Summercamp Symposia - 3 September

About

Two steps to the Left… 
Saturday 3 September, 2 - 9.45pm

For the third and final event in our Summercamp series, artist Sonia Boyce has developed the day-long symposium and music event Two steps to the Left… in collaboration with current artist-in-residence Evan Ifekoya. The event sits within Wysing’s over-arching programme for 2016 Wysing Poly, which explores the legacy of the Polytechnic as a site of radical art practice in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

In keeping with the theme of the radical art practice of the 1970s and 80s, Two steps to the Left… takes US artist Adrian Piper’s groundbreaking interactive performanceFunk Lessons (1982-85) as a point of departure, to explore dance and movement as a political act; asking what role does dance and music play in the creation of momentary communities, of dissent and assent.

Two steps to the Left… will include presentations, workshops and discussions including contributions from Ain Bailey, Adelaide Bannerman, Sonia Boyce, Yassmin V Foster, Evan Ifekoya, Melika Ngombe Kolongo and Zinzi Minott, and live music performances from Ain Bailey, Oretha, and Nkisi. Food will be available as part of the event.

The day will interrogate what societal codes and structures are either deliberately put in place or unconsciously adopted that both bond and exclude by:

Looking at experimental sonic electronica.
Inviting a space to feel and freeform with the body, rather than be choreographed.
Asking, who, how and if one might feel free to dance.
Taking into account the legacies of conceptual art in current art practices.

Sonia Boyce (MBE, RA) emerged as an artist in the early 1980s as a key figure in the Black-British art scene, with artworks that spoke about race and gender. Since the 1990s out of the spontaneous performances of others she uses the documented process to make multi-media artworks. Recent exhibitions include:Speaking in Tongues, CCA-Glasgow (2014);S/N: Signal to Noise, Whitney Museum of Modern Art/The Kitchen, New York (2015);Liberties – 40 Years Since the Sex Discrimination Act, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2015); and, All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Boyce is Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, Chair of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts London and is the Principal Investigator for a 3-year AHRC-funded project ‘Black Artists and Modernism’. In 2016, she was elected as a Royal Academician.

Evan Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle. Recent exhibitions include A Quiet Violence of Dreams at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town; Okun Song at StudioRCA, London, 2016; All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Embodied Spaces, FramerFramed, De Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam – both curated by Christine Eyene, Studio Voltaire OPEN, London, all 2015; and 30 years of the Future, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2014. Recent performances and screenings include Sticky Black: A Broadcast at Jerwood Space and A Score, A Groove, A Phantom: The Extended Play at Whitstable Biennale 2016. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network11. Ifekoya currently lives and works in London.