As If

About

‘As If’ is a series of performances that expand on the exhibition Transparent Things’ premise of fiction as methodology. As if this or that, is an exercise of fictioning that creates propositions to confront the status quo. Fiction can be applied as a tool of world-making towards highlighting the often invisible, yet extant, structures that dictate our current reality. In using fiction, those practices acknowledge and highlight collective imaginaries that hegemonic systems present as natural, and which rest upon collective belief - think about maps, nations, religions, History, sciences, etc.

Taking place in the afternoon of February 29 – a somewhat fictitious day in itself — ‘As If' will present four consecutive performances that combine text, choreography, sound, and visual cues, by artists Verity Birt, Rebecca Jagoe, Reba Maybury, and Korallia Stergides. These performances construct new imaginaries with the intent to raise awareness, critique, and offer alternatives to ones’ present. 

Verity Birt, Deformation Attends Her 

Rebecca Jagoe, How Deep Is Your Love

Reba Maybury, John’s

Korallia Stergides, The Distance from Earth to Sun

Co-curated by Goldsmiths MFA Curating students Harriett Henderson, Dot Jia, Mariana Lemos, Clementine Proby, and Melanie Scheiner.

Artists Bio

Verity Birt is currently a practice-based PhD researcher at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Northumbria University (BxNu) in Newcastle. Birt’s practice involves writing, performance, sculpture, and film-making situated in a Western feminist tradition. She works to perform stories that empower womxn and other non-conforming bodies (human and more-than) in our destructive patriarchal and androcentric society. Forthcoming exhibitions include: YOKE, Strauhof Museum Zürich. Birt has previously exhibited at: Well Projects, Margate (2019); Art Earth Tech, London (2019); On Curating Project Space, Zürich (2019); Thames Side Gallery, London (2019); Caraboo Projects, Bristol (2019); TOMA, Southend-on-Sea (2019); Black Tower Projects, London (2018); Artbyte, London (2018).

Rebecca Jagoe is an artist, art writer, and editor, based in London. Their practice examines how within European culture, the Feminine as an ideology and identity has been shaped at the meeting point of medical rhetoric and the aesthetics of high fashion. As a genderqueer, non-binary person AFAB, they reinforce that femininity is neither an essentialist component of female gender identification; nor is femininity itself essentialist. Their work is rooted in personal narrative: to explore how any one person’s subjectivity and experience can be seen as a distillation of historical and cultural imperatives, rather like the filtration system of an oyster whose body is used, somewhat imperialistically, by human scientists as a mode of measuring pollution levels of their surrounding environment. Recent shows and performances include Jupiter Woods, London (2019); “Ghost Changing Room” at Wimbledon Space (2019); “If Words Could Float” at Sissi Club, Marseilles (2019); “Dependable, Gentle, Overnight” at Kelder Projects (2019) and “Trying Hard to Think Pure” at de Pimlico Projects (2019). Their writing has been published in The Happy Hypocrite 11, The Silver Bandage edited by Erica Scourti (2019), Orlando Magazine Issue 3 (2018); and The Interjection Calendar published by Montez Press (2016). Following the anthology ON VIOLENCE edited together with Sharon Kivlan, they are currently working on the forthcoming ON CARE. 

Reba Maybury is a writer, artist, lecturer, and political dominatrix based in London. In 2015 she founded Wet Satin Press a publishing company exploring eccentric corporate male sexuality. 'Dining with Humpty Dumpty' is her first novella and was released in 2017. Her radio show  'Mistress Rebecca's World’ is regularly broadcast on NTS. Arcadia Missa represents her and she has exhibited and read at Karma International, Los Angeles (2017); Bridget Donahue, New York (2017); Schloss, Oslo (2017); Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York (2018); Balice Hertling, Paris (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019); White Columns, New York (2019); P.P.O.W, New York (2019); ICA, London (2019); and Luma Westbau, Zurich (2019).

Korallia Stergides is currently an MA student of Fine Art Media at The Slade School Of Art, UCL and a graduate of Central Saint Martins Performance Design and Practice in 2016. She is based in London and Cyprus and is of Greek-Cypriot and Bulgarian origin. Her work interweaves choreographic and spatial processes with experimental film, objects, poetry, performance, and installation to construct an alternative place of fiction. These works become hyper collages of fragments informed by autobiographical narrative and historical and ecological fact. Often, there is a process of abstraction of the notion of Home and a focus on human and non-human shared mythology, as well as relationships, interdependence, and intimacy. Recent projects include: “Yellow Liquid Sun" at Phytorio Project Space (2019); "I'm An Ephemeral Bubble Of Time Waiting To Be Popped" solo exhibition at Well Projects (2019); Open Choreography with Siobhan Davies Dance (2019); "Deep Love Auctions: Bags Of Time" at Milton Keynes Arts Centre and Toynbee Studios (2019). "Symposium Plants Speak, If We Listen" at the Chisenhale Art Place and Black Tower Projects (2019); Screening of "Whale For An Ear" at The Table, Swiss Church (2019), Whitechapel Gallery (2018), Arnolfini (2018), ICA (2018); Stergides was a selected participant of Stop Play Record, Film in partnership with The Institute of Contemporary Art, Chisenhale Gallery & Channel 4 (2017); Shortlisted by Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2017).