COLLAPSE Tape Launch with Anne Gillis + Keira Fox/Sophie Sleigh-Johnson/Vindicatrix for purge.xxx
Sat 21 Sep 2024 7:00 PM - 11:00 PM
St George-in-the-East Church, E1 0BH
Description
Anne Gillis performs “BROUHAS-_” + Keira Fox/Sophie Sleigh-Johnson/Vindicatrix perform “COLLAPSE” + "Baby Jesus" documentary film by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Therese Henningsen
An evening of performance in occulted architecture celebrating the tape
release of COLLAPSE on purge.xxx
Tapes will be available at the event.
Anne Gillis performs « B R O U H A S – _ »
Pour magnétocassettes, chants magnétiques, et petits-riens, ...
For K7 recorders, magnetic songs, and little-nothings....
For more than 40 years, Anne Gillis has discreetly unfolded her a singular universe without compromise. She playfully moves with determined restrictions, excavating contrasting forces; sensual and visceral, mechanical and organical black and white. She extends this personal expression in her visuals: self-portrait photos, handwritten text and theatrical performances are equally aligned. Her music can be considered as musique concrète using the tape machine as compositional tool, manipulating her recorded sources, consisting mainly of extended voice and different (instrumental) sounds, with the addition of electronics and treatments. In both her photography and her music, Anne Gillis works fully analogue.
https://art-into-life.bandcamp.com/album/-
COLLAPSE Keira Fox/Sophie Sleigh-Johnson/Vindicatrix
An escalating 3-act play set across multiple timelines: B.C, industrial, merchandised. It asks: what is it like to be indebted to a city? What is it like to be in debt in a city? What is the fabric of collapse?
Involving original relief prints, audio environment, spoken word, large handmade collection bags, and costume, it draws on site specific research in Turin based around an occupation by female activists The Casa Delle Donne of an historic women's mental asylum in the centre of the city. Other invoked sites in Turin include The Fiat Factory and the workers strikes of the 60s – and their attendant printed banners— with a focus on money, poverty, begging and the Catholic Church.
Such locations complement cultural and hypnagogic sites that were nonetheless tethered to Turin for its first iteration: Hittite desserts and the ruin of Ebla; the tills of British sitcom stores; murderous 1970s shopping departments, and car garage disappointments past and present. Now, it relocates to the site of St George in the East. The church, layering the scars of both Baroque and Wartime London, provides a sacred setting for COLLAPSE to occur again.
Costumes for performance by Xenab Lone.
Sophie Sleigh-Johnson (born 1988) is a writer, artist and performer based in Southend-on-Sea. Her first book Code:Damp is out on Repeater books this November. https://www.sophiesleigh-johnson.co.uk/
Keira Fox is a London based artist whose practice encompasses performance, choreography, sound, installation and prop making. She is one part of the performance duo New Noveta since 2012 and co-runs the feminist collective/curatorial project TLC23.
https://www.instagram.com/keirajfox/ https://www.instagram.com/newnoveta/
Vindicatrix is a producer, singer and multi instrumentalist, working mostly with electronics but also incorporating histrionic vocal improvisation, maudlin crooning, and composition for chamber ensemble. Previous releases can be found on Mordant Music, Scum Yr Earth,purge.xxx and Cellule75.
Baby Jesus, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Therese Henningsen
Baby Jesus focuses on four nuns from the congregation Little Sisters of Jesus, who live together in a tower block in Hoxton in London and a shared house in Walsingham, a village for Catholic pilgrimage in the UK. Based on interviews the film is a polyvocal portrait of their life as non-monastic nuns and their personal commitment to the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Therese Henningsen have been working together on a series of short documentaries with focus on women's work, value systems and desire: Maintenancer (2018), Baby Jesus (2023) and Anatomical Venus forthcoming in 2025.
Sidsel Meineche Hansen is an artist based in London and Copenhagen. She is a bursary recipient of the 2020 Turner Prize and included in 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams (2022). Her practice includes sculpture and moving images that reflect on virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to human labour within the gaming, pornographic and tech-industries.
Therese Henningsen is a London-based filmmaker, who works primarily with documentary. Her films include After Time (2023), Slow Delay (2018), Baby Jesus and Maintenancer (2023 and 2018, with Sidsel Meineche Hansen). She has co-edited the anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter, published by Prototype.
This event is fully funded by ticket sales and tickets are priced to cover our costs. However, we do not wish to turn anyone away for lack of funds - please let us know if you are unable to afford the concession price and we will make sure you can attend.
Location
St George-in-the-East Church, E1 0BH