Performance Night: Fictions Are Realities To Come

An evening of newly commissioned live works by Helen Benigson, Adam James and Sisters From Another Mister, expanding on moments of intersection and disorientation in our increasingly slippy experience of real and virtual worlds.

Helen Benigson's CASHINO DESERT takes ideas of incubation to the womb and desert when a pregnant body travels between Nevada and Las Vegas. Casinos, carpets and convertibles set the scene for a hyper real girl group, headed up by a girl in her first trimester, who can't believe their luck at the free drinks, dazzling lights and views of Vegas and the surrounding desert area. The video will be performed with three musicians and a live rap from Princess Belsize Dollar.

Adam James will bring his interactive performance series LARP to the otherworldly setting of Jon Rafman's exhibition. Adopting the creativity and playfulness of Live Action Role Play games, LARP will invite the audience to lose themselves in spontaneous characters and scenarios, invented through non-verbal communication and prompts from the artist.

Sisters From Another Mister get physical with the virtual dimension, embodying and embracing our over-attachment to the world of screens with dynamic performances. For this event they have developed a new work featuring the looping and repetition of found imagery, the stillness and movement of physical bodies, and references to dystopia, life cycles, and chewing gum.

Throughout the evening Tarot Cards will be read by Jo Waterhouse who, with fellow artist Rosalie Schweiker, developed a special Tarot deck that abandons the technique's esoteric traditions in favour of the honesty and humour of the human condition. The Drag Queen says you are fabulous. The Outsider Artist warns against venerating the unknown.

FREE

Booking recommended

Helen Benigson creates immersive video and sound environments, which become layered sets for scripted and choreographed performances, played out in messy, awkward and anxious digital carnivals. Collaborating with casts of volunteers and participants; amateur and professional weightlifters, spray tan beauticians, dancers, ‘tequila-girls’, strippers and midwives, her practice provokes a multi-sensory site-specific experience, exploring contemporary game-playing, sharing and the corporeal, public space.

Recent solo exhibitions and performances include; Stressful, Anxious, Insomnia Fat, Carroll/Fletcher, London, 2015; Weightless Utopias, Site Gallery, Sheffield Breathe Harder, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, both 2014; and Performa 13 After Hours, New York, 2013. Recent group exhibitions and performances include Transformation Marathon, Serpentine, London, 2015; Videonale 14, Kunst Museum, Bonn, Lagos and Odessa, Videocracy at The Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, The House in the Sky at Concrete, Hayward Gallery, both 2014, Ericka Beckman: Image Games – work in context, Tate Modern, London, 2013. In 2014, Benigson was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to support her DPhil at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Musicians Adriano Rossetti-Bonell, Dario Rossetti-Bonell and Cosimo Keita Cadore will be performing with Helen Benigson, and have composed the music for CASHINO DESERT. The trio met in the early 2000s and between them they have played and recorded with the likes of Hans Zimmer, Sting, George Fenton, Lionel Richie and Corinne Bailey Rae.

Adriano Rossetti-Bonell - saxophone and electronics
Dario Rossetti-Bonell - guitar
Cosimo Keita Cadore - drums & percussion

Adam James works across film and performance to explore the social and cultural characteristics of ‘outsiderness’. He uses role-play (specifically Live Action Role Play), improvisation and game mechanics as a means to generate choreographic content, bringing to life characters, rituals and events that look at the place of play in contemporary societies.

Recent solo exhibitions, performances and projects include; Actionable Intelligence, Tate Family Festival, Tate Britain; The Truth Parade, MOCA, London, both 2015, and Wasteland Rituals, Legion-TV, London, 2014. Recent group exhibitions, performances and projects include; The Artist and the City, Airspace Gallery and PMAG, Stoke on Trent; Open Forest, Jerwood Space, London, both 2014; Fort-Da, Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, London; The Birth Caul, Vitrine Gallery, London, both 2013; and The Mudhead Dance, V22 Summer Club, London, 2012.In 2013 Adam James was awarded an Artsadmin bursary to research the Nordic LARP scene.

Amelia Prazak and Milda Lembertaitė are Sisters From Another Mister, an artist collective formed in 2011. Their free-wheeling practice employs absurd scenarios, gender play, witty sculptural forms and video works, in which the artists themselves often feature.

Recent group exhibitions and performances include: Pool, CGP Gallery, London; Anthias, Hotel Pullman, London, both 2015; Chroma, The House of Peroni, London, 2013; Accidental Festival, Roundhouse, London, 2013; Celeste Prize, Centrale Montemartini, Rome, 2012; Rodin Reflections, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, 2012; Scenofest Street Stories, Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Prague, 2011.

Rosalie Schweiker is a conceptual artist who uses social exchanges such as conversations, make-believe and jokes to find new functions for art in the everyday.Jo Waterhouse is a designer and artist who uses traditional printmaking techniques to create unique products. They both have in interest in realising work through collaboration with others.

In their collaborative practice they have read their specially designed tarot cards at various festivals including; Space Time: The Multiverse festival, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, 2015; and Inland Art Festival, Cornwall, 2014.They also collaborate on the Other Bra Shop, on-going project which has toured to ArtsAdmin, London and Kunstverein Bielefeld, both 2015; and The Pizza, a convivial pizza making and eating project, 2013 onwards.