Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research

Unbound Zine: Xiaomei Going Overseas is a 30-minute surreal drag performance mixed with field trip recordings of East and Southeast Asian queer self-publishing heroes.

Screened at LADA at Live Art Bookshop x Queer and Feminist Zine Spirits Across Borders on Saturday 13 Dec 2025.

Shot in a breath between lockdowns in 2021, these teeming forms is a sensate and mythic film, imagining a process of wilding – of entering the land and being opened by it. Memory and desire, history and loss, future and fantasy become porous, contributing to a textural and sensate meditation on living.

Commissioned by ]performance s p a c e[. Presented by ]ps[, ICA (London), VSSL studio, Chisenhale Studioes (2021) and Venice International Performance Art Week (2023). Funded by Arts Council England.

Single-channel video work; duration: 28.33

Nuidey is a short film made on an iPhone. It depicts three middle-aged queers, two of them fat, dancing in the Western Isles in slow motion in June 2024. They are naked.

There is a soundtrack of twangy music and reflections by the performers, which are subtitled. The reflections concern the place, light, rationale; fat subjectivity; what it is to be seen in real life and online; illness and decision-making. The conversation is intimate, the performers know each other well.

The film was conceived of and made by Charlotte Cooper as an expansion of her book Fat Body Work (2025 33editions).

The film was screened as part of Live Art Bookshop: Fat Body Work Launch at LADA on Wednesday 29 October 2025.

Regret
A 28 day durational performance
6 hours per day, June 2-29, 2021
Performed at Floating Goose Studios, Adelaide, Australia

cock~salt (2025) is a performance to camera by Claye Bowler, screened at LADA as part of Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest exhibition The Body Is a Thing in Time, curated by kane stonestreet.

An online event to celebrate the launch of artist and writer Tara Fatehi Irani’s new book Mishandled Archive, published by LADA. Hosted by Rachel Mars, the event features an excerpt from Tara’s performance of Mishandled Archive with Pouya Ehsaei, a performative presentation by Diana Damian Martin, Mary Paterson, Jemima Yong, Maddy Costa and Holly Revell and special appearances by Giulia Palladini and Joe Kelleher.

Writer and academic Dominic Johnson hosts a rare UK appearance by the US (French based) artist Skip Arnold. They screened a selection of Skip’s videos and other documents, and discussed the body, duration, intervention, commitment, and documentation.

A visual diary zine of the Chines photographer SickGirl’s (@eeriesickgirl) Exile Route between 25 Dec 2023 and 16 Nov 2024.

A collection of poems and drawings self-published by political theatre maker Maya at an important period during their life and inspired much of their later work.

From the artist: This is a neurodivergently true story about neurotransgressive performance (which I call proper performance). It contains some magic green liquid and a bit of an accidental erection.

"TransMission: Sissy TV" is an exploration of the idea of trans archives. And auto-archive of the artist's body, work, costumes, props, hopes, dreams and memories accumulated over nearly three decades of creating queer work.

A short text and image piece by artist Kira O'Reilly, accompanied by a photo of O'Reilly's "Menopause Gym."