(Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance

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.

Shot in a breath between lockdowns in 2021, these teeming forms is a sensate and mythic film, imagining a process of wilding – of entering the land and being opened by it. Memory and desire, history and loss, future and fantasy become porous, contributing to a textural and sensate meditation on living.

Commissioned by ]performance s p a c e[. Presented by ]ps[, ICA (London), VSSL studio, Chisenhale Studioes (2021) and Venice International Performance Art Week (2023). Funded by Arts Council England.

Single-channel video work; duration: 28.33

Nuidey is a short film made on an iPhone. It depicts three middle-aged queers, two of them fat, dancing in the Western Isles in slow motion in June 2024. They are naked.

There is a soundtrack of twangy music and reflections by the performers, which are subtitled. The reflections concern the place, light, rationale; fat subjectivity; what it is to be seen in real life and online; illness and decision-making. The conversation is intimate, the performers know each other well.

The film was conceived of and made by Charlotte Cooper as an expansion of her book Fat Body Work (2025 33editions).

The film was screened as part of Live Art Bookshop: Fat Body Work Launch at LADA on Wednesday 29 October 2025.

F A U L T L I N E S (2022) is a performance video from SITE, 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.

Video documentation of an interactive talk from artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Symoné. It explored agency and spectatorship in the intersections between live art and gaming.

An online event to celebrate the launch of artist and writer Tara Fatehi Irani’s new book Mishandled Archive, published by LADA. Hosted by Rachel Mars, the event features an excerpt from Tara’s performance of Mishandled Archive with Pouya Ehsaei, a performative presentation by Diana Damian Martin, Mary Paterson, Jemima Yong, Maddy Costa and Holly Revell and special appearances by Giulia Palladini and Joe Kelleher.

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.

Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content.

The Hologram is a feminist health militia that produces networks where we can practice skills like trust, communication, and cooperation that will help us outlast capitalism.

Intended to be performed live over the phone, Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays invite readers and audience members alike to engage with a series of unclear relationships and scenarios, invoked and mediated by contemporary communication technology.