LIVE 2021: A Programme of Performance Curated by Languid Hands

This year’s LIVE programme is curated by Languid Hands, a London-based artistic and curatorial collaboration between Rabz Lansiquot, filmmaker, programmer and DJ, and Imani Robinson, interdisciplinary writer, editor and live artist.

The duo have been curatorial fellows at Cubitt Artists since January 2020, presenting No Real Closure, a platform for experimentation and development of black artistic practice across exhibitions, moving image, text, performance and public programming.

Their LIVE programme extends this method of inquiry, and will be available to view online, with performances by Ebun Sodipo, Rebecca Bellantoni & Ashley Holmes.

The performance programme will be hosted online on frieze.com from Thursday 14 October. 

About the Artists

REBECCA BELLANTONI

Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y, 2021

Condition the roses, accept the vision. C.R.Y, is centred around questions of liminal space. Thinking through and with the possibilities of re/creation, the performance asks if the liminal space can become physical and what form that might take. What is possible within this space? Who and what can enter/join? Is the liminal space a communal one? What can be shared and is it possible to leave a liminal space with something ‘concrete’, foundational and workable?

Rebecca Bellantoni is an artist based in London. Bellantoni mines everyday occurrences and abstracts them, investigating through the lens of metaphysics, spirit/energy, religion and the aesthetics of them, to trouble the accepted/expected ‘real’; and the experiential ‘real’. Bellantoni asks, how might these removed borders offer portals to self, collective reasoning and healing thought/action? Black geographies and their attendant realities are a research element. 

Her practice is wide-ranging and utilises video, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, writing and sound-text. Recent works and projects have been shown at PUBLICs, Helsinki, Tate, Block Universe, Palais de Tokyo, Raven Row and Stroom Den Haag.

EBUN SODIPO

my body reminds us of water iii, 2021

We are looking. We are searching. We are listening.

We know she will come, we know that she will arrive but when...

We thought we caught a glimpse of her in an archive somewhere.

We do not know.

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These are fragments of finding, records of being in and with the body, flash-fire encounters with ancestors. This is a seeking of more than what we have to hand.

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Using the ghostly, hypnotic and meditative capacities of reflective surfaces, Sodipo speculates on black trans desire and thirst as instinctual drives, gesturing towards and stuttering out - in song, and in movement, and in text - an embedded and embodied knowledge of a configuration of being that can now only be felt, has been lost to sensible knowing, existing only on the murky edges of consciousness; destroyed in the encounter with the West.

Ebun Sodipo is a London based artist making work for those who will come after: the black trans people of the future. Her interdisciplinary practice narrates her construction of a black trans-feminine self after slavery and colonialism. Through a process of fragmentation, collage, and fabulation, she devises softer, other-wise ways of imagining and speaking about the body, desire, archives, and the past.

Her work has been shown, read, watched, performed at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning Centre, Bernie Grants Arts Centre, Narrative Projects, Raven Row, The Block Museum of Art, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s How To Sleep Faster, Auto Italia, ICA, Tate Britain, Embassy Gallery, Wasafiri. She is currently an artist in residence at Porthmeor Studios, where she is working on commissions for VISUAL Carlow, FACT Liverpool, and CCA Glasgow. She also teaches at UAL and Falmouth University.

ASHLEY HOLMES

Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub), 2021

Even Myself Knows That Too (Journal Dub) is a reference to a line from the song ‘Bad to Worse’ released in 1978 by Burning Spear and is a continuation of Ashley Holmes’s current explorations into the language, sound, movement and foundations of Black musical tradition. An ode to his guiding voices, to ancestors, to the legacies of the Blues, of Reggae, Rocksteady and Dub through experiments in space and sound. The performance combines installation, moving image and DJing, navigating disparate but connected geographies across the Black Atlantic through musical encounters with expressions, or acknowledgements, of feelings of sorrow, aspiration, fear, hope, love and dread.

Ashley Holmes (b. Luton, 1990) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield working across sound, video, radio broadcasts and performance. He hosts Tough Matter, a monthly broadcast on NTS Radio and also facilitates Open Deck - a series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around relationships to music, sound and oral histories.

Recent selected work & projects include; Distend, Leeds Art Gallery, commissioned by Yorkshire Sculpture International (2021) ; A Free Moment, curated by Christina Gigliotti at Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, (2020); away, completely: denigrate, group exhibition curated by Languid Hands at Narrative Projects, London (2019); Double 6, performance w R.I.P. Germain commissioned by Poor Image Projects at former Court Room of Leeds Town Hall, Leeds (2019); Survey, group exhibition by Jerwood Arts (2018); …and their tooth, finest gold: group exhibition curated by Deborah Joyce Holman at Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2018).

Early bird tickets to Frieze London are now sold out. Limited second release tickets are available - book yours now. Tickets are only available online in advance. There is no box office at the fair.

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