Desk Scheme

Ongoing Opportunity

Year

2025

Cost

£100/month (no VAT)

Rent must be paid monthly in advance. 2-month minimum contract, followed by a rolling contract with a one-month notice period. No deposit required.

Working hours

Days may vary, usually Monday to Friday, 10.30am-5.30pm. (Potentially other days on request.)

Application deadline

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. When all spots are filled, you’ll be added to our waiting list and contacted when a desk becomes available.

Apply here

Nestled alongside the Study Room and LADA office, our subsidised desk space in our home in Bethnal Green welcomes artists, producers, curators, researchers and writers on a rolling basis. Since launching in 2017, our Desk Scheme has hosted a diverse mix of practitioners and helped build lasting local, national and international relationships and networks.

What you get

A comfortable, flexible desk space is available and includes the following benefits:

access to LADA’s Study Room,
Wi-Fi provision,
heating,
lift access and accessible toilet,
access to printer and scanner,
access to kitchen (with microwave, hob, kettle, other amenities),
free tea and coffee supplies (B.Y.O. milk),
use of LADA’s mailing address,
access to LADA staff for advice and other support,
networking with other artists, producers, curators, researchers and writers,
first to hear about LADA events and activities,
a 20% discount on any Live Art Bookshop purchases.

You can find more information about our space here.

Subject to availability and timing, space may also be made available for meetings and gatherings. We do not offer landline telephone access.

Please note that this scheme is fully dedicated to supporting work that benefits the Live Art sector and/or experimental contemporary culture.

Access Information

The building is wheelchair accessible by lift and provides a wheelchair accessible ground-floor bathroom. All bathrooms are gender inclusive. There is no isolated quiet space inside, but there is a small quiet outdoor area. Some of the art on display in the space includes naked bodies. You can find more information and see photos of the space here. Should you have any particular access requirements, please email [email protected] and we will be happy to offer further support.

How to apply

Please briefly summarise your work to date as an artist, producer, curator, researcher, or writer (with references to artists, projects, partners, platforms and/or funders you work or have worked with).

Please also provide a brief description of your working practice and plans for the year ahead, and finally, please say why you would like to participate in this Desk Scheme.

We ask that you keep your statement to 500 words maximum. You may link to supporting documents, webpages or social media sites if you wish.

We are happy to receive video or audio applications. To do this, please answer the questions listed in the form and send the audio or video file to [email protected]. Please try to keep either version to 5 minutes or less.

The Garrett Centre, source Adrian Dutton

‘LADA was always just so welcoming for me and has actually been one of the crucial parts of my own formation here in London in relation to Live Art and performance studies. […] It is an absolute gem of a place.’
– Leyneuf Tines, Desk Scheme artist and scholar (2023)

Tom Bland

Tom Bland has two books out, Camp Fear and The Death of a Clown, with Bad Betty Press. He accidentally trained in experimental theatre and found ways to enliven poetry through unusual somewhat dangerous magickal rituals. He is using his time at LADA to develop and print visual poems as well as to write a monograph exploring the poiesis of some of his favourite artists including Antonin Artaud, Anne Sexton, Niki de Saint Phalle and Steve-O.

Photo of a white man holding a vinyl thong with a zipper at the crotch above a Sainsbury's bag.

Tom Bland. Image Karolina Urbaniak

Delaine Le Bas

Delaine Le Bas is a cross disciplinary artist creating installations, performance, text works, photography and film. She was born in Worthing in 1965 and studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art. Delaine was one of the sixteen artists who were part of Paradise Lost: The First Roma Pavilion in Venice Biennale in 2007. She created the project Romani Embassy in 2015 as a response to the everyday exclusions, institutional racism and segregation that Roma, Gypsies and Travellers continue to face. In 2019 she was part of FutuRoma at Venice Biennale, designing costumes for Rewitching Europe and creating the installation and performance Witch Hunt III that included an 8-metre-tall goddess. Her work has been featured in the Gwangju Biennale (2012); Critical Contemplations in Tate Modern (2017); ANTI – Athens Biennale (2018); Berlin Biennale (2020); as well as in the solo exhibition Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna (2023). Delaine has also worked with her late husband, the artist Damian Le Bas, on the series of installations Safe European Home? (2011-2017). In 2017 they produced the stage artworks and costumes for Roma Armee at Gorki Berlin, and in 2023 the objects relating to their shared life and experiences were presented in the House of Le Bas installation at the Whitechapel Gallery. One of Delaine’s most recent commissions was for Radical Landscapes for Tate Liverpool (2022). In 2023, she performed tHIS iS nOT vaLENCIA oRange oR caRmEN with Lincoln Cato at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern as part of the exhibition popular, which also featured Delaine’s ongoing installations and performances Witch Hunt. Delaine was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2024 for her presentation Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna.

A woman sits in a wire framed chair beside an old rusted car. She wears a white jacket and pale striped trousers. Its is bright so she covers her eyes with her hand.

Delaine Le Bas. Image courtesy of the artist

Kate Mahony

Kate Mahony works in front of people. She is interested in performance and liveness, with themes spanning from inside-out methods to wrongness, alternative education, making noise and normative behaviours. Her practice has come out of framing performance within a ‘gig economy’ that is an artistically unrestricted and often unpaid platform. By catering to the ‘gig’ at hand, Mahony’s performances are quick, cheap and site responsive. For the past ten years Kate has been creating and curating live performance and moving image works that have embraced immediate/DIY ways of making, as well as fronting two bands, Rainham Sheds and Shake Chain. She is currently working and delivering workshops which consider and teach how to perform or ‘un-sing’ with a ‘hysterical voice’. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at intuitions such as SET, Nottingham Contemporary, SPILL Festival, Bluecoat Gallery, Goethe University and UICA (USA). Kate’s practice is cross-disciplinary in approach, from co-curating a performance programme out of a lock up single-car garage in Bethnal Green (LUPA), to creating a DIY crew of amateur filmmakers to capture a Live Action Roleplay (LARP). From 2019 – 2022 Kate has been the lead artist for City as Studio at Modern Art Oxford, a professional development programme for young artists creating lo-fi performance and moving image works. Kate graduated from Goldsmiths College with her BA in Art Practice in 2012; School of the Damned in 2016; and MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2017. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University.

Kate Mahony performing in Shake Chain at Supernormal Festival, 2024

Aaron Williamson

Over the last twenty-five years, Dr Aaron Williamson has created over 300 performances, videos and installations in Britain, Europe, Japan, China, Australia, Scandinavia, USA, South America, Canada and many other countries around the world. Aaron has a PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex (1997) and has published widely (his monograph Performance / Video / Collaboration was co-published by LADA and KIOSK in 2007). He has been awarded, among others, the Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the British School at Rome (2000-2001); a three-year AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at BIAD, University of Central England, (2004-2007); and the Stephen Cripps Studio Bursary, Acme Studios (2013-2014). Aaron’s work is informed by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised and progressive sensibility towards disability. At a University of California San Diego lecture in 1998, he coined the term ‘Deaf Gain’ as a counter-emphasis to ‘hearing loss’. In 2019 a retrospective of Aaron’s work was exhibited at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester, featuring performance documentation, short and 15mm films, his work with the Disabled Avant Garde, and the large-scale commissioned installation work Inspiration Archives. Aaron was a Research Fellow in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University (2019-2023) and is currently working on a full-scale exhibition and retrospective at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton to open in October 2025.

Aaron Williamson. Image courtesy of the artist

Past Desk Scheme Users

BULLYACHE│Tink Flaherty│Carrie Foulkes│Simone French│Fox Irving│Gareth Llŷr Evans│Ornela Novello│Benjamin Ord│Deborah Pearson│Sally Rose│Emily Russell│Leyneuf Tines│Anelena Toku│Manuel Vason│Sarah Wishart

Banner image credit:

The Desk Scheme area. Image by Willy Amott