Notes on a Return

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

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.

Applying a queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of Self/s, the book guides readers to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences, featuring exercises to activate their practices and clear introductory definitions to key phenomenological terms. Includes interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice of this century help to help unpack the application of phenomenology as Bacon calls for a queer reimagining of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’

10 is the latest and last publication from The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home (2008 – 2018) and looks at 10 persisting problems of the past 10 years, featuring an array of critical and inspiring voices The Institute has worked with over the last decade.

Video documentation of the book launch, as part of LADA Screens. Includes 4 videos.

Analyses the artist’s oeuvre in the contexts of liveness, visual art and participatory practices.

Documentation of the event considering questions of archives and legacies through the art and lives of four extraordinary and influential artists who have died in recent years – Ian Hinchliffe, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Lol Coxhill and Roger Ely.

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 collection of ‘found’ writings about and around Live Art that were originally published, shared, sent, spread and read between January 2015 and December 2017. Selected through recommendations and an open call for submissions, Volume 5 reflects the dynamic, international contexts that Live Art and radical performance practices occupy.

Part of Library of Performing Rights (P3041).

The first substantial survey of its kind, the publication brings together documentation of performances, drawings, videos, installations, and sculptures, as well as writings, interviews and visual essays by the artist. A series of commissioned critical essays show her to be a prolific maker of acts, objects, and multiple ‘selves’.

The fourteen essays bringing together a unique gathering of artists, many of whome make works which arise out of responses to the situation or the environment in which they find themselves.

An evening considering questions of archives and legacies through the art and lives of four extraordinary and influential artists who have died in recent years – Ian Hinchliffe, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Lol Coxhill and Roger Ely. Inspired by the acquistion of the Ian Hinchliffe archive by Queen Mary.

16 November 2017