Performing Rights Manifestations
Manifesto Room
Full programme details and bookings www.psi12.qmul.ac.uk
Manifesto Room
A space for issue based discussions, practice based presentations, informal performances and displays, with specially curated strands by John Jordan and The Otolith Group.
Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 June
10.00 - 23.00 daily
Free with Day Pass or Conference ID.
Octagon
Long Table
10.00 - 11.00
Daily
A long table with space for sitting and talking or standing and listening where participants can gather for informal conversations on serious topics.
Discussions
Activists, academics and practitioners discuss the place of performance in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights.
Thursday 15 June
11.00 - 13.00
The place of performance in enhancing international exchanges and dialogues. Contributors include Ali Zaidi, Miriam Quindani, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gabriela Salgado.
Friday 16 June
11.00 - 13.00
The place of performance in war zones, contested sites and areas of conflict. Contributors include Ruth Holdsworth, James Thompson, Rabih Mroue, Chumpon Apisuk and Branislava Kuburovic.
Saturday 17 June
11.00 - 13.00
The place of performance in communicating the experiences of exile, immigration and displacement. Contributors include Almir Koldzic, Nela Milic, Fernando Arias and Milan Kohout.
Talks
Artists and curators talk about specific projects and practices driven by issues of human rights.
Thursday 15 June
14.00 - 15.00
David A Bailey
Remember Saro-Wiwa - The Living Memorial
Curator David A Bailey and artist James Marriott of PLATFORM talk about a unique public art project dedicated to writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight colleagues who were executed by the Nigerian government in 1995 because of their campaign against the devastation caused by the international oil industry in the Niger Delta. In recognition of this struggle , PLATFORM created the project "Remember Saro-Wiwa" in 2004 - an initiative to commemorate their lives, and to continue questioning the issues around (un)ethical practices, and corporate responsibility. This presentation will explore the issues behind the project, particularly the interrelation between ethics, art, and political change. www.remembersarowiwa.com
and
Thursday 15 June
15.00 - 16.00
Aldo Milohnic
How to Do Things with Performative Actions: On artistic and activist practices in Slovenia
Author Aldo Milohnic will talk about possible meeting points of human rights and performative actions, by referencing the most outstanding texts published in the last few issues of the Maska performing arts journal, and presenting illustrations of direct performative actions in the Balkans and some of Maska's own artistic projects dealing with human rights issues.
Friday 16 June
14.00 - 15.00
Paul Heritage
Love in a time of War
Artist curator Paul Heritage and curator João André da Rocha ask a series of questions about performance strategies and human rights within peripheral spaces, with reference to a series of projects in Brazil.
and
Friday 16 June
15.00 - 16.00
Daniela Labra
Performance, Human Rights and Young Contemporary Visual
Artists In Brazil
Curator Daniela Labra gives presentation on the range of artistic activities in Brazilian metropolis concerning human rights and social manifestations since 2000. Supported by the British Council, Rio de Janeiro.
Saturday 17 June
14.00 - 15.00
David Williams
Performing Citizenship: version 1.0's recent explorations into the sweaty armpits of the Australian body politic
Artist David Williams presents a talk on the theory and practice of version 1.0, the Sydney-based performance group whose work not only investigates, but also enacts, participatory democracy. Their work has, in recent years, taken as its starting points a range of defiantly non-theatrical public documents, with concerns ranging from refugee policy and governmental accountability, to the rhetoric of 'freedom' of 'democracy' used in the selling of the war on Iraq, to recent ideological re-imaginings of national identity and 'Australian values'.
and
Saturday 17 June
15.00 - 16.00
Karen C. Faith
Performing Among A People: serving communities in public ritual
Artist Karen Faith talks about making public work in service to specific communities, while inviting the viewers to create a community of themselves. Faith will focus on her own work with survivors; open up a discussion on cultural and social languages, ritual and ceremony as a point of spiritual connection and healing, and obstacles to communication in culturally and socially specific public work; and lead a small closing ceremony created collectively by those in attendance.
Sunday 18 June
14.00 - 15.00
Sara Raza
Contested Territories: The Built, Un-Built and the Un-Buildable
Curator Sara Raza talks about violation, trauma and dislocation of urban spaces in relation to performance and live art practices from the Middle East and Central Asia. Sara will be joined by Iranian artist Shahram Entekhabi.
and
Sunday 18 June
15.00 - 16.00
Adrien Sina
Performance, War, Politics, Ethics and Eroticism
Curator and artist Adrien Sina talks about the continuing political resonance of the extraordinary women artists Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953), Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793), and Aspasia ( - 469 BC).
and
Sunday 18 June
16.00 - 17.30
Open Space
An open space for presentations, performances or whatever. Propose your ideas and book your slot by seeing your Open Space host Dr Peggy Shaw in the Manifesto Room.
Guest curators
Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 June
18.00 - 20.00
John Jordan presents
While Rome burns: The question of performance at the end of the world.
Perhaps one of the greatest questions for human rights and performance is the threat of a generalised collapse of our present civilisation, brought on by the destruction of our life support systems. Given the enormity of the global environmental problem, questions about the role that performance can play, if any, will be explored during the four days of Performing Rights.
Thursday 15 June
Outlining the climate of collapse
A presentation mixing biography, violin playing, film and hard science by guest Aubrey Meyer, an accomplished musician and composer before he immersed himself in ecological campaigning and became a leading figure in the global negotiations on climate change with his unique campaign of Contraction and Convergence.
Friday 16 June
After the Carnival? Are carnivalesque forms of resistance still relevant given the present social and ecological emergency?
Brian Holmes, Larry Bogad, James Leadbitter and Hilary Ramsden, theorists and art activist practitioners from different generations and at the forefront of many creative resistance movements, discuss whether new tactics are needed within this new cycle of struggle, or whether is there even more need for pleasure to be injected into radical politics in these dark and difficult times?.
Saturday 17 June
The art of building lifeboats.
Should our creativity be focused on creating models of sustainable living and surviving in a post collapse world?
Creative pranksters Kayle and Heath from irrational.org have been experimenting with ways to survive in a time of collapse, ranging from finding free food, surviving in the wilderness, and developing a series of manuals and buried survival pods. They present a workshop on the art of living lightly, and how they see the developing of survival tactics as part of their creative practice.
Sunday 18 June
Crude Interventions
A practical workshop to brainstorm an audacious act of creative resistance to the causes of climate change.
Mark Brown from climate justice direct action group London Rising Tide, and participants will look at a cultural event sponsored by a major oil company, and brainstorm different forms of intervention that could take place during it - the ideas generated from the workshop will be carried out later in the month. This workshop is part of London Rising Tide's Art Not Oil project.
Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 June
20.00 - 22.00
The Otolith Group presents
Images Sometimes Tremble: Video-Essays In The Age Of Telepolitics.
In a contemporary context characterised by the resurgence in activist documentary and the turn towards documentary in contemporary artists moving image practice, Images Sometimes Tremble proposes an encounter with a more elusive tendency, one that exists within the domains of archive and poetics and between the zones of historicity and fabulation: the essay-film. Strangely overlooked by critics, this interstitial, tangential tendency has retained a persistent popularity with generations of artists across the world. Each work is accompanied by a presentation by theorists Kodwo Eshun, Nicole Wolf, Brian Holmes and Chris Berry that situate the work in a series of theoretical contexts that allow multiple entry points for discussion.
Thursday 15 June
Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group present a rare opportunity to see Videogramme einer Revolution (Videogrammes of a Revolution, Germany/Romania, 1992) by renowned essay- film maker Harun Farocki and media philosopher Andrei Ujica. The directors have assembled their account of the 1989 Romanian revolution from TV and amateur video footage of the events Videogramme reflects upon the emergence of a telepolitics in which the camera does not merely report but instead catalyses and participates in the production of a new political space that comes into existence before our ears and eyes. Courtesy of Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin.
Friday 16 June
Screenings of Amar Kanwar's A Season Outside ( India ,1998] and To Remember (India, 2003) followed by lecture and discussion led by Nicole Wolf. Amar Kanwar achieved recognition when A Season Outside was screened at Documenta XI in 2002 to major acclaim. The film is a meditation on the poetics and politics of non-violence prompted by Kanwar's question: Can non-violence prevail in a context of persistent, intractable atrocity? Navigating between legends, anecdotes, memories of Partition in 1947 and government inquiries into Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of Satyagraha, this visual essay refuses to propose easy solutions. To Remember is a portrait of Birla House, the site of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948. Located in Delhi, Birla House has become a gallery and shrine attracting hundreds of visitors daily. This short silent film is an homage to Gandhi as well as the visitors who embody the spirit of his pacifist teachings. Against the backdrop of a surge in militant, Hindu nationalism, Kanwar's work is particularly telling. Clearly, the historical turn of events from non-violence to nuclear armament, suggest a deep ambivalence about Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. Courtesy of Amar Kanwar
Saturday 17 June
A screening of Coco Fusco's Operation Atropos (2006) followed by lecture by Brian Holmes. The British debut of artists and critic Coco Fusco's latest video-work Operation Atropos promises to be a special event. With eager art students in tow, Fusco signs up for an intensive field course in U.S. military interrogation techniques. This demanding program involves an immersive simulation of the POW experience that makes for uneasy watching and raises difficult questions about the changing relations between femininity, militarization and the privatisation of torture. Courtesy Coco of Fusco.
Sunday 18 June
A screening of Zhou Hongxiang's The Red Flag Flies, followed by lecture by Chris Berry. A rare opportunity to see Zhou HongXiang's extraordinary video-essay screened here in its full 70 minute version. The Red Flag Flies restages the Maoist tropes of the Cultural Revolution as a theatre of provocation. Maoist poems, slogans and icons are reworked as incongruous tableaux that move across time and place with dazzling iconoclasm. Neither narrative nor documentary, The Red Flag Flies is a series of rhythmically arranged episodes whose cumulative effect is defiantly singular. Courtesy of Zhou Hongxiang
Day Passes: £10 (allows access to The Manifesto Room, Library of Performing Rights, Conference Plenaries, and all installations and daytime performances).
