Curious: Artist Borderpanic Compendium, book launch

For the Live Art Development Agency’s DIY programme in 2016, Curious ran a summer workshop called Private Keep Out in Hastings:

Whether at home, secreted behind net curtains or privet hedges or further afield, delineating our territory at the campsite, or beach, the British are renowned for their predilection for privacy. Post Brexit referendum and in a crisis of asylum seekers and immigrants, the notion of who is let in and who is kept out, what belongs to whom and what is ‘private’, has taken on a more ominous register. Through site specific performance and art-making, Private Keep Out explored ways we might more successfully break down boundaries, develop more successful relationships with each other and find ways to operate on more communal levels. Artists were invited to explore the double-sided issues of privacy and trespass through a series of generative workshop activities and site responses and then went on to create a diverse range of performances and installations.

Following that DIY project, using a DIY Progression grant supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Curious have created a new performative publication – The Artist’s Borderpanic Compendium. Enabling a rich array of theatrical and artistic scores that can be performed at a moment’s notice, the Artist’s Borderpanic Compendium can be used by artists and non-artists in need of creative succour and survival.

Theatre makers and technicians all know that the one thing you can never mask/masque in a theatre is the EXIT sign. This creative compendium will face that virulent green EXIT sign full on, proffering an array of prêt–à–porter performance scores, performances for the page, artistic instructions for surviving border panic, strategic scripts, sketches, maps and images from an array of UK-based artists living in an emerging UK, a UK on the verge of an EXIT.

This event will mark the publication of the Artist’s Borderpanic Compendium.

Event contributors

ABC contributors who will speak, sing or perform at the event include: Leslie Hill, Rachel Mars, Laura Malacart, Tara Fatehi Irani and Claudia Barton.

Claudia Barton is a singer and lyricist known for the role ‘gamine’ in the London duo Gamine with whom she released two albums, Sabotage and You Can Cry. Other recent projects are the album Love Pain and a dark-lounge album in a new guise as Cloudier Skies completed with a French producer. Claudia has been an Associate artist of Curious since 2011 and has collaborated on several projects including the moment I saw you I knew I could love you and Slipstreaming.  www.claudiabarton.com

Tara Fatehi Irani is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and performance maker working with mistranslated memories and unattended archives. Her work is primarily concerned with the ephemeral interactions between memories, words and sites. The output of her practice ranges from performance (site-responsive, spoken word, dance, participatory or audio-visual) and videos, sound recordings, installations and writings. Her work has appeared in houses, basements, streets, gyms, theatres, galleries and journals in Iran and Europe. She is a doctoral researcher at the University of Roehampton in conjunction with the Live Art Development Agency where she is working on Mishandled Archive, a practice-as-research project exploring the inter-animation of performance and personal archives through a yearlong daily practice of disseminating family archives from her home country Iran. www.tarafatehi.com

Leslie Hill is co-artistic director of Curious theatre company which has produced over 50 innovative works for theatre, festivals and landscapes since 1997. Curious has presented at venues and festivals such as the Pompidou Centre, the London Cultural Olympiad, the Sydney Festival, the RSC, PS122 and the Edinburgh Festival. Publications include Performing Proximity (Hill and Paris 2014), Performance and Place (eds Hill and Paris, 2006) and Hill’s new monograph, Sex, Suffrage and the Stage (2018) all published by Palgrave Macmillan. Hill just moved back from California where she lived in San Francisco and taught at Stanford University for several years.  She returns to London as Professor of Theatre and Performance Making at Roehampton University and is delighted to be back in the Big Smoke surrounded by artists and friends.  Curious is produced by Artsadmin. placelessness.com and artsadmin.co.uk

Laura Malacart’s collaborative and interdisciplinary practice engages with participatory performance, writing and video. These strategies conceive of language/s and speech as crucial domains for exploring identity politics, history and ideology. Recent works explore the construction of social identities with an emphasis on the role of corporate trade (Speak Robert, 2017, Tate Exchange and Venice Biennale) and the praxis of citizenship (The Little Book of Answers, Tate Modern, Manchester Library, Brixton Market et al.). Laura Malacart’s PhD explores ventriloquisms and the politics of the voice in fine art practice (2011, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL). She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL (2017-18).

Rachel Mars is a London based theatre maker. She has been writing and performing theatre and alternative theatre for 15 years. Her work interrogates the cultural and political constructs that inform the way we operate together. Her most recent show Our Carnal Hearts won a Total Theatre Award for Innovation. She has produced four shows with artist nat tarrab as Mars.tarrab, who are the winners of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Award for their new work ROLLER. She has made and shown work with the support of The Royal Court, Tate Modern, Fuel Theatre, Southbank Centre, The Wellcome Trust and Cambridge Junction. She is an Artist Fellow at Birkbeck University, London. She regularly features on BBC Radio’s ‘Pause for Thought’ in her guise as ‘Queer Jew’ and has written on performance for The Stage, The Guardian and The Jewish Chronicle. www.rachelmars.org

DIY Progression is a new initiative to allow artists to develop the work undertaken on their DIYs. This could involve the creation of new performance works, ongoing collaborative research with other artists, or something else entirely. Recipients of the first DIY Progression awards are Curious and Seke Chimutengwende & Alexandrina Hemsley. DIY Progression is supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation.