Ouch – Pain and performance

Our Ouch screening programme is being shown at Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana.

Ouch is a collection of documentation and artists’ films looking at pain and performance – both the pain artists cause themselves within the course of their work, whether intentional or not, and the experiences of audiences as they are invited to inflict pain on artists or are subjected to pain and discomfort themselves. For many artists and audiences pain within the context of performance offers challenging, exhilarating and profound experiences. 

The selected works feature eminent and ground breaking artists whose practices address provocative issues from the lived experiences of illness, to representations of the aging female body, cosmetic surgery, addiction and self harm, animalistic impulses, and treacherous fire stunts, and what can happen when you invite audiences to be complicit in challenging embodied actions. 

Ouch featured artists: Marina Abramović, ORLAN, Oleg Kulik, Ron Athey, Franko B, Marcel.li Antunez Roca, Cassils, Bob Flanagan, Wafaa Bilal, Rocio Boliver, Petr Pavlensky, Martin O’Brien, Regina Jose Galindo, Ernst Fisher & Nicola Hunter, Kira O’Reilly, jamie lewis hadley.

The screening will be accompanied by a lecture by Dominic Johnson on 15 March at 7pm, IT HURTS: Art, Performance, and Pain.

“I see pain as an inevitable byproduct of interesting performance.” Dominic Johnson

For full details of the screening programme