Documenting Live! 2002

Documenting Live! is a collaboration between Aavaa – African and Asian Visual Artists Archive, LADA and contributing artists. It is a new and unprecedented initiative to raise the profile and appreciation of Black and Asian Live Art in Britain, by revisiting and documenting key works in the most imaginative and innovative ways possible.

Widely recognised as a practice that reflects and disrupts the devleopments that have taken place at the edges of visual art, performance art, theatre, dance, new writing, digital media and the moving image, Live Art is a process led, and often ephemeral medium. There are many inherent challenges in both recording and providing accessible documentation of live work. This is particularly true of work by culturally diverse practitioners.

Documenting Live! is a new approach that aims to capture the essence of performance-based work and explore its context.

The first Documenting Live! project is an exciting interactive cdrom interpretation of motiroti’s celebrated participatory performance Wigs of Wonderment . A performance that challenges Western ideas about beauty and the ‘exotic’, by inviting the audience to look at the languages of style and fashion.

Originally conceived by Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi of motiroti, ‘as a sensory journey for an audience of one’, Wigs of Wonderment was commissioned by the ICA Live Arts (London) and first performed in 1995.

To accompany this cd rom, Keith Khan has written an introduction about the journey the performance has undertaken since its inception and the process of translating Wigs of Wonderment into a digital format. There is also a critical response to the CD ROM, written by art historian Dorothy Rowe, which will prove a vital and engaging resource for academics, students, artists, curators – and the plain curious!

The Wigs of Wonderment cd rom is no longer available but a copy can be viewed when visiting the Live Art Development Agency’s Study Room.