LADA Unpacked

Ongoing Project

Unpacked offers elements of LADA’s programmes and resources for presenters, artists and others to engage with Live Art practices and approaches, to introduce Live Art from the UK, and to represent the range of issues and ideas artists engage with.

Please contact LADA if you would like to discuss any aspect of Unpacked.

Screenings

Drawing on materials in LADA’s Study Room or developed from our projects, we offer a diverse range of screening programmes of contemporary Live Art practices for presentation as exhibitions or as theatrical screenings within UK and international festivals and events. Screening programmes are curated and compiled in close collaboration with host partners and are tailored to respond to their artistic aspirations and curatorial approaches.

Screening Programmes include:

OUCH: On Pain and performance for Wellcome Collection’s In Pursuit of Pain (London, 2016), the 3rd Venice International Performance Art Week (2016) and Aksioma Gallery (Ljubljana, 2017).

Live Art &… for IBT17 (Bristol, 2017).

Girls on Film for LADA’s Just Like A Woman programmes in Slovenia, New York and London (2013, 2015).

Blood Counts for London’s new Science Gallery (2017).

The Girls, 'Diamonds & Toads', photograph: Anthony Hopwood. Performed at City of Women Festival, 2013 and Just Like a Woman, 2015

Bibliotheques, Study Boxes and Unbound

In collaboration with host partners, LADA offers UK and international promoters temporary installations of bespoke, thematic Bibliotheques or Study Boxes containing hand- picked selections of DVDs, books and other materials from the LADA’s Study Room around specific themes.

Recent Bibliotheques and Study Box outings include:

Migrants Make Culture (London, 2020): a selection of titles and resources on issues of migration and displacement.

Venice International Performance Art Week (Venice, 2020): a selection of work from the Study Room with a focus on collaboration, dissent and time.

Oxytocin (London, 2017 and 2019): bibliotheques of titles from the Study Room was offered as part of a symposium and programme of performances about women, carers, mother art, maternal health and wellbeing.

Steakhouse Live (London, 2018): a selection of work from the Study Room representing topics such as feminism, sexuality, disability and race in relation to Live Art practices.

Live Collision (Dublin, 2016-2018): curated selections of work from the Study Room representing topics such as feminism, sexuality, disability and race in relation to Live Art practices.

Hear Me Roar! Festival (Lancaster, 2016): a ..more curated selection of items for a Pop-up Study Room in response to the festival theme ‘Ages, Stages and Phases’ celebrating feminist art across the generations.

Tempting Failure, TF2016 festival (Bristol and London, 2016): the festival took over the Study Room for a day of discussion around the Festival theme in-utero.

Venice International Performance Art Week (Venice, 2014, 2016): curated selections of work from the Study Room representing topics such as feminism, sexuality, disability and race in relation to Live Art practices.

LADA can also provide a bespoke selection of books and DVDs from its specialist Live Art shop Unbound for sale at key events in collaboration with partners.

More about Unbound

LADA Bibliotheque at Live Collision, 2018.

Venice International Performance Art Week, Co-Creation Live Factory Prologue 1, 2017. Image © Lorenza Cini

Semi nude artist holds a translucent bluwe fabric over their head, in a room overlooking the London skyline at dusk.

Amanda Coogan at Steakhouse Live Festival 2018, Artsadmin.

The Library of Performing Rights (LPR)

LPR was originally created by Lois Weaver and Queen Mary University London in collaboration with LADA in 2016 for Performance Studies international (PSi)12: Performing Rights, as a unique resource that examines the intersection between performance and Human Rights. From August 2017 LPR has been reimagined and reactivated, in collaboration with Lois Weaver, the artist and researcher Elena Marchevska and the Study Room In Exile in Liverpool, as a concept or approach to research and practice rather than a distinct collection and is available as a place of action, a place of knowledge exchange, a repository of experience, and a resource and a context that others can use to support and advance their own work both at LADA and elsewhere.

More about the LPR

The Pink Supper, Nando Messias, 2019. Image by Holly Revell.

PLAYING UP

PLAYING UP is an artwork by Sibylle Peters, exploring the potential of Live Art to bridge generations. Drawing on key Live Art themes and seminal works, PLAYING UP takes the form of a game played by adults and kids together. LADA coordinates national and international PLAYING UP public Play-Ins, that involves kids and their accompanying adults working together as a team to complete activities and tasks in order to create their own work of Live Art. More information about PLAYING UP.

More about PLAYING UP

A young person and their parent wear gorilla masks in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall.

PLAYING UP, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 2016. Image by Seraphina Neville.

The Performance Pack

A performance enabler, an educational resource and a limited edition artwork. The Performance Pack takes the form of an entertaining illustrated lecture about performance, and especially the relationship between performance and fine art. It comes as a pre-packed performance lecture kit containing everything you need, including script, audio-visual material, props and suggestions for staging. Commissioned by LADA and Tate Modern, and conceived and created by Joshua Sofaer.

More about The Performance Pack

The Performance Pack

The Many Headed Monster

An original and inventive resource for anyone interested in contemporary performance practices and their relationships with audiences. The Many Headed Monster is a boxed set containing a lecture complete with presentation instructions, extended notes and author’s commentaries, a DVD of 22 performance works/extracts by leading UK and international artists, and 50 full colour image cards. Conceived and created by Joshua Sofaer and published by LADA.

More about 'The Many Headed Monster'

The Many Headed Monster

Lecutres

LADA offers a range of illustrated Lectures, including an introduction to the concept and practice of Live Art, an overview of Live Art activities in the UK, and ways of being, and surviving, as a Live Artist. The Lectures draw on the extensive visual resources of the Agency’s LADA’s archives and Study Room to provide engaging and thought provoking sessions tailored to different contexts and constituencies. The Lectures are aimed at general audiences interested in contemporary art and more specialist artists, curators and higher education institutions.