Benjamin Sebastian (b. 1980, Cairns*, Queensland, Australia) is a transdisciplinary artist-curator based in London whose practice spans curating, installation, writing, image-making, sculpture, moving image, new media and performance.
benjamin-sebastian.com
*The Gimuy Walubara Yidinji and the Yirrganydji peoples are the traditional custodians of Cairns and the surrounding district. Gimuy is the traditional place name for the area Cairns city now occupies. Sebastian wishes to pay respect to the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji and Yirrganydji Elders, both past and present, and extend that respect to all Indigenous Australians.
Charlie Ashwell is a dance artist working with choreography, writing and dramaturgy. Having graduated from London Contemporary Dance School in 2009, they performed with Seke Chimutengwende & Friends, Dog Kennel Hill Project, Janine Harrington, Florence Peake and English National Opera, among others. They have worked as dramaturg with Seke Chimutengwende, Es Morgan and Greg Wohead, alongside teaching technique, improvisation and choreography at the University of Roehampton. Charlie completed a Masters of Research in Choreography and Performance in 2014, going on to make the solo work
Banishing Dance and duet
spells with Es Morgan. Their ongoing research explores the notion of ‘Choreography as an Occult Practice’, engaging the hidden, the spectral, the magical and the prophetic in dance performance.
charlieashwell.com
Daniella Valz Gen is a poet, artist and card reader. Their work explores the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems with an emphasis on embodiment and ritual, through the mediums of performance, installation, conversation and text. Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection
Subversive Economies (PSS 2018). Their prose has been published in various art and literary journals such as Lish, SALT. Magazine, Paperwork Magazine and The Happy Hypocrite amongst others. They’re currently developing the next stage of their project
(be)longing, a series of immersive elemental rituals. Valz Gen has been focusing the last two years on integrating their oracular practice with their art and poetry. They run monthly gatherings exploring poetics in relation to the symbolism of Tarot cards within the container of Sacred Song Tarot.
daniellavalzgen.net
Es Morgan (they/she) creates performances as containers for language and movement, which co-exist on their own terms, without hierarchy or resolution. Made for theatres, clubs, galleries, and film, these works emerge in response to an array of interests: queer and post-work futures, poetry, tarot and far-left politics, funnelled through their shifting experiences of transness, intimacy, desire and longing.
esmorgan.comGeorgie (Rei-n) Lo is an artist and ritual somatics practitioner working with a toolkit of yoga, tarot, dance, contact improvisation and performance art. The themes of her current research are animism and the Dao, psychogeography, land relations and situationism, games and play. The arising query of her work is: can we find movement to play in the flow of perceived restrictions towards liberation?
Joseph Morgan Schofield (they/them, b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) uses performance, moving image, writing and curation to create ‘queer ritual action’ which explores desire, grief, ecology and the wilding of queer and trans* futurity. Their practice is relational, emerging through encounters between the sweating, wanting, sensate non-binary body and a host of human/other-than agents. Gathering and facilitation are central to Joseph’s practice, and their artistic work also involves curating, producing, mentoring and teaching. Joseph has convened FUTURERITUAL since 2017. As a facilitator, Joseph has co-led a number of expansive workshop projects, including
FUTURERITUAL: MYTHIC TIME with VestAndPage, and
The Sunday Skool for Misfits, Experimenters and Dissenters (VSSL studio). With Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph is the co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio and the co-director of ]performance s p a c e[.
josephmorganschofield.com /
futureritual.co.uk
Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian visual artist based between Folkestone, UK and Vitoria, Brazil. She completed a degree in Visual Arts and a Masters degree in Institutional Psychology at Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil. Her artwork is a hybrid practice across performance, video, installation and writing, occasionally flirting with drawing, painting and collage. Since 2018 she has been working on the creation of an ongoing project called
Book-Performance, composed by a series of actions devised in response to specific autobiographical texts particularly influenced by personal experiences of racism and misogyny. Currently, she is part of the international collective Speculative Landscapes a group of four women who, since 2020, have been working on systemic questions about what else institutions can be, when not shaped from stories of violence, segmentation and extractions in the territories.
rubianemaia.comSoojin Chang works in a process of trance, dissociation, feedback, and self-recognition to create performances that dissolve personhood and objecthood through animist methodologies. Their works take the form of video, live performance, ritual practice and field research. Using her body as technology to transmute in/visibility, Chang’s practice negotiates contemporary ethics, colonial inheritance, and queer, interspecies reliance. Current and recent interventions include:
Dog Eggs at Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2022);
BXBY, commissioned for the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022;
a heifer would be needed for the sacrifice at Tramway for Take Me Somewhere (2021);
State of Possession at the ICA and CCA Glasgow (2019);
Death Ritual at Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh (2019); and
Hair Eggs at MoMA PS1 (2018).
soojinchang.comTeo Ala-Ruona is a Helsinki-based performance artist. Their work focuses on speculative and somatic fiction and body horror in forms of performances, texts and sound installations. They explore topics of sex, queer ecology, toxicity and gender, and look for ways to redefine language and narratives telling about pleasure and intimacy on a toxic Earth. By often using their own body as a site for various speculative stories to take place, they experiment on how through fiction they can transform themselves, as well as the perspectives from which others look at their body. Ala-Ruona's work has recently been shown at Baltic Circle (Helsinki), Festival XS (Turku), Nocturnal Unrest (Frankfurt), Bangkok Biennial (Bangkok) and Gas Gallery and Human Resources (Los Angeles). They graduated with an MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance from Helsinki Theatre Academy in 2018, and with an MA in Art Education at Aalto University in 2016.
teoalaruona.net
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