Bull’s-Eye – The mother, The Daughter & The Holy Ghost

Documentation from an online lecture by Ron Athey on Penetration in Live Art and Video. This lecture formed part of LADA’s 2020 Summer Programme.

Penetration – be it bodily, spiritual or sexual – is a recurring motif in Ron Athey‘s work. In this lecture, which comes as he begins work on a new project, Athey will explore the artistic potential of the contemporary post-porn movement in relation to his practice.

Video documentation of an online artist conversation with  Rosalind Fowler, Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter  in December 2021. This conversation followed an online screening of BREADROCK, I feel like doing this, a film by artist collective Fourthland (Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter) and artist and filmmaker Rosalind Fowler.

BREADROCK, I feel like doing this is a visceral homage to cultural history, memory and universal myth.  Melding experimental and ethnographic filmmaking, the work presents a series of staged vignettes drawing on the rituals and artefacts of the Estate’s Bangladeshi, European, Kurdish, Serbian, Turkish, Ugandan and West Indian communities, to create new kinships, myths and culture.

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

Contemporary Theatre Review Volume 32 Issue Number 1 February 2022

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Contemporary Theatre Review Volume 31 Issue Number 3 August 2021

Part of ‘series of rituals practicing ways to dialog with the natural world’ by Fernanda Branco, MA in Performance Norwegian Theatre Academy//Østfold University College.

Documentation of the evening which featured a screening of short films and performance documentation by artists working around ritual, performance and queer futurity.

Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture.

A trilogy of hybrid art films of collaborative performances in epic locations around the world. Included the three films (Performances at the End of the World, Performances at the Holy Centre, Performances at the Core of the Looking-Glass) and a text about the project.

Feminist science fiction that anticipates a post-patriarchal future.

Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey presents the first critical overview of this major artist’s work. It demonstrates how Athey foresaw and precipitated the central place afforded they body and identity politics in art and critical theory in the 1990s and beyond.

A romantic exploration performance about love and human relationships.

Please note that Queen Mary University of London holds the entire archive of the late artist.