margaretakern.com

 

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (lab of ii) is an ephemeral network of socially engaged artists and activists whose work falls in between resistance and creativity, culture and politics, art and life, and whose working context is the new anticapitalists movements of the last decade. The Lab's projects have included gathering 100 international artists and activists around a free potlatch breakfast to share tools of creative resistance before going on actions together (Experiment 1: European Social Forum, London 2004); touring to 9 cities in the UK with a caravan run on chip fat; infiltrating department stores with 'prayers to products'; and training several hundred rebel clowns for civil disobedience at the G8 summit (Experiment 2: The Tour, 2005). www.labofii.net

 

LEIBNIZ was set up by Ernst Fischer and Helen Spackman in 2004. Their work is concerned with issues of belonging, displacement and alienation and seeks to explore how we occupy as well as 'uncannily' disrupt a variety of spaces - from our own bodies to social conventions and political/ideological systems. Recently they have focused on collaborations with exiled writers and asylum seekers on issues relating to race, diversity and Human Rights. Helen Spackman is Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University and Ernst Fischer Creative Research Fellow at Roehampton University. www.leibnizlab.co.uk

 

Mad For Real are Cai Yuan and JJ Xi who have been living and working in the UK since the 1980s. They started working as a performance duo with their action Two Artists Jump on Tracey Emin's Bed (1999) at Tate Britain's Turner Prize Exhibition. _Their work has featured in exhibitions including Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery,1999), Shanghai Biennial (2000), and Touring London (IniVA). Their film Two Artists Piss on Duchamp's Urinal was shown at the 9th Biennial of Moving Images in Geneva, and Dazed Eye, a film commissioned by Dazed & Confused and Film4, was shown in La Foret Arts Space, Tokyo. Soya Sauce and Ketchup Fight was performed at the Liverpool Biennale 2002, and presented as a video screening in Live Culture at Tate Modern, at the 50th Venice Biennale and at the Prague Biennale 2003. Recent exhibitions include Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin 2005; Vital Performance Festival, Manchester 2006; Point to the East, Strike in the West, photograph and performance, 798 Dashanzi, Beijing 2006; and Soya Sauce and Ketchup-Universal Project, Louisiana Museum for Modern Art, Denmark 2007. www.madforreal.com

 

Stacy Makishi is a Hawaiian-born, UK based artist who works in a variety of media including live art, site-specific installations, video, new writing and physical theatre. Her work is often about absence, displacement and memory from the point of view of the foreigner. The foreigner confronts with our strangeness and our own foreignness.  Within her work there appears to be a tension that exists in the place in between: between here and elsewhere; between the abject and sublime; desire and repulsion.
Whether she takes on a horror film, fashion show or psychic intervention, her work is often infused with a surreal humour.  www.stacymakishi.com

 

James Marriott is an artist, writer, activist and naturalist. He is a Co-Director of PLATFORM and recent works with the group have included the operatic audio tour And While London Burns and the book The Next Gulf - London, Washington and the oil conflict in Nigeria. He is an Arts & Humanities Research Council Fellow in the Creative & Performing Arts at the Dept of Sociology, Goldsmiths College. Since 1983 PLATFORM has brought together artists and activists to create projects about social and ecological justice particularly focused on their home, London. www.platformlondon.org

 

Rabih Mroué is an actor, director, and playwright from Beirut. Continuously searching for new and contemporary relations among all the different elements and languages of theatrical art forms, Mroué questions the definitions of theatre and the relationship between space and form of the performance and, consequently, questions how the performer relates with the audience. His works deal with the issues that have been swept under the table in the current political climate of Lebanon. He draws attention to the broader political and economic contexts by means of a semi-documentary theatre. From theatre practice to politics, and from the problem of representations to his private life, his search for 'truth' begins via documents, photos, and found objects, fabricating other documents, other 'truths': it is as if the work becomes a dissection table for the dubious processes of Lebanon's war society.

 

Grace Ndiritu lives and works in London and has shown her work widely in the UK and internationally. She has won several prestigious awards and prizes including Perspective, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, (2004) and the Delfina UK Studio Award, London (2004). Exhibiting widely both nationally and internationally, during 2005 Ndiritu had solo shows at the Venice Biennale, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Delfina, London. She also participated in a show curated by Emma Underhill for Amnesty International, to launch their campaign about violence against women. She has said that her purpose as an artist is to rewrite history through the immediacy of Performance Video Art. It is an attempt to give back what has been taken from those who lack power: their dignity.

 

Monica Ross lives and works in Brighton and has been making time-based works since the 1980s. rightsrepeated was first presented in Chronic Epoch, Beaconsfield, London 2005. Other recent exhibitions include Arbeit*, Taxi im Palais Gallery, Innsbruck 2005, Out of Dog, books by artists, Baltic, Gateshead 2004 and justfornow a one person show at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, 2004. Recent performances include Women with Red Umbrellas, a street event for Pilot Projekt Gropiusstadt, Berlin 2005 and justfornow, a durational text-based performance and web work which can be seen at www.justfornow.net.

 

Jenny Sealey has been the Artistic Director of Graeae Theatre Company since 1997 and is fired by the company's mission to create opportunities for theatre practitioners with physical and/or sensory disabilities, and its policy to explore full artistic accessibility. She has directed all Graeae shows including Into the Mystic by Peter Wolf, the critically acclaimed The Fall of the House of Usher, the groundbreaking Fittings: The Last Freakshow, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, Alice (a co-production with Nottingham Playhouse) and Two, The Changeling and most recently the critically acclaimed Peeling.

 

Adrien Sina is an architect, artist and theoretician who lives and works in Paris and London. He has curated exhibitions involving architecture, performance, video and philosophy including Fugitive Fluctuations, Tragédies Charnelles, Immanences Spatiales. In 2003 he was advisor to Tate Liverpool for Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance. He was Thinker in Residence at the Live Art Development Agency, working on the development of PSi 12: Performing Rights, and is planning the Performance, War, Politics and Eroticism programme for the Centenary of Futurism for the PERFORMA Biennale, New York, 2009. He is advisor to the Pompidou Centre for the exhibition Traces of the Sacred, 2008. www.adrien-sina.net

www.adrien-sina.net/performingrights/

 

Ange Taggart is the founder of the website 'My Dads Strip Club', and is known for her collaborations creating hybrid live art actions, quirky videos and delivering performances. She has used her demographic as a ‘middle aged female shopper’ to successfully carry out un-authorised, issue-based interventions, Tescos, Starbucks, Virgin and Coke have all been subjects of her creativity. She's fucked coke machines, interrogated shoppers, bought everything and returned it, telling stores why their products are crap. Coming from Nottingham UK she’s taken a fresh look at the shopping experience and invested it with all the thrills you get as a shoplifter, but this time its legal. Collaboration has been central to her practice, examples can be found at www.mydadsstripclub.com

 

James Thompson is Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester and theatre practitioner. He has worked in Brazil, Burkina Faso, DR Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the US and the UK. He is currently director of IN PLACE OF WAR, a research and practice project exploring performance in war zones. He is author of Applied Theatre (2002) and Digging Up Stories (2005). www.inplaceofwar.net

 

the vacuum cleaner is an artist/activist collective of one fashioning radical social and ecological change. By employing various creative legal and illegal tactics and forms the vacuum cleaner attempts to disrupt concentrations of power and reverse the impending collapse of planet earth. They have disrupted and occasionally shutdown some of the biggest multi-nationals, including Starfucks, Self ridges, Coka Cola and Virgin. Their work has been shown at the ICA, Tate Modern, Liverpool Biennial, BBC 4 and Channel 4 (UK) Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (USA) Society for Arts and Technology (Canada), Arte, Canal + (France). the vacuum cleaner is a co-founder of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and member of the New Social Art School. http://thevacuumcleaner.co.uk

 

Virgule Performing Arts Company is a contemporary experimental theatre, performance and dance company founded by Arvand DashtAray and Sara Reyhani in Tehran, Iran in 1999. Virgule do not limit their artistic works to any conventional style or cultural formula or certain philosophies, but are trying to create innovative intercultural performances by discovering unnoticed Iranian cultural performances and using them in experimental works which express the challenges of their generation in Iran, and try to revitalize the dull environment of Iran's performing arts scene. For Virgule culture and art are the best way to know and be known, to hear and be heard in this world. www.virguleidea


Lois Weaver was the Artistic Director of Performance Studies international 12: Performing Rights in June 2006 and is Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at Queen Mary University of London. She was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theatre and the WOW Theatre in New York and Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop Theatre in London. She has been a performer, director, and writer with the Split Britches Company since 1980. She is involved in Staging Human Rights, a People's Palace Project initiative that uses performance practice to explore human rights in women's prisons in Brazil and the UK. In collaboration with Holly Hughes and Eleanor Savage, she recently developed the solo performance, What Tammy Needs to Know.

 

The Yes Men are anti-corporate activist-pranksters who are described by Wikipedia as 'a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction" by pretending to be powerful people and spokespersons for prominent organizations. ..... The Yes Men have posed as spokespeople for The World Trade Organization, McDonald's, Dow Chemical, and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development......Their experiences were documented in the film The Yes Men, distributed by United Artists, the film documentary info wars, and the book The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization (ISBN 0-9729529-9-3)." www.theyesmen.org