LADA’s Summer Programme: Week 1

Date: 08 Jun 2020 - 15 Jun 2020
Location: Online
Price: Free

Black Lives Matter – Please contribute to a cause that’s important to you where you can, whether it’s financially, in-kind, or through direct action. Here are a few suggestions: Ways you can help, a master list of donations, petitions, and resources from the US; Split a donation between 70+ community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organizers in the U.S; The National Mikey Powell Memorial Family Fund, supporting families and campaigns affected by custody deaths in the UK; Donate to Black Lives Matter UK, a coalition of Black liberation organisers across the UK.

LADA's Summer Programme

During these times we strive to remain a resource for our community by keeping our calls open, developing new opportunities for artists to be artists, offering a wide range of free resources, and developing this online Summer Programme that draws upon the incredible resources and resourcefulness of the artists and organisations who work with, around, and for Live Art.

Online this week

Available from Monday 8 to Sunday 14 June only, the first week of our Summer Season features works by:

Keith Khan
Noëmi Lakmaier
Adam Patterson
Neil Bartlett
About LADA’s Summer Programme

Check out LADA's Summer Programme

Adam Patterson, Looking for ‘Looking for Langston’, 2018. Still from video. Courtesy of the artist.

Neil Bartlett, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, 2017, Tate Britain. Video still. LADA Projects, in collaboration with with Tate Britain for Queer British Art 1861-1967

Keith Khan

Keith Khan’s new film Z is our summer LADA Screens.

Z is inspired by the movements of penitence and suffering of devotional rituals in Spanish Catholicism. Castigation is a common sight – men whip themselves in public, carry heavy saint statues on floats with bare feet in an ostentatious show of public suffering, while women suffer in silence and stillness at home. The performers Carolina Junco and Carlos Alma worked towards the idea of religious ecstasy, shown for the briefest moment.

Keith Khan works with performance, film, drawing and textiles. Born in London, of Indo-Caribbean heritage, he interrogates the layers of inherited ethnic and cultural identities and the contemporary phenomenon of cultural confusion. His works are highly personal, but often presented in different locations and for an audience as diverse as himself.

Watch 'Z'

A female performer stands in a bathroom, with both hands pulling her hair above her head, staring into a mirror.

'Z', Keith Khan, 2020. Still from video. LADA Screens, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Noëmi Lakmaier

We showed Noëmi Lakmaier’s Cherophobia as part of LADA Screens in 2017. Cherophobia was a 48-hour durational living installation, an attempt to lift the artist’s bound and immobilised body off the ground using 20,000 helium party balloons. It was both a performance and a gathering, intertwining people in their shared suspense and anticipation. This 48 minute artist film was edited by Sophie Mallett from the live stream of the event.

Noëmi Lakmaier’s work explores notions of the ‘Other’ ranging from the physical to the philosophical, the personal to the political. The individual’s relationship to its surroundings, identity, and perception of self and other in contemporary society are core interests in her predominantly site responsive, live and installation based practice. Lakmaier’s work aims to emphasise and exaggerate the relationship between object, individual and space. Through the use of everyday materials as well as her own body and the bodies of others, she constructs temporary living installations of alternative physical realities which explore the psychological implications of power, control and insecurity, the drive to belong and succeed as well as feelings of self doubt and otherness. She is interested in the presence of the viewer as voyeur and how this presence can act as the catalyst that galvanises an event and creates a tension and a divide between ‘Them’ – the passive observer and the ‘Other’ – the objects of their gaze.

CHEROPHOBIA BY NOËMI LAKMAIER. IMAGE BY TINA ROWE.

Adam Patterson

“The eye of another was a kind of cage. When it saw you the lid came down, and you were trapped.” – George Lamming, “In the Castle of My Skin,” 1953.

There isn’t too much in this world that is more unsettling and damaging than walking through Bridgetown and being stared out of place.

Lookalook documents a live performative walk in Bridgetown, Barbados, using masquerade to characterise and personify the violence and (dis)possession experienced in being looked at (or in Barbadian terms, the incarnation of a ‘stinklook’). ‘Stinklook’ and ‘cut-eye’ are quintessentially Barbadian (and Caribbean) behaviours, and Lookalook, itself, is a monster giving these behaviours a sense of mythology.

The Caribbean region and the self-image of its citizenry has always been held under and shaped by the projections, desires and fears of the colonial and now touristic gazes. It is only since the independence era that documents of ‘looking back’ and resisting these gazes have started surfacing.

The video documents the procession of Lookalook, overlaid with a (mostly) voiceless subtitle track, drifting between the character’s internal monologue and some of the verbal responses presented by the Bajan public.

The work was documented by Logan C Thomas, a Barbadian photographer.

This video was selected as part of the 2018 LADA Screens Open Call.

Lookalook by Adam Patterson. Image by Logan C Thomas.

Neil Bartlett

“I wrote this short film and created the images for it in the space of a single working day. I’ve always made my art out of what is to hand – and since I was halfway through my seventh week of self-isolation on the day in question, what I had to hand was my sixty-one-year old body, my phone, and my bathroom mirror. Musing on those three things lead me to thinking about other people’s phones, other people’s bathroom mirrors, and other people’s bodies. That then lead me onto thinking about what we really mean (and feel) when we say we “miss” collaborating with people. Maybe it’s a queer thing, but I’ve always felt that communication is primarily a bodily business.

The film’s title, by the way – Neil Bartlett’s 2020 – refers both to the year I’m having, and to the technical term for standard visual acuity.”

Neil Bartlett has been working since 1982. Over the last thirty-eight years he has made performances happen in places as different as Tate Britain, the National Theatre, Reading Jail and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern; his most recent work, 24 HOURS OF PEACE, was the largest-scale thing he has ever done . He has also published a shelf-load of books.

You can find out more about his work, and contact him, at www.neil-bartlett.com.

This film was edited with the kind assistance of Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway (LADA).

Neil Bartlett in A Vision of Love revealed in Sleep in 1988. Courtesy of the artist.

Summer Programme

Between Monday 8 June and Sunday 19 July, LADA will present an online Summer Programme – weekly offerings of screenings, talks, presentations and ‘live’ online events that draw upon the incredible resources and resourcefulness of the artists and organisations who work with, around, and for Live Art. This programme will include contributions by LADA’s artist Patrons, a selection of LADA Screens Greatest Hits and the presentations of Once More with Feeling – a series of instruction and reenactment pieces commissioned by LADA during the Covid-19 pandemic. We are currently seeking proposals for folx to hold stalls as part of the Fete, and for Once More With Feeling.

During these times we strive to remain a resource for our community: responding to the pandemic, and the associated states of isolation, lockdown and distancing, LADA has compiled this ongoing list of support and resources for artists and arts workers, have sought proposals for two online, collaborative home-based residencies, and begun a series of ‘Lockdown Lists‘ which draw attention to the ways in which contemporary and historic Live Art practices speak to the issues and conditions of lockdown.

A shirtless man dances with his back to the camera. His arms are extended, christ like. He is in the desert, beneath a big blue sky.

'Z', Keith Khan, 2020. Still from video. LADA Screens, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

Artist is lifted into the air by hellium balloons

Cherophobia, Noëmi Lakmaier, 2016. Pinhole image by Tina Rowe.

Banner image credit:

“Lookalook”, Adam Patterson, 2018. Photographed by Logan C Thomas.

Part of LADA's Summer Programme 2020

A season of weekly offerings of screenings, talks, presentations and ‘live’ online events.

LADA’s Summer Programme: Week 1