Frankly Speaking: a collection of essays, writings and rants

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.

Regret
A 28 day durational performance
6 hours per day, June 2-29, 2021
Performed at Floating Goose Studios, Adelaide, Australia

(dis)closure (2025) is a performance by kane stonestreet at CEREMONY, a festival from Future Ritual. The documentation was screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

cock~salt (2025) is a performance to camera by Claye Bowler, screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

Writer and academic Dominic Johnson hosts a rare UK appearance by the US (French based) artist Skip Arnold. They screened a selection of Skip’s videos and other documents, and discussed the body, duration, intervention, commitment, and documentation.

This book traces the early history of performance art in the former Czechoslovakia, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s amid the Prague Spring and the subsequent Normalization period marked by censorship, prosecution, and state pressure on artists.

“This new work ‘Care Zine’ came from conversations about our practises, realising at the heart of it we are centred on care for our communities in an ever precarious and changing world. Through zine making as self expression and a cathartic art form, we realised participants benefited from the space to make and play and that play and freedom were a great part of caring from each other."

A live art work and archive book exploring fetish, female eroticism, and symbolic violence through a spatial intervention at a KTV in Chinatown.

From the artist: This is a neurodivergently true story about neurotransgressive performance (which I call proper performance). It contains some magic green liquid and a bit of an accidental erection.

A short text and image piece by artist Kira O'Reilly, accompanied by a photo of O'Reilly's "Menopause Gym."

Making performance works for four decades, British experimental theatre collective Forced Entertainment has become globally renowned for its singular aesthetic and audacious events, melding narrative fragments with strange acts, broken poetry, audience provocations, and comcial failure. With its low-fi theatre, intimate text-based works, and epic durational spectacles, the group has profoundly influenced the international performance scene, evoking and testing the politics of contemporary life.