Performing Rights Vienna

The Live Art Development Agency has been commissioned by Tanzquartier, Vienna, to create a Live Art programme for March 2007. Building on the strengths and continuing the momentum of Performance Studies international (PSi)#12: Performing Rights, the Agency has curated Performing Rights Vienna. www.tqw.at

Performing Rights Vienna is a programme of performances, presentations, debates, workshops, screenings and interventions that sets out to reflect the relationships between performance and human rights and between art and activism; to illustrate the creative strategies artists are using to effect social, cultural and political change; and to consider the role and responsibilities of artists, and performance itself, in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights.

Workshops

John Jordan (UK)
Creative Resistances workshop
Wednesday 7 and Thursday 8 March
12.30 – 18.30 daily
A two day workshop exploring methodologies of art and activism. Sharing skills and ideas workshop participants will look at ways that creativity can be applied directly to movements for social and ecological change. The workshop is suitable for those who are interested in live work which does not merely represent a political issue, but is directly confronting and transforming the issue itself. If you are interested in radically engaged performances that look neither like art nor activism but take the best of both of these worlds, that sit somewhere between direct action and live art, resistance and creativity then this workshop is for you.

Creative Resistances Public showing
Thursday 8 March
20.00
A public event with John Jordan and participants revealing the ideas and approaches they have been exploring in the Creative Resistances workshop.

Artist in Residence

Richard Dedomenici (UK)
Artist in Residence
Thursday 8 to Saturday 10 March
The one-man subversive think-tank from the UK will be in residence at Tanzquartier throughout Performing Rights Vienna making interventions, making mischief, and making friends.

Performances

Richard Dedomenici (UK)
Did Priya Pathak Ever Get Her Wallet Back?
Thursday 8 March
21.00 
Richard Dedomenici explores the complex relationship between his artwork and the police in this provocatively topical solo performance. Metropolitan Police commissioner Ian Blair has called for a widespread national debate in the UK to decide what kind of police force we need after the London bombings of July 2005. Did Priya Pathak Ever Get Her Wallet Back? is Richard Dedomenici’s fair and balanced contribution to this debate. The performance references case studies including that time in 1996 that Richard nearly got shot in the head by a police sniper in a McDonald’s Drive-Thru, that time in 2001 when Richard got arrested for attempting to break into a prison, and that time in 2005 when Richard got woken up at 3am by anti-terror police trying to break down his front door.

Franko B (UK/Italy)
Don’t Leave Me This Way
Friday 9 March
19.30 and 22.00
Franko B is at the forefront of artists testing not only the limits of how it is permissible to represent the body in art, but the limits of the body itself. His work is concerned with making the unbearable bearable and inviting us to witness the human condition at its most exposed, essential and existential. In 2006, Franko began a process of developing new creative strategies to explore and voice alienation and trauma stemming from culture, religion and politics. His new work, Don’t Leave Me This Way marks a departure in his performance practice away from his signature blood-based works into a different, but equally visceral, live encounter. Here Franko’s body is presented as a sculptural form – naked and seated on a plinth – whilst the audience are flooded with powerful lighting, opening up a new and unexpected range of emotional and bodily responses for artist and audience alike. Created in collaboration with Kamal Ackarie.

Robin Deacon (UK)
Whatever Happened To Colin Powell?
Friday 9 March
20.30
A lecture performance offering an alternative perspective on the life and times of former US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Originally written in response to Powell’s resignation in 2004, this new version continues to interrogate the theme of comparative biography between performer and politician, while questioning its own relevance in the light of Powell’s virtual disappearance from the public eye. Exploring an increasingly ‘unnatural’ order of things embodied by the likes of Powell, the performance expounds some theories as to why Powell looked and acted the way he did (the two are connected), with Deacon asking himself – is this really a self portrait?

Aine Phillips (Ireland)
Harness
Saturday 10 March
19.30 and 22.00
The artist re-enacts her experiences of growing up with a profoundly brain damaged brother. This boy is violent and beautiful, harnessed to a wheelchair, helmeted to protect his face from falling in seizures. Twenty years later she gives birth to a daughter with dislocated hips who is strapped into traction for half a year. The artist speaks their embodiments and performs their modes of harness, translating constraint into tenderness, torture into rapture, helplessness into command. She shows the vulnerability of wholeness, the purpose of union in extreme human experience and how the personal becomes political…

curious (UK)
(be)longing
Saturday 10 March
20.30
longing: A strong persistent yearning or desire, especially one that cannot be fulfilled._belonging: the state of being comfortable and accepted in a place or community. (be)longing is a performance with film and live music created and performed by Leslie Hill and Helen Paris and developed as part of a year long project with The Women’s Library in London which explored longing and belonging as experienced by women working in and around the sex trade in East London. In (be)longing, Hill and Paris explore their own ideas of longing and belonging. Stories of yearning and the search for home are told against two very different landscapes – one is the vast searing landscape of the American Southwest, the other is the discreet, hidden, interior, private landscape of the heart.

Screening presentations

Adrien Sina (France)
Performance, Politics, Ethics and Human Rights
Thursday 8 March
18.00
A screening and contextualising talk on twentieth-century artists responses to war, politics, racism, injustice and repression. Adrien Sina will illustrate a history of performative practices and strategies in relation to ethical and human rights issues by artists including Josephine Baker, Valentine de St-Point, Vaslav Nijinski, Bertolt Brecht, Tadeusz Kantor, Josef Beuys, Hermann Nitsch, John Lennon, Martin Scorsese, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Valie Export, William Kentridge, Zhang Huan, Marina Abramovic, Guerrilla Girls, Yinka Shonibare, Mona Hatoum, and Shirin Neshat. Complementary strands within the screening will look at early political actions and the roots of political performance in Greek tragedy, and women’s performative and theatrical acts against the terror, the violence and the cruelty of the French Revolution, the origin of the Declaration of Human Rights, with Olympe de Gouges and Charlotte de Corday.

The Vacuum Cleaner (UK)
11 Morsels To Suck On
Friday 9 March
22.30
Thorn-in-the-side of your local Multi-National, the vacuum cleaner, present 11 of their current favourite films and stories from a across Europe. Political pranks, art activism and acts of creative resistance with all the subtle one can expect from groups with names like The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and The Space Hijackers.

Jeremy Xido (USA), Claudia Heu (A), Cabula6 (Austria/USA)
Crime:Europa
Saturday 10 March
17.30
A series of five short complimentary films investigating the ways in which inhabitants of five towns across Europe deal with a recent local criminal case that has somehow captured the public imagination.  Concerned less with the “truth” of the cases, the films focus on how people try to retell the stories of what happened in an attempt to understand who they are and with whom they live. The films, focusing on cases as diverse as the murder of a homeless man in Salzburg by four teenagers to the industrial crimes of the Solvay factory in Rosignano, Italy, were filmed in Berlin, Germany / Salzburg, Austria / Rosignano Solvay, Italy / Ribamar, Portugal and Kortrijk, Belgium.

Illustrated Talks and Dialogues

As many artistic practices that are concerned with these issues are taking place on the frontline or within community contexts, Performing Rights Vienna will also feature talks, dialogues and presentations that attempt to represent some of the creative approaches and artistic projects artists are engaging with.

Friday 9 March, From 17.00

Florian Malzacher (Germany/Austria)
Dictionary Of War
Created by the activist network Multitude e.V. and the curatorial collective Unfriendly Takeover, Dictionary of War is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the subject of war, featuring contributions from scientists, artists, theorists and practitioners as lectures, performances, films, slide shows, readings, concerts in the form of a marathon discourse. From Amphetamine to Defeat, from Electronic Soldiers to Heroes, from NATO to Resistance, Theatre of Operation, Throne of Blood and Weather, the aim is to (re)create key concepts that already play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or had yet to be invented. The Dictionary of War serves to scrutinise a reality that characteristically obfuscates existing power relations the more people talk about war and peace.

PLATFORM (UK)
Promoting Creative Processes of Democratic Engagement To Advance Social and Ecological Justice
PLATFORM talk about their cross disciplinary work which for over twenty years has been bringing together environmentalists, artists, human rights campaigners, educationalists and community activists to create innovative projects driven by the need for social and environmental justice. This interdisciplinary approach combines the transformatory power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning, the rigour of in-depth research with the vision to promote alternative futures.

Gini Muller (Austria)
Movements, Networks and Activations
Gini Muller will explore the artistic and activists movements that she has been part of or witness to over the last few decades including VolxTheaterKarawane, no-racism.net and ladyfest. This presentation has been created in a collaboration with Christine Standfest, performer, theorist and member of theatercombinat.

Saturday 10 March
From 15.00

Franko B (UK/Italy)
Blinded By Love?
Franko B presents an illustrated talk about his practice from his early political and artistic motivations through to his recent works including I Miss You!, Oh Lover Boy and Aktion 398, and particularly their extreme use of the body as a site for the representation of vulnerability, pain and loss. Like all aspects of his practice, Franko’s talks have been described as being “rich in reasoned politics, humanity and compassion” (Glasgow Herald).

Oliver Ressler (Austria)
Performing Rights Venezuela
In Venezuela, a profound social transformation identified as the Bolivarian process has been underway since Hugo Chávez’s governmental takeover in 1998. Oliver Ressler will talk about the situation in Venezuela, presenting excerpts from his films “Venezuela from Below” (67 min., 2004) and “5 Factories-Worker Control in Venezuela” (81 min., 2006), both carried out in collaboration with Dario Azzellini.

Lisl Ponger (Austria)
Challenging what is accepted
Lisl Ponger presents a talk and preview for her new film Imago Mundi – Challenging what is accepted. Imago Mundi re-stages a 17th century still life – bringing its symbolic criticism of religious and secular power structures into line with those of a post-colonial, neo-liberal and globalising world in order to propose a re-reading of both the representation of politics and the politics of representation. Leading us on an excursion through the layers of symbols, work processes and the art forms of film, photography, dance, theatre, music and literature it uncovers the normative parameters that form the invisible or unacknowledged cultural cage in which we spend most of our time. In the interaction of political discussion, art forms and levels of meaning the film is a text which can be read as part of a discourse on political art and political activism.

Performance Panel
Saturday 10 March
12 noon – 14.30
A Performance Panel led by Adrian Heathfield (UK) and Lois Weaver (USA/UK) with creative interventions by the artists Hubsi Kramar (Austria), Ines Doujak (Austria), Daniel Aschwanden (Austria), Oreet Ashery (UK), Rajni Shah (UK), and Philippe Riera/Superamas (Austria).

Oreet Ashery will focus on Welcome Home, an ongoing series of investigations into notions of Returning, No Returning and disappearance, from political, psychological and domestic perspectives, and particularly the Palestinian Right to Return. At the core of Welcome Home as a performative art practice are the ways in which every day life is an important part of the process, and personal contact with relevant people is integral to the project.

Daniel Aschwanden will ask what is the relation between globalization, everyday-life, dance and performance, and how does capitalism actually function on a global level? In a shooting-gallery-like performance installation – Shoot Oneself Free – he will talk about his own practice and, with the help of Christian Felber’s book 50 Suggestions For A Fairer World, will demonstrate playful solutions to the capitalist trap.

Ines Doujak is a visual artist who questions representations of sex, sexuality and racism within, and outside of, institutions. In 2001 she created a performance action to address issues of racism, and particularly racist attitudes to men, in which white men sold postcards to passers-by featuring stereotypical images of black men as a public menace. For Performing Rights Ines will recreate the action in the city centre and, for the Panel, engage in a dialogue about the work and its’ public response with the Free Fighter, cook and former skinhead Thomas Talasch who she will invite to witness the action.

Hubsi Kramar describes his occupation as ‘public annoyance’, and, through his theatre and film practice, campaigning work, and direct actions (such as appearing as Hitler at public events) is an infamous and influential agent provocateur in Austria. For the Panel he will talk about the ideas and impulses driving his work and the creative strategies he continues to explore to effect cultural change.

Rajni Shah creates performance interventions that are also gifts, spaces of wonder and enquiry, inviting the public to be included and implicated in a delicate but very real unravelling process.  Some of her questions for the Panel will be: what is the space beyond confrontation? what validates me to you? what is the pattern of these many tiny intersections, interventions, all over the world? and if we’re all at this table… where to go from here?

Philippe Riera of Superamas will focus on two crucial military concepts, which are usually considered, and used as facts, to create (or annihilate) states and identities –  the victory and the defeat. As an example, Robert Ouvrard (Souvenir Napoleonien/Societe Francaise d’Histoire Napoleonienne) will tell us all about a strange battle which challenges those two concepts.

Library of Performing Rights
Thursday 8 – Saturday 10 march
12 noon – 18.00
In collaboration with Lois Weaver, artistic director of Performance Studies international #12: Performing Rights, Performing Rights Vienna will also host The Library of Performing Rights; an actual and a virtual library, housing resources, research materials and technologies to explore and enable the transmission and documentation of human rights and performance.

The Library of Performing Rights was developed for Performance Studies international #12: Performing Rights to create a body of materials, documentation and evidence that aimed to archive the remains of performance-related interventions, as well as to stimulate performance and human rights experimentation, and further networks between academics, artists, and activists involved in the intersections between performance and human rights work. Since the PSi event in London in June 2006 the Library continues to grow as both a website and a physical resource containing publications, videos, DVDs, CD-ROMs, brochures, digital and web-based initiatives that will be transported, reassembled, and further developed in different locations and contexts.www.performingrightslibrary.org/

Lois Weaver’s Long Table
Friday 9 March
13.00 – 16.00 (and on demand)
“If you can imagine something you can make it. If you can make something, you can make it change. Artists help us imagine the future and Live Artists remind us of what it mean to be alive in the present” Lois Weaver. Lois Weaver hosts a space where audiences and artists and audiences are invited to gather for informal conversations on serious topics.

Performing Rights Vienna is curated by the Live Art Development Agency, London. Performing Rights Vienna has developed from Performance Studies international #12: Performing Rights, a festival of creative dialogues between artists, academics, artists and audiences that took place in London in June 2006 and was produced in a collaboration between Queen Mary, University of London, East End Collaborations, PSi and the Live Art Development Agency.

Contributors Biographies

Daniel Aschwanden was born in Switzerland and currently works in Vienna as a performer and choreographer, especially in transmedia projects, and as a curator and professor.  His special interest is the representation of the body in the arts (dance and theatre) context as well as in social contexts. In his performances he explores the relationship between the body and low and high-tech (digital) media (video / computer installations).  In the late 80s he founded an international dance and performance festival, Tanzssprache, at the WUK in Vienna. In the early 90s he founded the performance label Bilderwerfer. From 2000-2005 he collaborated, amongst others, with Yosi Wanunu, Toxic Dreams, Anne Juren and Jack Hauser. In 2005 he initiated a performance project in urban space, framefreezeframe (Vienna, Bratislava) and a media lab called absent interfaces together with Scott de la Hunta. He created the video Chinese Whispers, a summary of his fist visit to Beijing together with Peter Stamer. In 2006 he was artist in residence at Tanzquartier Wien, where he organized TanzRadioStudio2, a series of events and discourses. Back in Beijing, he participates with Peter Stamer in the DIAF 06 Festival with Headroom, a series of interventions, installations and discourses throughout the city. In September 2006, together with Soundt(h)inker Oliver Stotz Headroom is translated into a radio play and presented as a live performance at Tanzquartier under the title Chinese Whispers. www.bilderwerfer.com

Oreet Ashery is a London based artist, working in Live Art and digital media. Ashery’s practice is conceptual and process based, consisting of visual and performative investigations into personal politics and its complex relationship to social realities, identity and cultural politics, and the nature of an art practice. Oreet has an ongoing interest in the intersections between Jewishness, race, gender and the Arab and Muslim world. Her work is shown extensively in the UK and internationally in a variety of contexts including museums, cinemas, festivals, galleries, the streets, the internet, and site specific locations.  Since 2004, Ashery has created a number of events as part of a project entitled Welcome Home, in which she investigates the subject of Returning. She has been working as an art educationalist since 1992 with a strong commitment to work with specific communities including; young people excluded from schools, offenders and ex-offenders, children refugees, people over 80, homeless women, Bengali women’s group, adults with learning difficulties. www.oreetashery.net

Franko B was born in Milan and has lived in London since 1979. He has been creating work across video, photography, performance, painting, installation, sculpture and mixed media since 1990. He has performed at the Tate Modern, ICA, South London Gallery and Beaconsfield. He has presented work internationally in Zagreb, Mexico City, Milan, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Madrid and Vienna, Tate Liverpool and most recently at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium and the Crawford municipal gallery in Cork, Ireland. Franko B lectures widely, including at St. Martins School of Art, DasArt, New York University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has been the subject of two monographs, ‘Franko B’ (Black Dog Publishing 1998) and ‘Oh Lover Boy’ (2001) and has published a photographic project entitled ‘Still Life’ (2003). His new monograph, Blinded By Love, is published in 2007. www.franko-b.com

Jeremy Xido, originally from Detroit, graduated cum laude in Painting and Comparative Literature from Columbia University in New York and trained at the Actor’s Studio with Barbara Poitier, Arthur Penn and Andre Gregory. He has worked extensively in Europe and the United States as an actor and dancer for stage and film and since 2003 has been the co-director of the performance company Cabula6, which has toured around the world with a number of original pieces.  As a director he has shot several short films, most recently Crime : Europa, a project funded by the European Union investigating criminal cases in 6 towns across Europe.

Claudia Heu lives in Vienna, is a director, performer and teacher in the field of dance, experimental theatre and performance. She is the founder of ONNO theater, and since 2003 together with Jeremy Xido artist director of cabula6 presenting productions all over Europe. In addition to the work in the theater, she has spent years of her life involved in community work – from a year and a half working in a Favela on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, to work in refugee camps and prisons in Austria.

Cabula6 focuses on the border between reality and fiction and the uneasy dialogue between a person’s private sense of identity and its dynamic reception in a broader social context.  We search out non-traditional performance spaces that make it possible to walk this line, between what is real and what is constructed and which can bring audience members face to face with their assumptions and expectations about who they are. We create films, installations and performance pieces for the stage and on location.  We are dedicated to principles of delight, humour, investigation and adrenalin. We love to play.  www.cabula6.com

Curious are Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, internationally acclaimed for their edgy, humorous interrogations of contemporary culture and politics. Their work embraces live performance, digital media, installation, publication, film, and video. Over the last ten years they have created and toured over 30 performance, film and video projects in Europe, North America, Australia, Brazil, China and India as well as collaborating with national and international artists and companies. Hill and Paris’s publications include Performance and Place (Palgrave Macmillan), 2006 and Guerrilla Performance: How to Make a Living as An Artist, (Continuum), 2004. www.placelessness.com

Robin Deacon is a London based performer, writer and filmmaker. Since the early 1990’s, his work has toured internationally to festivals and conferences. Most recently, his work has explored journalistic and documentary styles, using the lecture format to re-enact autobiographical incidents. His work is characterised by a humorous and often satirical approach to the subject matter. www.robindeacon.com/

Richard Dedomenici is a one-man subversive think-tank. By approaching the limits of conventionally acceptable behaviour, his poetic acts of low-grade civil disobedience forcibly ask pertinent questions of society, while his subtle anarcho-surrealist interventions create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility. www.dedomenici.co.uk

Ines Doujak is a visual artist and works on questions of representations of gender, sexuality and racism within and outside of insitutions. Thomas Talasch is Free Fighter and cook. This is their second collaboration. The first Project called “Follow the Leader” was presented at the following exhibitions:  Be what you want, but stay where you are, Witte de With, Rotterdam; How do we want to be Governed? MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona); Being in the World, Art Central, Miami and Die Regierung. Paradiesische Handlungsräume, Secession, Vienna.

Adrian Heathfield writes on, curates and creates contemporary performance. He co-curated Live Culture at Tate Modern with the Live Art Development Agency in 2003, Small Acts at the Millennium with Tim Etchells and Lois Keidan in 1999, and Forced Entertainment’s twelve hour durational performance-lecture Marathon Lexicon.  He is the editor of Live: Art and Performance (Tate Publishing, 2004), Small Acts: Performance, The Millennium and the Marking of Time (Black Dog Publications, 2000), and co-editor of On Memory, an issue of Performance Research, and of the box publication Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance (Arnolfini Live, 1997). His writing has also appeared in Hybrid, Performance Research, Cultural Studies, Art and Design, Connect, and Space and Culture. He is a Principal Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University. www.adrianheathfield.net

John Jordan merges the imagination of art and the social engagement of politics. Co-director of social practice art group Platform (1987-1995) he then went on to be a co-founder of the infamous cultural resistance collective Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000). He is interested in the role of the artists dissolving into social movements, applying creativity directly to activism and social change. He has written and lectured extensively about the space between art and activism, and the global anticapitalist movements of the last decade – including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona and the Tate Modern, London. In 2003 he co-edited the book “We Are Everywhere-the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism” published by Verso and now being translated in 7 languages. He was senior lecturer in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University from 1994 until 2003, when he gave up academia to go Argentina to work on the film “The Take” with Naomi Klein. Most recently he co founded the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination that toured the UK leading up to the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005.

Hubsi Kramar lives and works in Vienna. He graduated from the Reinhard Seminar Vienna, studied at the Film Academy in Vienna and undertook postgraduate studies in arts administration at Harvard University. He has been working as an actor at various state theatres and independent theatres and in over 100 films. He has written and directed over 50 theatre pieces. Since 1980 he has been working as an independent artist and has founded various experimental theatre groups with special focus on actions in public spaces, such as WEARD t.atr, THEATER DIREKT and TAT-t.atr. Hubsi has also written numerous political essays and works upon theatre theory, socio-cultural structures, etc. such as the First Ecological Theatre Manifest (1986). Hubsi Kramar is notorious for his direct actions and political performances in public spaces. One of his most famous interventions was his appearance as Hitler at the Vienna Opera Ball – a protest against the elections in 2000 in Austria – for which he was arrested.  In 2003 he won the NESTROY prize for the best OFF theatre production. www.hubsikramar.net

Florian Malzacher (Multitude e.V. / Unfriendly Takeover) studied Applied Theatre Sciences at the University of Giessen/Germany. He worked as a freelance theatre journalist for daily papers like Frankfurter Rundschau or taz – die tageszeitung, and magazines like Theater Heute or Ballettanz. As a curator he has been charge of the International Summer Academy in Frankfurt 2002 and 2004. He is founding member of the curatorial collective Unfriendly Takeover and took part in the curating of several theatre- and performance festivals like Festival Theaterformen 2004. In 2004 he co-published Not Even a Game Anymore – The Theatre of Forced Entertainment (2004). He was member in several juries, such as for the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis 2005. Guest lecturer in Leipzig, Vienna and Frankfurt. Since October 2005 he is programming for the festival Steirischer Herbst in Graz/Austria. www.dictionaryofwar.org

Gini Müller lives in Vienna and works as dramaturg, performer, and ar/ctivist. She studied in Vienna and Berlin, (2005 Dissertation: Posse, theatrum mundi and performative power to do), and since 2003 lectures at the University of Fine Arts, Vienna about Performative Practices and Transgender. Between 2001 and 2004 she was part of VolxTheaterKarawane/PublixTheatreCaravan, activist and nomadic theatre/media-project in public spaces. Since 2002 she has also worked with theatercombinat wien, and since 2003  has been a member of the Performanceband SV Damenkraft.

Áine Phillips has been exhibiting multi-media performance works in Ireland and internationally since the late 80’s. She has created work for diverse contexts; the street, club events and  exhibitions including Moving Image Gallery and The Kitchen New York, National Review of Live Art Glasgow, Wolfsberg Castle Austria, Factorio Theatro Madrid. In Ireland at the Irish Film Centre, Arthouse, EV+A and the Hugh Lane Gallery. Her work has been shown at Museums of Art in Stockholm, Liechtenstein and Cleveland USA. She is Head of Sculpture at Burren College of Art, Ireland and is curator of Tulca Live, festival of live and video art in Galway. Her work is centered on autobiographical performance.

PLATFORM is based in London and has been working for over 20 years, promoting creative processes of democratic engagement to advance social and ecological justice, Their recent projects include And While London Burns, an operatic audio tour across the City of London about climate change, and Remember Saro-Wiwa in which they commissioned a living memorial for Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and activist who was executed in 1995 for highlighting the impact of oil companies in the Niger Delta. www.platformlondon.org

Lisl Ponger works in media, film, photography and installation. She studied photography in Vienna and works and lives in Vienna. She has received the following awards, 2005 Prize for Visual Arts – City of Vienna, 2005 Golden Gate New Vision Award 48th San Francisco International Film Festival, 2003 Prize for Visual Arts – County of Lower Austria, 1994 Austrian Appraisal Award for Film, and 1988 Austrian Prizewinning Award for Film. In 1998/99 and 2001/02 she was Professor for Artistic Photography at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Oliver Ressler was born in 1970 and lives and works in Vienna. Ressler is an artist who carries out theme specific exhibitions, projects in public space and videos on issues such as racism, migration, genetic engineering, global capitalism, forms of resistance and social alternatives. His ongoing project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies was produced 20 times, including solo-exhibitions in Galerija Skuc, Ljubljana, 2003; Kunstraum Lueneburg, G, 2004; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, MediaLabMadrid, Madrid, 2004; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, 2005; Museum of Contemporary Art, Novi Sad, 2005 and Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, 2005. Many of Resslers works are being realized in collaborations, such as European Corrections Corporation with Martin Krenn and Boom! with David Thorne. In collaboration with the political analyst Dario Azzellini he produced the films Venezuela from Below (2004) and 5 Factories-Worker Control in Venezuela (2006), which in an 6-channel video installation was presented at the Berkeley Art Museum, USA. Ressler participated in numerous group-shows, including the biennials in Prague (2005), Seville (2006) and Moscow (2007). www.ressler.at

Rajni Shah is a performance artist, writer and producer currently based in London. Her work explores the fine boundaries between performers and audience, between fiction and stark reality, and between stereotype and inner truth. She has performed in the UK and USA, including the National Review of Live Art 2006 and 2007, Chisenhale Dance Space, The Place, and Chelsea Theatre. Rajni is currently an Artist Associate for Chisenhale Dance Space, a Creative Adviser for Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company, a member of the board of directors for the New Work Network, an active member of Alternate ROOTS, and Project Director for ‘Restock, Rethink, Reflect’ for the Live Art Development Agency. Rajni’s work combines bold visual statements with a gentle invitation to dialogue and is committed to finding beauty and concern in the midst of the everyday. www.rajnishah.com

Adrien Sina is an architect, artist and theoretician who lives and works in Paris and London. He has curated cross-disciplinary exhibitions involving architecture, performance, video and philosophy including Fugitive Fluctuations, Tragédies Charnelles, Immanences Spatiales. In 2003 he was advisor to Tate Liverpool for Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance and from 2004 to 2006 he was Thinker in Residence at the Live Art Development Agency developing issues and ideas for PSi12:Performing Rights where he was an Artist in Residence. He is currently planning the Performance, War, Politics and Eroticism programme for the Centenary of Futurism at Roselee Goldberg’s PERFORMA Biennale, New York, in 2009. He is advisor to the Pompidou Centre for the exhibition ‘Traces of the Sacred’.  2008. www.adrien-sina.net/performingrights/

Christine Standfest studied literature, linguistics, gender and cultural studies at FU Berlin and at the University of Lancashire. As well as being a political activist, she has worked as a drama advisor, translator, writer, lecturer and professor. Since 1997 she has worked with the performance collective theatercombinat and participated as a researcher and performer in their various productions, such as fatzer, massakermykene, sieben, anatomie sade/wittgenstein, madcc psukb, schlafgegen düsseldorf, mauser, firma raumforschung, où est donc le tableau, palais donaustadt, and tragödienproduzenten. www.theatercombinat.com

Superamas have, since their first work Building (1999), seen their task as taking on dance with materials from other areas of life. The group uses untreated, often unspectacular circumstances as well as readymades coming from everyday culture, and it treats those elements equally. SUPERAMAS are especially interested in attributes developing from the combined presentation of materials and their newly derived connections. Showing here means letting see, expose to view. In the context of public performance, SUPERAMAS call their work dé-montrer, separating and dismantling that which in its original state presented a unit or entity. According to this concept, visible facts are questioned. Samples from films and cutting techniques are implemented in the artistic work. www.superamas.com

the vacuum cleaner is an artist and activist collective of one fashioning radical social and ecological change. By employing various creative legal and illegal tactics and forms the vacuum cleaner attempts to disrupt concentrations of power and reverse the impending ecological collapse of planet earth. the vacuum cleaner work in very varied contexts from corporate interventions, disinformation and hacktivism to presenting documentation and making installations and videos for galleries and festivals. the vacuum cleaner is a co-founder of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and founder of the very co-operative. www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk

Lois Weaver was the Artistic Director of Performance Studies international 12: Performing Rights in June 2006 and teaches at Queen Mary University of London. She was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theatre and the WOW Theatre in New York and Artistic Director of Gay Sweatshop Theatre in London. She has been a performer, director, and writer with the Split Britches Company since 1980. Her interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre, and performance and human rights. She recently developed a guerilla video performance entitled Dirty Laundry commissioned by Franklin Furnace in New York. She is involved in ‘Staging Human Rights’, a People’s Palace Project initiative that uses performance practice to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK. In collaboration with Holly Hughes and Eleanor Savage, she recently developed the solo performance, What Tammy Needs to Know.