ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
Defences of Animals, Clara Saito / Harun Morrison, 2022, performance documentation.
Photo: James Allan
Photo: James Allan
Welcome to an afternoon of thinking through practice on the way visitors move in institutions, and how institutions move.
In an art institutional space, how do signs, maps, labels, panels, the architecture, the objects on display determine our thinking? How do our bodies relate to these ‘choreographic instructions’, and to the people visiting around us?
In art galleries and museums, the presence of our bodies in space is always political. As visitors, our identities are in constant negotiation with the implicit or explicit narratives (gendered, racial, class, colonial) of the space. As Sara Ahmed notes, to be ‘welcomed’ means that you are a guest, while the institution is the host and, therefore, you are not at home.
As professionals working in art institutions, what are our choreographies of working in the office, the box office, the meeting room? What are these ‘practices’, and how do they shape and direct our thinking and our decision-making?
The event will feature movement-focused artistic practice, collective discussions, and presentations from industry professionals on audience monitoring, evaluation and public engagement projects.
With contributions from:
CHA X5
Tara Fatehi Irani
Harun Morrison
Jemima Yong and Anahi Saravia Herrera
Alisa Oleva
Sara Ruddock
Richard Martin, Siobhan Forshaw, Luke Gregory-Jones (Whitechapel Gallery)
Melissa Bentley and Marie Hobson (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Programme
We warmly encourage attendees to participate in the whole afternoon and not attend individual sessions, but please do step out if you need quiet time.
Print works by CHA X5 are on display in the space. Jemima Yong & Anahi Saravia Herrera will hand out ‘visitor surveys’ at the end.
1 – 1:25 pm Welcome, spatial game.
1:30 – 1:50 pm Marie Hobson (V&A): verbal and visual presentation.
1:55 – 2:20 pm Richard Martin, Luke Gregory Jones (Whitechapel Gallery): verbal and visual presentation.
2:25 – 2:45 pm Break
2:45 – 3:30 pm Take part in a movement session with Sara Ruddock or explore walking and mapping scores outside the ICA with Alisa Oleva.
3:30 – 3:45 pm Break
3:45 – 4 pm Re-gathering, spatial game.
4 – 4:20 pm Tara Fathei: video and verbal presentation.
4:20 – 4:30 pm Harun Morrison: video and accompanying text.
4:40 – 5:20 pm Discussion groups facilitated by Lorenza, Paul, Harun, and whoever wants to start one.
5:20 – 5:30 pm Close and thanks.
1:30 – 1:50 pm Marie Hobson (V&A): verbal and visual presentation.
1:55 – 2:20 pm Richard Martin, Luke Gregory Jones (Whitechapel Gallery): verbal and visual presentation.
2:25 – 2:45 pm Break
2:45 – 3:30 pm Take part in a movement session with Sara Ruddock or explore walking and mapping scores outside the ICA with Alisa Oleva.
3:30 – 3:45 pm Break
3:45 – 4 pm Re-gathering, spatial game.
4 – 4:20 pm Tara Fathei: video and verbal presentation.
4:20 – 4:30 pm Harun Morrison: video and accompanying text.
4:40 – 5:20 pm Discussion groups facilitated by Lorenza, Paul, Harun, and whoever wants to start one.
5:20 – 5:30 pm Close and thanks.
Curated and organised by Lorenza Peragine as part of the Techne PhD Fellowship at the ICA, with support from Paul Paschal. Supported by Techne, the University of Roehampton and the ICA.
About the artists
Alisa Oleva is a
multidisciplinary artist using performance strategies to explore
everyday movement scores and collective walking practices. She works
with the alternative audio guides for galleries and urban spaces,
choreographies of the everyday movement in public spaces, urban
choreographies, choreographies of tourist groups, the way the city moves
us and how we move it. She is currently one of 12 artists part of the
Another Route international fellowship at ArtsAdmin, London, and
previously presented her work Walking Home at Performistanbul in Istanbul, Turkey (2020), Chisenhale Dance, and LADA.
CHA X5 are an arts collective based in Nottingham and London, currently composed of Rohanne Udall and Paul Paschal. They have been trying to make interesting things happen (performances, publications, workshops, exhibitions, radio broadcasts, etc.) since 2013. Sometimes they set up their own things and sometimes they work with institutions (David Roberts Art Foundation, Siobhan Davies Studios, LADA, PACT Zollverein, Iniva, Primary, Sadlers Wells Theatre, etc.). They are currently interested in: acting, bookmaking, demons, holding office, hosting, moral rhetoric, overcare, poetry, ugly feeling.
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and currently an associate artist with Greenpeace UK. His forthcoming novel The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2024. Harun has recently staged the performance Nothing Special at Centrale Fies at MAXXI, Rome. He is currently exhibiting Dolphin Head Mountain alongside a new performance work, Defences of Animals, at the Horniman Museum. Harun continues to develop a garden for Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Art Catalyst research programme Emergent Ecologies and circulate the publication Environmental Justice Questions.
CHA X5 are an arts collective based in Nottingham and London, currently composed of Rohanne Udall and Paul Paschal. They have been trying to make interesting things happen (performances, publications, workshops, exhibitions, radio broadcasts, etc.) since 2013. Sometimes they set up their own things and sometimes they work with institutions (David Roberts Art Foundation, Siobhan Davies Studios, LADA, PACT Zollverein, Iniva, Primary, Sadlers Wells Theatre, etc.). They are currently interested in: acting, bookmaking, demons, holding office, hosting, moral rhetoric, overcare, poetry, ugly feeling.
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and currently an associate artist with Greenpeace UK. His forthcoming novel The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2024. Harun has recently staged the performance Nothing Special at Centrale Fies at MAXXI, Rome. He is currently exhibiting Dolphin Head Mountain alongside a new performance work, Defences of Animals, at the Horniman Museum. Harun continues to develop a garden for Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Art Catalyst research programme Emergent Ecologies and circulate the publication Environmental Justice Questions.
Jemima Yong and Anahí Saravia Herrera
make work that creatively interprets political situations and feelings.
Between them, they hold experience as performance makers, curators,
writers and community organizers. Jemima and Anahi are interested in
creatively reflecting on their felt experience of power structures as
women, migrants, cultural workers and ambiguously young people. They
gravitate towards creating work that involves the act of making things
public and making the covert or insidious explicit. They like to laugh
when they do this, so humour is also important. Currently, Yong and
Herrera are working on a research as performance project called RAGE ON STAGE, which is about the many layers and expressions of feminist anger. They live and work in London (for now).
Lorenza Peragine is a AHRC/Techne-funded PhD student in Dance at the University of Roehampton, London, researching everyday choreographies in art institutional spaces. In 2022-2023, she was a PhD Fellow at the ICA, focusing on racial and social injustice in art institutions. As an artist and producer in London for the past 10 years, she has devised and collaborated with other artists to realise performances, exhibitions, and festivals. She has also worked in museums and galleries as visitor assistant, evaluator/interviewer, marketing officer, and cataloguing and packing collection objects. Her academic background is in history of art and museum studies (University of Bologna, Italy), and dance practice and performance theory (Trinity Laban).
Lorenza Peragine is a AHRC/Techne-funded PhD student in Dance at the University of Roehampton, London, researching everyday choreographies in art institutional spaces. In 2022-2023, she was a PhD Fellow at the ICA, focusing on racial and social injustice in art institutions. As an artist and producer in London for the past 10 years, she has devised and collaborated with other artists to realise performances, exhibitions, and festivals. She has also worked in museums and galleries as visitor assistant, evaluator/interviewer, marketing officer, and cataloguing and packing collection objects. Her academic background is in history of art and museum studies (University of Bologna, Italy), and dance practice and performance theory (Trinity Laban).
Luke Gregory-Jones is Head of Visitor Services and Civic Engagement
at Whitechapel Gallery, where he works to develop the civic
possibilities of the institution. He has previously worked as a
researcher at UCL STEaPP and Theatrum Mundi, and guest tutors on the MA
Visual Communication course at RCA. His interests include urbanism,
psychogeography and walking.
Dr. Marie Hobson is Senior Audience Research and Insight Manager at
the V&A. Having spent 15 years conducting visitor studies in
national museums, including the Science and Natural History Museums, she
is now growing the audience insight function at the V&A. While her
previous appointments were situated in Learning teams, her current post
operates within a Marketing department offering new perspectives on the
role of audience research in a museum. Marie has recently completed a
doctorate at King’s College, London, investigating museum practitioners’
understanding of research and evaluation, professionalization of
visitor studies and how to increase evaluation utilisation in
organisations.
Melissa Bentley is Visitor Research Manager at the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. Melissa has over 15 years’ experience working in culture, heritage and visitor research. She has worked at the V&A for over 10 years as the visitor research manager. She manages day-to-day data collection and reporting as well managing large-scale, multi-year evaluation projects through all stages of capital and learning projects. She combines this part-time role with freelance consultancy focussing on evaluation and data analysis. She is a member of the Visitor Studies Group.
Richard Martin is Director of Education and Public Programmes at
Whitechapel Gallery. He was previously Curator, Public Programmes at
Tate (2016 – 21), where he led the annual Tate Intensive programme for
international culture professionals. His curatorial practice is
supported by 15 years’ experience teaching at King’s College London,
Middlesex University, Birkbeck, University of London, and UCL’s Bartlett
School of Architecture. He completed his PhD in Cultural Studies at the
London Consortium, a multidisciplinary programme partnering Birkbeck
with the Architectural Association, the ICA, the Science Museum and
Tate. He is the author of The Architecture of David Lynch (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Sara Ruddock is a Swedish, London-based artist working with dance and choreography as vibrational and relational practices. Since 2002, she has created and performed solo works and collaborative projects with artists from sound/music, performance and visual arts. As a dancer, Sara worked with a range of choreographers including Deborah Hay (US), Lena Josefsson/Kompani Raande-Vo (SWE) and Jules Cunningham (UK). As an educator, she has taught extensively at DOCH/Stockholm University of the Arts, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and independent workshops and classes internationally. She is currently a PhD candidate at University of Roehampton, researching listening as embodied and relational practice, specifically through notions of resonance and resistance in dancing and sounding.
Siobhán Forshaw is the Curator of Community Programmes at the Whitechapel Gallery. Her interests include contested cultural memory and identity, the relationships between care and labour, human and more-than-human community systems, and lately, in power devolution and access in the art world, particularly concerning class and disability.
Tara Fatehi is an artist,
writer, researcher and performer based in London. She has a PhD in
Drama, Theatre and Performance from the University of Roehampton (2020).
Her project Mishandled Archive (since 2017) which culminated in the
publication of a book with LADA (2020), engages with daily minimal
choreographies in public spaces as acts of resistance. It also proposes
‘mishandling’ a collection of family photographs, dispersing them around
the world and recording them publicly on Instagram, as an alternative
way of engaging with archives. She was the first ever resident artist at
the United Nations Archives in Geneva, where she performed In
Observance on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian
People (2021).
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![A shot of a gallery floor from a balcony. Two people look into a glass cabinet. In the background, a figure in pink and white clothes blends into the wall, against a pink and white branded display of logos and apparel.](http://ica.art/media/07634.jpg)
Image: James Allan
no. 236848.