Our key resource which provides a research space for artists, academics, students and other curious folk. Containing over 8,000 items, including out-of-print books and rare documentation, our Study Room, in Bethnal Green, is the world’s largest collection of research materials on Live Art.
Book a VisitThe catalogue includes books, DVDs, magazines, journals and digital materials. A selection of these resources can be accessed online.
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‘LADA’s Study Room is a kind of artform in itself.’
As part of the continuous development of the Study Room we regularly commission a range of artists and thinkers to write personal Study Room Guides to help navigate users through this resource.
The idea is to enable Study Room users to experience the materials in a new way and highlight materials that they may not have otherwise come across.
View our Study Room Guides
Are We There Yet? - a Study Room Guide on Live Art and Feminism
We have assembled this selection of useful links and and pages for artists and researchers.
Downloads – free resources created by LADA
Daniel Oliver, Weird Séance Incredible Interquel Spectacle, SPILL Festival of Performance 2015, produced by Pacitti Company. Photo by Guido Mencari
An ongoing project offering free online screenings of seminal performance documentation, works to camera, short films/video and archival footage.
Our most recent LADA Screens was Crossed Paths: Scots Pine by Miranda Whall which premiered on LADA Screens from 4th July – 4th August 2022.
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Miranda Whall, Crossed Paths - Scots Pine, November 2021. COP26, Glasgow. GoPro footage, still from film
Responding to the social conditions and lived experiences of the Covid-19 lockdown, LADA is compiling a series of reference lists of writings and films which draw attention to examples of historic and contemporary Live Art practice that produce states and encounters that are in someway akin to, or speak to, some of the experiences of lockdown or issues a lockdown raises. These lists are imagined as resources where artists, researchers and curious folk might start their own investigations into the relationships between art making and periods of isolation, distancing, stasis and contagion.
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Martin O’Brien, Mucus Factory, 2011, London. Image credit Manuel Vason. LADA Research and Projects, Restock Rethink Reflect Two on Live Art and Disability and Access All Areas (London and New York)
A series of channels where you can watch short videos and films selected from LADA’s Study Room or generated through our programmes and initiatives.
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Franko B and Nando Messias in conversation, Live Art Now, Queen Mary University of London, July 2019. Still from video, by Claire Nolan.
Listen Online is LADA’s platform for audio content, including recordings of artist talks as well as commissioned artworks by artists such as Marcia Farquhar, Jen Harvie, Taylan Halici and many others.
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STACY MAKISHI, IMAGE BY HOLLY REVELL
Originally planned for publication in early 2020, we are delighted to offer The Live Art Almanac Volume 6, reimagined as an online resource. Edited by Bojana Janković, the Almanac sketches out a cultural sector in a slow-burning crisis, undergoing a steady increase of inequality, precarity, and nationalism. Moving back and forth, between the pandemic and the time before, Volume 6 makes connections between the brewing crises of before and the state of emergency now.
The Almanac is grouped in seven thematic collections, namely: Institutional Critiques; The Woke Minority; The Magic Money Tree; Two Meters Apart; Enclosed Spaces; The Aftermath; and Dearly Departed.
The Live Art Almanac Volume 6
The Live Art Almanac: Volume 6 - Illustration by David Caines.
A series of project specific LADA websites hosting curated content and documentation of the projects.
Edge of an Era: an archival project revisiting a specific series of seminal performance art events from the late 1980s.
PLAYING UP: A Live Art Game for Kids and Adults: an intergenerational artwork by Sibylle Peters
Performance Magazine Online: an online archive of and resources about, Performance Magazine (1979-1992)
Glimpses of Before:1970’s Performance Art in the UK: Study Room Guide by Helena Goldwater
Are We There Yet? A Study Room Guide on Live Art and Feminism
Live Art and Feminism in the UK: Curated by LADA in collaboration with Eleanor Roberts and the Google Cultural Institute, offering a snapshot of some of the key figures and issues of Live Art and Feminism in the UK since 1970
Documenting Intimacy: a research initiative piloted by Brian Lobel and Marisa Zanotti to explore documenting one-to-one performance from the perspective of artists.
NRLA 30: Highlights from the documentation of the 2010 edition of the NRLA Festival when artists from across the Festival’s 30-year history presented new work.
PLAYING UP. Artwork by David Caines.
Performance Magazine, Front Cover Collage
The Resources Catalogue includes a growing number of Collections of publications, DVDs and other ‘rare’ materials organised by themes, artists or projects, which have been assembled or acquired by the Agency, or generously donated by artists and colleagues.
View our collections
Bernsteins 'Taking Measurements of yourselves as Artists` FairlightGlen, Hastings 1972
LADA is delighted to be able to offer UK and international promoters temporary installations of bespoke Study Boxes containing hand picked selections of DVDs, books and other materials from the LADA Study Room around specific themes.
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SPILL Study Cafe, Ipswich 2012
Banner image credit: LADA Study Room, Bethnal Green