The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Three short documentaries observe the creative process of Hooligan Art Community (founded in Kyiv in 2019) as the theatre company deals with relocation due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Spanning the period May 2022 to October 2024, the films represent three distinct stages in the artists’ experience of displacement.

The three documentaries in this collection were made by Liubov Sliusareva (from Donetsk) who joined Hooligan Art Community in 2020 as filmmaker and art director. The films were produced by Peter Cant, co-founder and artistic director of Hooligan Art Community. Cant, an artist and theatre-maker from the UK is based in Berlin. He began working in Ukraine in 2016.

Against Interpretation is a selection from Susan Sontag’s early writings about the arts and contemporary culture. The book quickly became a modern classic and has had enormous influence here and abroad. As well as the title essay, ‘On Style”, and the famous ‘Notes on Camp’, the book includes discussions from such figures as Sartre, Simone Weil, Georg Lukács, Lévi-Strauss, Artaud, Genet, Brecht, Beckett, Bresson and Godard.

Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s’ art world. In Where is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.

Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemerality of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

Audio documentation of a lecture given by Malik Nashad Sharpe, on the subject ‘Horror for the Live Context’ on 8th March 2025 at The Garrett Centre.

Culminating his Study Room residency, this talk highlighted some of the utility of making horror as a performance practice, and explored the genre’s potential as a framework for seeing, reading and working with contemporary live performance. During his residency he approached horror as a research tool to tease out an alternative tradition of choreographic practice that contains social resonance and fantastical outcomes, and constitutes a suggestive and speculative lens through which performance can be contextualised.

Artworks referenced and shared in this talk:

‘Shoot’, Chris Burden, 1971, ‘Carcasse’, Piotr Pavlensky, 2013, ‘Rhythm 0’, Marina Abramovic, 1974, ‘American Psycho’, directed by Mary Harron, 2000, ‘Nope’, Directed by Jordan Peele, 2022, ’10 Cloverfield Lane’, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, 2016,  ‘Saw’, directed by James Wan, 2004, ‘Le Manoir de Diable’, directed by George Meillies, 1890, ‘All of us are Dead’, directed by Lee Jae-kyoo; Kim Nam-su, 2022, ‘Untitled Nostalgia 3’, Tiraan Willemse, 2025, ‘Presage’, Elie Autins, 2022, ‘Goner’, Malik Nashad Sharpe, 2024

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

In Stages of Evil, Robert Lima explores the sociohistorical implications of Christian and pagan representations of evil and the theatrical creativity that occultism has engendered. By examining examples of alchemy, astronomy, demonology, exorcism, fairies, vampires, witchcraft, hauntings, and voodoo in prominent plays, Stages of Evil explores American and European perceptions of occultism from medieval times to the modern age.

Training Utopias

Performance Research Volume 25 Issue No. 8 December 2020

Pg69-75

An evening with artists readings of extracts from significant books held in LADA’s Study Room. Part of LADA at 20.

Documenting the eponymous six year project as well as the current research and thinking around the subject with contributions by prominent artists, academics, activists and chefs.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights ( P3041).

A performance-based feature film produced and filmed on location during the month-long performance walk from Northern Germany through Poland to the Russian region of Kaliningrad, in May/June 2015.

Includes feature film, trailer, poster, stills from the movie, and film description.

The first major survey of the artist’s interdisciplinary practices. Bringing together newly commissioned and other writings by major thinkers in and beyond visual and performance studies, and extensive documentation of the artist’s work from two decades of practice, it navigates through and between performance, biotechnical practices, image-making, and writing.

Draws strength from conversations with the performance artist Ron Athey and readings from Illness as Metaphor, by Susan Sontag.

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

Using interdisciplinary cultural studies to examine the gothicism in queer art, literature, and thought the author argues that during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a queer culture has emerged that challenges and responds to traumatic marginalization by creating a distinctly gothic aesthetic.

Part of the Library of Performing Rights (P3041).