Rebecca Lennon // LIQUID

About

Southwark Park Galleries and Matt’s Gallery present their annual collaboration: a new performance work by Rebecca Lennon commissioned specially for Dilston Gallery. LIQUID is a poly-vocal live performance and surround sound composition featuring five performers.

Typical of the artist’s work, LIQUID combines complex themes arranged linguistically, sonically and visually in an immersive audio-visual assemblage. LIQUID deals with urgent themes around finance, housing, the body, the voice and the porous nature of selfhood. Performers decked out in black velour hooded tracksuits perform alongside two video screens while percussive rhythms of vocal sounds, tics and hums overlap with looped and repeated textual fragments played out via a circle of speakers.

A key point of departure is a story describing the removal of roof tiles from a house to allow water seepage, causing it to rot from the inside and becoming derelict.  A performed text and a body of video work describe and viscerally conjure this toxic seepage as a movement of liquid: into and out of a body carried by a mosquito; out of the drains of a house, filling the street due to an intrusion of Knotweed, out of the mouth of the animal in absence of a voice; and into the body of the Vampire, via the demand of a melancholic thirst.

Lennon uses the image of planned dereliction as a way into thinking about ownership and its collapse. She departs, using the house as a stand in for the body, to think about how the self is constituted physically and through language, how a voice might be allowed or denied its right to speak and how rhythm may operate as an act of self (and collective) care.

A new text by Rebecca Jagoe will be published alongside the performance series.

LIQUID is a 20-minute performance presented on loop on Saturdays and Sundays in March.

Performances will start at 2pm, 2:30, 3pm, and 3:30 with a 10-minute interval between each rendition.

Performers: Carl Gent, Jennifer Hodgson, Sophie Jung, Stella Kajombo, Rebecca Lennon and Chooc Ly Tan

LIQUID is part of a new body of work being developed by Rebecca Lennon with Matt’s Gallery and Southwark Park Galleries in London, and Primary, Nottingham.

Rebecca Lennon is supported by an Arts Council England, Developing Your Creative Practice Grant. This exhibition is made possible thanks to Southwark Council,  Arts Council England, Forma, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Kunstraum, London.