Of Other Spaces Closing Performance Event

About

Summoning the spirit of Hannah Arendt’s ‘space of appearance’, Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? exhibition and event programme at Cooper Gallery proposes the body as an event. Standing among and between others, the body is a resistant otherness, queering and questioning its own appearance. 

Qualifying the essential liveness of the body and appropriating it as both medium and content, Of Other Spaces concludes on Saturday 4 March with an afternoon of live performances by the legendary Anne Bean, preeminent Chinese performance artist He Chengyao and “She Town” based artist Siôn Parkinson with Rhubaba Choir.

Anne Bean’s new performance I think you move me .....so c’mon move me now is an intermittent 45 year conversation around Feminism between Anne Bean 1972 and Anne Bean 2017. Moody and the Menstruatorsjoin in the groove, as does an ongoing dialogue with the artist Alexis Hunter.

Siôn Parkinson has worked with Rhubaba Choir on a performance work Blind Love Bad Taste to be presented in Cooper Gallery. Enveloping the gallery space with voice and text, Parkinson and the Choir will speak in a collective voice to conjure a multispecies animal completely other to our own form. The performance draws from a peculiar image of jumbled sea creatures made up of an ancient, foul-smelling shark and two worms permanently attached to her eyes.

He Chengyao will present a durational action in Cooper Gallery Project Space through-out four hours of the event. An intensely powerful form of self-expression and a challenge against social stigmas surrounding the power structure in social and institutional systems, her work foregrounds the dilemma of human existence encountered during current ‘dark times’. 

The event will be punctuated by screenings of artist’s film by Rose English and Monica Ross.

Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event? is a two-chapter contemporary art exhibition and event programme at Cooper Gallery and off site venues in “She Town” Dundee. Inherently radical, dissonant and often luxuriantly subversive, the programme situates feminist thinking as a provocative and cogent mode of creative and, above all, critical inquiry that offers a perspective on today’s politics.