On receiving a request to support Laure Prouvost’s ‘NO MORE FRONT TEARS‘ launch for CIRCA, I assembled a small team of artists to help create placards of Laure’s slogans.
On launch day, the placards (and us!) were used in the official documentation of the exhibition launch at Piccadilly Circus.
Delighted to be the inaugural recipient of the CIRCA x Goldsmiths scholarship award for the MFA Curating course.
Digital art and culture platform CIRCA and Goldsmiths, University of London have launched the #CIRCAECONOMY Scholarship Programme, funded by the sale of limited edition prints by artists including Ai Weiwei, Patti Smith and David Hockney.
Since launching in October 2020, the #CIRCAECONOMY initiative has circulated over £180,000 into supporting its free public art programme, appearing daily in London’s Piccadilly Circus, Seoul, Tokyo, Milan, Melbourne, New York and LA, while nurturing a more diverse cultural industry that supports emerging creative potential through a series of cash grants and awards.
Funds are generated through the sale of limited edition artists’ prints sales, with CIRCA commissioning new work from rising and established artists including Ai Weiwei, Cauleen Smith, Eddie Peake, Anne Imhof, Patti Smith, Tony Cokes, Emma Talbot, Vivienne Westwood, James Barnor, David Hockney, and more.
On Thursday October 13th, I will be supporting artist Laure Prouvost as part of her CIRCA residency and project, ‘No More Front Tears’.
BROADCASTING GLOBALLY THROUGHOUT OCTOBER 2022, coinciding with Frieze London and CIRCA’s second anniversary, Laure Prouvost will take centre stage on the CIRCA platform with a new 2.5min video work that explores the migration of other-than-humans, poetically navigating and providing deeper context surrounding questions of borders and immigration.
LAUNCHING MID OCTOBER, complementing the global video presentation and in conjunction with Frieze week, Prouvost will activate her first AR experience in Piccadilly Circus, London that brings to life a giant, painterly octopus. Wrapping around the Anteros Statue, she is resting after her long march to London, following a protest gathering of other-than-human compatriots. Marching together, through unscripted encounters between this world’s manifold, they seek to develop infrastructures for deep futurity.
PARTNERING WITH CHOOSE LOVE, who support refugees and displaced people globally, this month’s #CIRCAECONOMY print by Prouvost will power a £5000 donation to the charity.
‘Everywhere is Haunted‘ provides a discourse on the themes of race, gender, queer identity and natural hostile spaces in horror through talks, screenings, live performances and a horror disco. Curated by Dee Sada.
Dee Sada is a London-based musician and curator. She currently performs in Paper Birch with Fergus Lawrie of Urusei Yatsura. The duo released their debut album, ‘morninghairwater’ via TAKUROKU and Reckless Yes records in 2021. Dee has created an eclectic and diverse collection of work over the last 12 years through projects such as percussive noise band, An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump, electronic duo Blue On Blue and improv performance bands The Noise Bodies and ORAL ORAL.
Dee is currently studying the MFA Curating course at Goldsmiths, University of London and was awarded the inaugural Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) scholarship. She was also awarded a 2022-2023 culture seed grant from Culture Mile London. Her curatorial practice is based on inclusion, diversity, sustainability and community-based engagement. She has recently worked on projects with artists Carolee Schneemann and Laure Prouvost.
In Conversation:
Ric Rawlins is the writer and director of the UK’s first folk horror anthology feature film, Rewilding, a trio of tales which take place in the fields, forests and caves of the UK’s wildest haunts. As a writer he’s published Rise of the Super Furry Animals (2015) about the seminal Welsh band, and he’s currently writing a new film about a river-dwelling vampire.
Emma Merkling is an art historian based at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Durham University, specialising in the intersections between art, science, and spiritualism in the long nineteenth century.
She is co-host of Drawing Blood, a podcast about visual culture, the history of science and medicine, and the macabre. Emma received her PhD from the Courtauld in 2021 for a thesis on spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan and science, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Courtauld’s Centre for American Art, University of Stirling, and the Science Museum (London).
She has just completed a grant project on the scientific photographs of the medium ‘Margery’ Crandon, and is currently working on a book project, with Dr Thomas Hughes, on The Victorian Idyll in Art and Literature: Ecology, Matter, Form, where her contribution focuses on queer/more-than-human desire, ecology, and horror in the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron.
Live performance:
The Noise Bodies formed in April 2022 at Cafe OTO and performed an improvised piece inspired by James Tenney’s ‘Saxony’ and a recreation of ‘Noise Bodies’ originally performed by Schneemann and Tenney. The Noise Bodies are Frederick Fuller, Dee Sada, Noel Anderson and Mark Abbott.
There will also be a zine available on the night and the incredible Burning Witches Records on-site with their vast array of horror vinyl and cassette tapes.
Burning Witches Records is a UK-based record label specialising in forward-thinking electronic and heavy synth music. Born from a love of horror films and electronic music, Burning Witches presents artists that are pushing the boundaries of electronic music and music as a whole package. Opening track to album art to vinyl and cassette colour variants, Burning Witches Records makes every release count.
‘Purgatory’ (acrylics on cardboard) was used as the cover for the debut release of my solo EP, ‘Fragments’ on cassette tape.
A short clip of the performance of ‘Noise Bodies’. Based on Schneemann’s instructions, I recorded myself relaying the instructions which played through the PA at OTO.
Myself and the performers wore a head lamp each and created our own wearable objects – a mix of discarded objects and personal items. We ‘played’ the objects through interactions, movement, using cable wire as ‘wands’ as instructed by Carolee.
The Enemy Is Human Misery
A co-curated event with Death Knell featuring a diverse group of poets and musicians.
Meet the Speakers
Rachel Churner is the director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. She is also an art critic and editor, whose writings have appeared in Artforum and October magazine, among other publications. She was a recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2018 and was the editor of Hans Haacke (MIT Press, 2015), two volumes of writings by film historian Annette Michelson (MIT Press, 2017 and 2020), and Yvonne Rainer: Revisions (no place press, 2020), as well as books and exhibition catalogues on Jaime Davidovich, James Ensor, and Charlotte Posenenske. She owned and operated Churner and Churner, a contemporary art gallery in New York, from 2011–2014. Churner holds degrees in Art History from Stanford University and Columbia University and currently teaches in the Department of Visual Studies at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School.
Cathy Wade is an artist and writer who investigates how practice can be created and distributed in collaborative partnerships and through the creation of commons. Their work seeks to understand the experience of contemporary conditions through exchange with others. They are course leader for MA in Arts Education Practices at BCU; and are currently curating new work with artist Hannah Sawtell at Vivid Projects alongside facilitating Black Hole Club, Vivid Projects’ artist development programme.
Lotte Johnson is a curator at Barbican Art Gallery, London, where she is curating the forthcoming retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, opening in September 2022. Her work as a curator, writer and art historian focuses on interdisciplinary artistic expressions, feminist practices and transcultural dialogues, with a particular interest in performance. At the Barbican, she has curated solo artist commissions by Toyin Ojih Odutola (2020), Jamila Johnson-Small (2019), Yto Barrada (2018) and Bedwyr Williams (2016) and contributed to a number of major exhibitions, including Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art (2019), Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017) and The World of Charles and Ray Eames (2015), editing and authoring publications for many of these projects. She previously worked at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, contributing to exhibitions focused on Jean Dubuffet, Ellen Gallagher, Paul Gauguin, Jasper Johns and Dieter Roth.
As part of the upcoming performances of ‘Noise Bodies’ and ‘Saxony’, myself and musicians Fred Fuller, Mark Abbott and Death Knell have explored concepts and techniques for these pieces. ‘Saxony’ will be performed on piano, bass guitar, electric guitar and electronics.
Dee Sada 