Flare-Up Live

Join us this August for a celebratory series of performances that span poetry, film, music, and readings, drawing on the themes of our current group exhibition, Flare-Up. Artists and the CCA's Resident groups will contribute diverse explorations of embodiment – crip, sick, disabled, mad, trans, racialised and medicalised – through fiction, comedy, and history, in search of transcendence, collectivity, solidarity and interdependence.

Participating artists and collectives: Alchemy, A Particular Reality & Yasmin Huleileh, Avril Corroon, Feminist Duration Reading Group & frank r jagoe, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Resonance Poetry, Rosa-Johan Uddoh and Tissue & Oísin Roberts.

Performances will take place on Saturday 1st August from 2pm, running until 7pm at Goldsmiths CCA across the gallery.

Tickets are free, but booking is required. One ticket is required for access to the whole day, aside from Feminist Duration Reading Group’s event, which can be booked here.

Alchemy will present a showcase of spoken word, poetry and music. APR & Yasmin Huleijeh will screen Huleileh’s short film 43 Degrees Celsius accompanied by a live reading. Resonance Poetry will perform poems responding to the work in Flare-Up, and TISSUE & Oísín Roberts will present a cross-continental reading about fun and friendship.

Avril Corroon will build on her installation Sublet Glory, on display in the exhibition, through performative reading Glowing Daisy Day. Artist Lou Lou Sainsbury will present her hybrid digital/live performance Parasitic Girl and writer Iarlaith Ní Fheorais will also present a performative reading, Fictionalised Evidence: Psychiatry and the Novel. Rosa-Johann Uddoh will present her comedic memory-loss performance 33 Black History Months & Counting.

BIOGRAPHIES

Alchemy is an evolving collective of professional artists, youth workers and Goldsmiths university student ambassadors and placement students working with Lewisham organisations and schools to offer a wide range of professional music skills training, mentoring and performance opportunities to local 13-18 year olds. The project was founded by musician and associate lecturer in music and education Mikey Kirkpatrick and made possible by Goldsmiths (Widening Participation, Music, Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies Departments) in partnership with The Albany, Deptford and the CCA Residents Programme.

A Particular Reality (APR) is an inter-institutional collective formed by students, alumni and educators from the Fine Art departments at Goldsmiths University, Kingston School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University and Middlesex University. With a commitment to building creative learning environments upon the values of equity, care and collaboration; APR addresses art, learning and anti-racism, within and beyond practice-based education.

Avril Corroon is a visual artist born in Ireland working with sculpture, installation, moving-image, performance, and social practice. Her work examines inequity and health through questioning how architecture manifests governance. She has made cheese from toxic mould, collected 1800L of dehumidifier water, and performed on a city rooftop as the Airbnb logo. Corroon has focused on housing crisis’s and living conditions, collecting and using materials that hold distinct relations to these issues such as toxic mould. For her last major work GOT DAMP (2023) Corroon worked with members of a housing union, as well as the wider public in Dublin at Project Arts Centre and TACO in London, to create an exchange system for harvesting damp and collecting stories, circulating back evidence for claims with thermal imagery, equipment (dehumidifiers), and fees.

Corroon graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University of London in 2019. She is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten where she lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include The Regeneration Game, PS² and Belfast Film Festival, Belfast (2025); Living Canvas, IMMA, Dublin (2025); Glowing Daisy Day, Kip, London (2025); Dreamtime Ireland at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow (2025); Living Space, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2025); Six Minutes by Residents of the Rijksakademie, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2025); GOT DAMP, Project Arts Centre, Dublin and TACO!, London (2023); Cow & Gate, Sismógrafo, Porto (2022); AVR I4L C070 RRN, PEER, London (2021); and Spoiled Spores, The Lab Gallery, Dublin (2019).

Formed in 2015, the Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG) focuses on under-known and under-appreciated feminist texts and movements from outside the Anglo-American canon. The group’s free monthly programme, open to all, has encompassed film screenings, performances, workshops, translations, walks, meals, podcasts, writing and listening, as well as collective reading.

Iarlaith Ní Fheorais (b. 1995) is a curator and writer based between Galway and London. As the curator of the 21st edition of TULCA Festival of Visual Arts she staged exhibitions, public programmes and a publication responding to the legacy of mass psychiatric incarceration in Ireland entitled honey, milk, and salt in a seashell before sunrise. She’s the author of the book There’s a Tunnel Under Ballybrit Business Park (2026), a critique of the MedTech industry and the politics of healthcare in Ireland. She has an essay on John Broderick’s 1965 novel The Waking of Willie Ryan in the forthcoming Abolish Europe and is currently co-directing the film Going to Ballinasloe with artist Sarah Browne.

Ní Fheorais has written for publications such as frieze magazine, Burlington Contemporary, Viscose Journal, and Paper Visual Art, among others. She has contributed to public programmes at Paul Mellon Centre, Chelsea School of Art, Rietveld Academie, Konstfack University and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin on subjects ranging from curatorial practice, writing on disability and medicine and access methodologies in the visual arts. She has sat on numerous selection panels including EVA’s 41st Platform Commission, Unlimited International Open Award and Edinburgh Arts Festival Platform Award 2023.

Lou Lou Sainsbury is an artist and filmmaker based in London, working across moving image, live-performance, sculpture and textiles. Sainsbury’s work seeks to tell stories exploring histories of resistance, transformation and entanglement. With collaboration at the core of her practice, rituals and invocations, collective study, domestic intervention, adaptation, songwriting and make-shift mutations make up some of her idiosyncratic research methods. Making connections between spirituality, medicalisation, colonialism and technology, her tricksterish work attempts to excavate a historical and imagined past of queer and trans life within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds.

Her recent solo exhibitions include Ehrlich Steinberg (Los Angeles, US); Gasworks (London, UK) & Humber Street Gallery (Hull, UK). She has presented in group exhibitions at major institutions and film festivals including the BFI London Film Festival; Videoex (Zurich, CH); Leiden Shorts (Leiden, NL); Compton Verney (Warwick, UK); Chapter (Cardiff, WLS); International Film Festival Rotterdam; Tate Modern, Herald St, (both London, UK); Rencontres Internationales (Paris, FR); Nottingham Contemporary and La Casa Encendida (Madrid, ES). She was recently an artist in residence at EKWC (Oisterwijk, NL) and Gasworks (London, UK).

Resonance Poetry is a poetry collective based in South East London. They’re a group of friendly queer volunteers who love poetry and people.

Resonance believes that poetry is for everyone and everyone can write poetry. They’re committed to creating community, amplifying and providing opportunities for early-career artists at all stages of life, and championing access to the arts for underrepresented groups.

They host free monthly open mic poetry nights at arts club SET Social and deliver free poetry workshops at The Feminist Library in Peckham. They also publish work from emerging writers, and partner with local charities and community groups to bring poetry to places it isn’t usually found.

Rosa-Johan Uddoh is an artist working towards maximum self-esteem (but not in an individualist sense!), inspired by Black feminism. She is interested in how different types of Black performance are encouraged at different times, the limits and consequences of ‘representation’ and 'hard work' and how different scripts might prompt us toward freedom. A performance artist in her heart of hearts, she also works with film, installation, writing, audio, drawing & print. Through thorough research, and by engaging nostalgia, humour and popular culture, she aims to tap into a place in herself, participants and audience that’s deeply-felt and politically charged.

Solo exhibitions & performance presentations include: ‘Pantomime, Performance and Black Feminism’, Amant (New York, 2025); ‘NATIVITY’ (Women’s Art Collection, Cambridge, 2023); 'Pink Tongue, Brown Cheek', Iniva (London, 2022) & ‘Practice Makes Perfect’, Focal Point Gallery & Bluecoat (2021). Rosa has participated in group shows/ presentations at Pioneer Works NY, Bergen Kunsthall & Tate Modern. She was the Amant NY Researcher in Residence 2025, the Stuart Hall Library Resident 2020 and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2022. Rosa's first book 'Practice Makes Perfect' was published by Book Works and Focal Point Gallery in 2021.

TISSUE is a trans publishing and events initiative based in London. Arising from a hostile political landscape for trans* people in 2022, TISSUE is a trans* literary initiative, which curates reading events and publishes anthologies with an emphasis on fostering communal spaces that develop trans thinking and writing. Their events offer a social nexus for the community to meet, showcase and exchange ideas, and their publishing archives these conversations and work in print. Their first anthology, MAKING, was launched at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2023, while the second, CRINGING, will be published later this year. Their pamphlet series The London Review of Trannies, produces community-led criticism of contemporary trans exhibitions in London.

TISSUE is co-curated by Donna Marcus Duke and Sam Moore. Donna Marcus Duke is a writer, performer, and organiser. They write for the likes of Frieze, I-D, Numero, Vogue Italia, AnOther, Dazed, and 3AM; their essays and poetry have been published by Sticky Fingers, Pilot Press, Worms, and UCL Press. They are currently a Visiting Scholar in Life Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. Sam Moore is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press, 2020); Long live the new flesh (Polari Press, 2022); and Search history (Queer Street Press, 2023).