LOOP

About

Co-curated by Harold Offeh & Eastside Projects
Co-commissioned by Eastside Projects & Birmingham International Dance Festival   

Loop — a shape produced by a curve that bends round and crosses itself. A structure, series, or process, the end of which is connected to the beginning 

Looping — to form (something) into a loop or loops, to encircle 

Loopy — slang phrase for mad or irrational behaviour normally accompanied by  gestures 

Loophole — legal and contractual means of escape 

Loop the loop — on the roller -coaster 

Loopers — 2012 movie about time travel and altering history 

LOOP TV — a Summer 2021 prelude to this exhibition

Loop, Looping, Loopy, Loophole, Loop the loop, Loopers. Can you have a performance without an audience? Sadly, we may be the continual and faithful audience to the performance of our own lives – perpetual spectators to our own performance. LOOP asks what is at stake in encountering and experiencing performance? And how is this experience negotiated: live and in person with the possibility of close physical proximity? Or mediated, distanced, documented and transmitted via technology and screens?

LOOP is an exhibition constituted by actions and gestures, choreographed and presented to audiences, defined by the body, the floor, the walls, the sound, the sensors, the womb, the book, by whirling, by dancing with nature, and by trying to position these practices in the loop of history. We don’t know what comes next but we want to perform again. We want to speak. To say something about subjectivity, class, race and gender at play. We are artists constructing narratives, histories, fictions and processes of being live, physical, virtual and mediated. 

But we are mindful of you. We are the audience. You are the audience. This is LOOP.