No End and No Beginning

See a screening of ‘Dying Under Your Eyes’, a newly commissioned film by artist Oreet Ashery. This family portrait of end-of-life care explores themes such as ageing, dying and mourning. The film will be screened every half hour (duration 25 mins). Please note the film is subtitled.

Oreet Ashery posed the question “Do you consider yourself healthy?”. This provoked many responses from visitors throughout the duration of ‘Misbehaving Bodies’, some of them personal and moving, others funny and blunt. Drop in and listen to this reading of varied responses that reveal how we think about our own mental and physical health.

Artist Amanda Millis poses the question “How can we find health?” Taking place within ‘Misbehaving Bodies’, Millis’s performance brings together community self-care activities within the gallery space. The performance also highlights the difficulty of finding time for leisure and self-care in the increasingly laborious individualisation of our healthcare system. This participatory event includes one-to-one conversations with the artist and the support to use gravity blankets, foam rollers, yoga mats and hand-therapy tools. Millis offers the time and space to enact care and health. This performance will also be supported by artist Farrah Riley Gray.

Join artist Josh Bilton for a performance lecture on his research exploring the role of the spirit double and how it can be used as a form of processing loss, grief, uncertainty and emptiness. The immersive experience will include birdsongs performed as laments by cellist and composer Gregor Riddell and dancers, including a sunbird emoji. You will also be invited to wrap an object as an offering that will form part of the artwork.

Join Part Time Collective for a drop-in workshop to create ‘Anxious Objects’: embroidery, scent pouches and written notecards. These objects are sensory and creative outlets, the making of which may help ease any anxiety around difficult topics and feelings such as grief, illness, mental health, body autonomy and memory. The intent is to communally hold a space with others to share, care and learn from each other.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled.

Experience spoken-word performances by Ahmet Arnavut, Jonathan Massiah and Jocelyn Collison-Kozak from St Christopher’s Hospice, developed with writer and academic Yasmin Gunaratnam and artist Lucie Blake Faggiani. Exploring themes of migration, belonging and loss, this project unites Gunaratnam’s interest in stories, transnational dying and intercultural care. The spoken-word performances will be followed by a short discussion.

Experience Johanna Hedva’s ‘Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House’ and M Lamar’s ‘Funeral Doom Spiritual’. These two musical performances use forms of lament to commune with the dead. Each artist takes traditional forms of music – Korean P’ansori and shamanism for Hedva, and opera, the Negro spiritual, and doom metal for M Lamar—queering and racialising them for subversive means. Both Hedva and M Lamar’s performances highlight that the process of loss and death is an ongoing one; there are states of death in life and the living.