Mishandled Archive

Celebrating ten years of Barnes’ White Rabbit.

He makes everyone smile on a miserable day,

And does lots of things in his own unique way,

He loves art and performance and sometimes he’ll sing,

His outlook on life is a wonderful thing.

He’s quite a celebrity and travelled afar,

He’s met famous people some of them stars,

New countries, new culture and so much more,

To live life to the full is what he aims for.

Around his home town he’s a familiar sight,

With his bright coloured clothes and Japanese bike.

He cycles around shouting hello as he goes,

This is White Rabbit who everyone knows.

Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened documents neon, LED and other text works by the British artist Tim Etchells. The book creates a compelling and comprehensive investigation of Etchells’ projects in public space and galleries, leading with images of key works installed in sites all over the world.

Alongside its wide-ranging image survey, this work features an extended conversation between the artist and Jule Hillgärtner, director of Kunstverein Braunschweig, as well as a text by curator Ben Borthwick.

Surveying the full range and approaches of Etchells’ sculptural work with text, Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened creates dialogue across the artist’s works spanning sixteen years, as well as exploring the complex relation between individual works and the different contexts in which they have been installed over the last several decades.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.

This work is in French.

Take Me To Your Favourite Place is an audio and written journal that starts with artist Maria Sideri’s trip to Brussels. The work suggests a subjective geography that observes and reinvents the city and its miscellaneous facts, in order to create movements between the spaces of a metropolis in constant transition.

This book explores the self in modern and contemporary art. Accompanying an exhibition in four chapters of the ISelf Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery, it looks at the complex ways in which artists are thinking about identity as an individual, in relation to others, to society and the wider world.

Celebrating the first-ever retrospective exhibition of performance art icon Jess Dobkin, this book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as a performer, curator, and community activist, and asks: How do archives perform? With contributions by more than twenty renowned performance scholars, archivists, and creative collaborators and a riot of full-colour photographs, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective provides unparalleled access to Dobkin’s artistic process and production from the last thirty years.

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire as well as his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary perfromance and queer visual culture.

Video documentation of ‘Passion Play’, an event curated and presented by Daniel Oliver, in collaboration with Access All Areas and LADA, on 1st August, 2025 at The Garrett Centre.

Included in the footage is: performances by graduating and former students from Access All Area’s ‘Performance Making Diploma’: Bruno De Ceita Pedro, Jacob Dean, Claire Dunbar, and George Webb, an introduction from Oliver and Dean, and a Q&A.

The event was funded through the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama’s knowledge exchange funding.

This is a video file and includes closed captions. Filmed and edited by Claire Nolan.

An interview with Lois Keidan on the history of the Live Art Development Agency, recorded in 2019 to mark LADA’s 20th Anniversary.

Documentation from a deep dive into La Pocha Nostra’s archive held at LADA’s Study Room on 5th July 2024, led by artist Ansuman Biswas who has been collaborating with La Pocha Nostra and its founder Guillermo Gómez-Peña since 2002.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions please visit our vimeo channel. 

An introduction by Alisa Oleva to her film Walking Home, which was screened as part of LADA Screens in February 2021.

Audio documentation of a participatory conversation in response to La Pocha Nostra’s commitment to use performativity as a methodology of resistance and to erase the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, and artist and spectator, on 2nd August 2024  at The Garrett Centre.

performingborders has been exploring performance and Live Art practices across notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders since 2016, inspired by La Pocha Nostra’s work. Drawing from Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s publication Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back (2000), they explored LADA Study Room’s resources around borders and performances, including the Performing Borders Study Room Guide. They also drew from their own archive to highlight artists whose practices challenge the diversity of experiences at the intersections of cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, physical, economic, and everyday borders.

This is an audio file. For a version with closed captions, please visit out vimeo channel.