British Library Sound Archive recording and documentation of Potentials of Performance events (26-27 October 2012). This third themed year of the Performance Matters project features a vibrant series of commissions exploring and exploding the dialogue as a potential format for thinking through and testing possible futures. Of Things in Motion and Things at Rest sets thoughts and actions in motion on the stage in a path towards a speculative performance encounter with the realm of the nonhuman and the secret lives held within it. Through sonic exploration of mundane objects, we aim to highlight how existent ideas of performative agency can be re-applied and re-thought with and through objects.

British Library Sound Archive recording and documentation of Potentials of Performance events (26-27 October 2012). This third themed year of the Performance Matters project features a vibrant series of commissions exploring and exploding the dialogue as a potential format for thinking through and testing possible futures. For each audience member receives a personal letter that continues a conversation that has been taking place via email between the artis and a series of contributors regarding understandings and practices of the potentials of performance. These exchanges come in contact with each other in the performance of a common reading in space and time of writings that exhaust the question: ‘What are the potentials of performance?’ You Have One Unread Letter: the list continues also exists in the space as an installation scroll.

British Library Sound Archive recording and documentation of Potentials of Performance events (26-27 October 2012). This third themed year of the Performance Matters project features a vibrant series of commissions exploring and exploding the dialogue as a potential format for thinking through and testing possible futures. Set in an ideal world where the labour of performance can take time and place, can be witness and witnessed, can live and let live, uneventful is a series of compositional vignettes that exist as enduring acts of love and labour ‘in the making.’

British Library Sound Archive recording and documentation of Potentials of Performance events (26-27 October 2012). This third themed year of the Performance Matters project features a vibrant series of commissions exploring and exploding the dialogue as a potential format for thinking through and testing possible futures. Specially invited respondents working across the creative and critical field of performance (Nicola Cinibere, La JohnJoseph, Eirini Kartsaki, Harun Morrison, Joe Kelleher) gather to reflect upon the works experienced over the two days. Following, an informal conversation between the projects co-directors (Gavin Butt, Lois Keidan, Adrian Heathfield) looking back at the three-year project, its insights and paradoxes, and looking forward to the future of performance.

Catalogue of exhibition focussing on installation and performance art from China dating from the 1980s to 2012. Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal.

Art of Change: New Directions from China (7 September–9 December 2012) featured contemporary installation and performance art from China produced over the past three decades. It brought together works by nine of the country’s most innovative artists and artist groups from the 1980s to today—Chen Zhen (b.1955–d.2000), Yingmei Duan (b.1969), Gu Dexin (b.1962), MadeIn Company (est. 2009), Liang Shaoji (b.1945), Sun Yuan (b.1972) & Peng Yu (b.1974), Wang Jianwei (b.1954) and Xu Zhen (b.1977). Comprising 40 works, the exhibition shows significant early examples of the artists’ work, alongside recent pieces and new commissions.

Part of the ‘Documentation Bank’ Collection, an extensive range of artists’ ‘Talking Heads’, documentation of key works, and a selection of Agency projects: http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/resources/collections/documentation-bank.

Transgression and transformation, pastiche and pasties – as Dorothy Max Prior loses herself in the world of burlesque performance.

The French performance artist’s practice of self-directed violence creates a spectacle that violates the viewer and establishes Orlan’s body as “a site of public debate.” Her work radically exposes the violence of patriarchically established “beauty standards.”

Performance documentation, 2010.

The performer marks a sacred space. She dons a Raven headdress. As she steps into the sacred space she begins a ritual of transformation.

Act Two: Transformation. Installation into Performance by Julia Bardsley. www.juliabardsley.net