Fire Practice Theatre

LADA partnered with Shubbak Festival 2025 to co-present Lara Habib Kobeissi’s Nazar, a one-to-one VR performance that engages all five senses in a transformative ritual rooted in protection practices from Southern Lebanon.

Audio documentation of conversation between Lara Habib Kobeissi and Shubbak festival director Alia Alzougbi on Wednesday 11 June 2025.

The conversation explored Lara’s process of making Nazar, including the movement from archival research to intimate world-building through virtual reality, ritual and touch. The talk looked at digital archiving as an act of soft resistance, aimed at restoring collective memory and intangible heritage.

Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas is a 30-minute surreal drag performance mixed with field trip recordings of East and Southeast Asian queer self-publishing heroes.

Screened at LADA at Live Art Bookshop x Queer and Feminist Zine Spirits Across Borders on Saturday 13 Dec 2025.

Three short documentaries observe the creative process of Hooligan Art Community (founded in Kyiv in 2019) as the theatre company deals with relocation due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Spanning the period May 2022 to October 2024, the films represent three distinct stages in the artists’ experience of displacement.

The three documentaries in this collection were made by Liubov Sliusareva (from Donetsk) who joined Hooligan Art Community in 2020 as filmmaker and art director. The films were produced by Peter Cant, co-founder and artistic director of Hooligan Art Community. Cant, an artist and theatre-maker from the UK is based in Berlin. He began working in Ukraine in 2016.

Sonia Boyce (b.1962) is a groundbreaking artist whose practice is founded on taking creative risks. Unafraid to play against set expectations about how art should behave, her collaborative interactions between audience and performer enable spontaneous and intimate social encounters, resulting in the creation of work that is simultaneously self-aware, visceral and open-ended.

This book is a much-anticipated introduction to the life and work of this extraordinary artist. Touching on her engagement with the work of other feminist artists and her time as a leading figure in the 1980s Black British Art movement, it contextualizes Boyce’s journey from her early pastel drawings and collages to her pivotal shift to film, sound, and performance art. Highlighting her artistic innovation as she experiments with medium to explore and question culture, identity and the boundaries between the public and private spheres in unexpected ways, it celebrates the visionary practice of a truly uncompromising artist.

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.

The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.

This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us.

Documentation from an online lecture by Ron Athey on Penetration in Live Art and Video. This lecture formed part of LADA’s 2020 Summer Programme.

Penetration – be it bodily, spiritual or sexual – is a recurring motif in Ron Athey‘s work. In this lecture, which comes as he begins work on a new project, Athey will explore the artistic potential of the contemporary post-porn movement in relation to his practice.

An introduction by Alisa Oleva to her film Walking Home, which was screened as part of LADA Screens in February 2021.

Video documentation of an online artist talk given by Miranda Whall on 4th July, 2022. This conversation followed an online screening of Miranda Whall’s film Crossed Paths – Scots Pine (2022). Following the talk, there is a Q&A with the artist led by Chinasa Vivian Ezugha.

Crossed Paths – Scots Pine (2022) is a film documenting the artist crawling through the centre of Glasgow to the area hosting the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference in November 2021, carrying a 6-year-old potted Scots Pine on her back.

Video documentation of an online artist conversation with  Rosalind Fowler, Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter  in December 2021. This conversation followed an online screening of BREADROCK, I feel like doing this, a film by artist collective Fourthland (Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter) and artist and filmmaker Rosalind Fowler.

BREADROCK, I feel like doing this is a visceral homage to cultural history, memory and universal myth.  Melding experimental and ethnographic filmmaking, the work presents a series of staged vignettes drawing on the rituals and artefacts of the Estate’s Bangladeshi, European, Kurdish, Serbian, Turkish, Ugandan and West Indian communities, to create new kinships, myths and culture.

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Sahera Khan on 1st March 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Sahera’s film My Glow as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Sahera engaged in a Q&A with the audience and gave a short BSL lesson.

In My Glow (2023), Aa mature, Deaf, Muslim, British Sign Language (BSL) mother shares her pregnancy journey through the pandemic, and how she coped with limited communication with others such as the health service.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions, visit our vimeo channel

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Lucy Sheen on 28th June 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Lucy’s film Abandoned, Adopted Here as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Lucy gave a performative reading of the poem I Know This Face, followed by a panel on the complexities of post-pandemic working in cultural and performative spaces for British East and Southeast Asians. With Jennifer Lim (Chair), Rosa Fong, Lucy Sheen, and Moi Tran.

Abandoned Adopted Here explores the nature of belonging in the British society and the unheard, silenced, and often erased voices of British East and Southeast Asians with mixed heritages and complex identities.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions, visit our vimeo channel

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson, on 26th APril, 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed a screening of Lateisha’s film The Gift as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Lateisha was  joined by collaborators Kes Gill-Martin and Ava Riby-Williams for a discussion and interactive sonic/music offerings.

The Gift (2022) is a single-take style short film, weaving together performance for camera, original sound composition and poetic storytelling that fuses speculative fiction and autobiography. We are invited into the artist’s home, to witness them playfully uncover (and reclaim) stories of grief, body, love, nature and home-making.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions, visit our vimeo channel