TRACE: The Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art

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. 

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 talk given by Miranda Whall on 4th July, 2022. This conversation followed an online screening of Miranda Whall’s film Crossed Paths – Scots Pine (2022). Following the talk, there is a Q&A with the artist led by Chinasa Vivian Ezugha.

Crossed Paths – Scots Pine (2022) is a film documenting the artist crawling through the centre of Glasgow to the area hosting the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference in November 2021, carrying a 6-year-old potted Scots Pine on her back.

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.

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Sahera Khan on 1st March 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Sahera’s film My Glow as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Sahera engaged in a Q&A with the audience and gave a short BSL lesson.

In My Glow (2023), Aa mature, Deaf, Muslim, British Sign Language (BSL) mother shares her pregnancy journey through the pandemic, and how she coped with limited communication with others such as the health service.

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Video documentation of an artist conversation with Lucy Sheen on 28th June 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Lucy’s film Abandoned, Adopted Here as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Lucy gave a performative reading of the poem I Know This Face, followed by a panel on the complexities of post-pandemic working in cultural and performative spaces for British East and Southeast Asians. With Jennifer Lim (Chair), Rosa Fong, Lucy Sheen, and Moi Tran.

Abandoned Adopted Here explores the nature of belonging in the British society and the unheard, silenced, and often erased voices of British East and Southeast Asians with mixed heritages and complex identities.

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

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson, on 26th APril, 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed a screening of Lateisha’s film The Gift as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Lateisha was  joined by collaborators Kes Gill-Martin and Ava Riby-Williams for a discussion and interactive sonic/music offerings.

The Gift (2022) is a single-take style short film, weaving together performance for camera, original sound composition and poetic storytelling that fuses speculative fiction and autobiography. We are invited into the artist’s home, to witness them playfully uncover (and reclaim) stories of grief, body, love, nature and home-making.

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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. 

This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker’s career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, ‘How to Live’ and ‘Diary Drawings’ – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners.

Interviews with people at the intersection of disability, queerness, kink, sex work and survivorship.

Unframing Photography: Performing the Image to See Otherwise is a new book by transdisciplinary artist Manuel Vason, and his third publication with LADA after the ground-breaking Exposures (2002) and Double Exposures (2014).

Common Salt was a performance around a table – a ‘show and tell’ by artists Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer. It explored the colonial, geographical and natural history of England and India taking an expansive and emotional time-travel, from the first Enclosure Act and the start of the East India Company in the 1600s, to 21st century narratives of trade, empire and culture.

In the performance Sue and Sheila activated insights into our shared past, laying out a ‘home museum’ of objects and stories about borders and collections, the Great Hedge of India, a forgotten naturalist – all accompanied by original Shruti box laments.

This book documents and explores the project, placing the performance text, images and reflections from both artists alongside writings by invited guests – from curators and artists to audience members.

Common Salt is designed by John Hunter (aka RULER) and published by LADA.