PSI#12 Performing Rights: London, 2006

June 15 – 18 2006

Queen Mary, University of London, in collaboration with East End Collaborations and the Live Art Development Agency.

Performing Rights was a festival of creative dialogues between artists, academics, activists, and audiences investigating relationships between human rights and performance composed of two distinct but related programmes: a Conference and a series of Manifestations.

Extensive documentation of the Performing Rights Manifestations programme is available to view in the Study Room.

Performing Rights Manifestations was conceived as an event that would live on beyond June 2006 and contribute to the continuing development of performance-based practice as a means by which human rights can be understood as part of evolving cultural and political processes. Housing materials submitted by artists, writers, academics and activists from around the world the Library of Performing Rights website has been created as a living archive of performance activism in support of human rights.

PSi 12: Performing Rights Conference

15 – 18 June, 09.00 – 18.00 Daily
Plenaries, papers and panel discussions bringing together over 400 curators, policy makers and representatives from key international cultural agencies and academic institutions. www.psi12.qmul.ac.uk

PSi 12: Performing Rights Manifestations

15 – 18 June, 10.00 – 23.00 Daily
Four days of events and activities reflecting the creative strategies that artists are employing to communicate issues of human rights, and exploring the role of performance in effecting social, cultural and political change through:

1. Manifesto Room
A space for discussions, presentations, informal performances and displays, with specially curated strands by John Jordan and The Otolith Group.



Long Table
 10.00 – 11.00 
Daily
A long table with space for sitting and talking or standing and listening where participants can gather for informal conversations on serious topics.

Discussions
Activists, academics and practitioners discuss the place of performance in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights.

Thursday 15 June, 
11.00 – 13.00
The place of performance in enhancing international exchanges and dialogues. Contributors include Ali Zaidi, Miriam Quindani, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gabriela Salgado.

Friday 16 June,
 11.00 – 13.00
The place of performance in war zones, contested sites and areas of conflict. Contributors include Ruth Holdsworth, James Thompson, Rabih Mroue, Chumpon Apisuk and Branislava Kuburovic.

Saturday 17 June, 
11.00 – 13.00
The place of performance in communicating the experiences of exile, immigration and displacement. Contributors include Almir Koldzic, Nela Milic, Fernando Arias and Milan Kohout.

Talks
Artists and curators talk about specific projects and practices driven by issues of human rights.

David A Bailey,
Remember Saro-Wiwa – The Living Memorial
Thursday 15 June, 
14.00 – 15.00

Curator David A Bailey and artist James Marriott of PLATFORM talk about a unique public art project dedicated to writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight colleagues who were executed by the Nigerian government in 1995 because of their campaign against the devastation caused by the international oil industry in the Niger Delta. In recognition of this struggle , PLATFORM created the project “Remember Saro-Wiwa” in 2004 – an initiative to commemorate their lives, and to continue questioning the issues around (un)ethical practices, and corporate responsibility. This presentation will explore the issues behind the project, particularly the interrelation between ethics, art, and political change. www.remembersarowiwa.com

and

Aldo Milohnic, How to Do Things with Performative Actions: On artistic and activist practices in Slovenia
Thursday 15 June,
 15.00 – 16.00

Author Aldo Milohnic will talk about possible meeting points of human rights and performative actions, by referencing the most outstanding texts published in the last few issues of the Maska performing arts journal, and presenting illustrations of direct performative actions in the Balkans and  some of Maska's own artistic projects  dealing with human rights issues.

Paul Heritage,
Love in a time of War
Friday 16 June, 
14.00 – 15.00
Artist curator Paul Heritage and curator João André da Rocha ask a series of questions about performance strategies and human rights within peripheral spaces, with reference to a series of projects in Brazil.

and

Daniela Labra, Performance, Human Rights and Young Contemporary Visual Artists In Brazil
Friday 16 June,
 15.00 – 16.00

Curator Daniela Labra gives presentation on the range of artistic activities in Brazilian metropolis concerning human rights and social manifestations since 2000. Supported by the British Council, Rio de Janeiro.

David Williams,
Performing Citizenship: version 1.0's recent explorations into the sweaty armpits of the Australian body politic
Saturday 17 June
, 14.00 – 15.00

Artist David Williams presents a talk on the theory and practice of version 1.0, the Sydney-based performance group whose work not only investigates, but also enacts, participatory democracy. Their work has, in recent years, taken as its starting points a range of defiantly non-theatrical public documents, with concerns ranging from refugee policy and governmental accountability, to the rhetoric of 'freedom' of 'democracy' used in the selling of the war on Iraq, to recent ideological re-imaginings of national identity and 'Australian values'.

and

Karen C. Faith,
Performing Among A People: serving communities in public ritual
Saturday 17 June, 
15.00 – 16.00

Artist Karen Faith talks about making public work in service to specific communities, while inviting the viewers to create a community of themselves. Faith will focus on her own work with survivors; open up a discussion on cultural and social languages, ritual and ceremony as a point of spiritual connection and healing, and obstacles to communication in culturally and socially specific public work; and lead a small closing ceremony created collectively by those in attendance.

Sara Raza,
Contested Territories: The Built, Un-Built and the Un-Buildable
Sunday 18 June,
 14.00 – 15.00

Curator Sara Raza talks about violation, trauma and dislocation of urban spaces in relation to performance and live art practices from the Middle East and Central Asia. Sara will be joined by Iranian artist Shahram Entekhabi.

and

Adrien Sina,
Performance, War, Politics, Ethics and Eroticism
Sunday 18 June, 
15.00 – 16.00

Curator and artist Adrien Sina talks about the continuing political resonance of the extraordinary women artists Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953), Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793), and Aspasia ( – 469 BC).

and

Open Space
Sunday 18 June
, 16.00 – 17.30

An open space for presentations, performances or whatever. Propose your ideas and book your slot by seeing your Open Space host Dr Peggy Shaw in the Manifesto Room.

Guest curators


John Jordan presents
 While Rome burns: The question of performance at the end of the world.
Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 June, 
18.00 – 20.00

Perhaps one of the greatest questions for human rights and performance is the threat of a generalised collapse of our present civilisation, brought on by the destruction of our life support systems. Given the enormity of the global environmental problem, questions about the role that performance can play, if any, will be explored during the four days of Performing Rights.

Outlining the climate of collapse
Thursday 15 June

A presentation mixing biography, violin playing, film and hard science by guest Aubrey Meyer, an accomplished musician and composer before he immersed himself in ecological campaigning and became a leading figure in the global negotiations on climate change with his unique campaign of Contraction and Convergence.

After the Carnival? Are carnivalesque forms of resistance still relevant given the present social and ecological emergency?
Friday 16 June

Brian Holmes, Larry Bogad, James Leadbitter and Hilary Ramsden, theorists and art activist  practitioners from different generations and at the forefront of many creative resistance movements, discuss whether new tactics are needed within this new cycle of struggle, or whether is there even more need for pleasure to be injected into radical politics in these dark and difficult times?.

The art of building lifeboats.
Should our creativity be focused on creating models of sustainable living and surviving in a post collapse world?
Saturday 17 June

Creative pranksters Kayle and Heath from irrational.org have been experimenting with ways to survive in a time of collapse, ranging from finding free food, surviving in the wilderness, and developing a series of manuals and buried survival pods.  They present a workshop on the art of living lightly, and how they see the developing of survival tactics as part of their creative practice.

Crude Interventions,
A practical workshop to brainstorm an audacious act of creative resistance to the causes of climate change.
Sunday 18 June

Mark Brown from climate justice direct action group London Rising Tide, and participants will look at a cultural event sponsored by a major oil company, and brainstorm different forms of intervention that could take place during it – the ideas generated from the workshop will be carried out later in the month. This workshop is part of London Rising Tide's Art Not Oil project.

The Otolith Group presents
Images Sometimes Tremble: Video-Essays In The Age Of Telepolitics.
Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 June, 
20.00 – 22.00

In a contemporary context characterised by the resurgence in activist documentary and the turn towards documentary in contemporary artists moving image practice, Images Sometimes Tremble proposes an encounter with a more elusive tendency, one that exists within the domains of archive and poetics and between the zones of historicity and fabulation: the essay-film. Strangely overlooked by critics, this interstitial, tangential tendency has retained a persistent popularity with generations of artists across the world. Each work is accompanied by a presentation by theorists Kodwo Eshun, Nicole Wolf, Brian Holmes and Chris Berry that situate the work in a series of theoretical contexts that allow multiple entry points for discussion.

Thursday 15 June
Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group present a rare opportunity to see Videogramme einer Revolution (Videogrammes of a Revolution, Germany/Romania, 1992) by renowned essay- film maker Harun Farocki and media philosopher Andrei Ujica. The directors have assembled their account of the 1989 Romanian revolution from TV and amateur video footage of the events Videogramme reflects upon the emergence of a telepolitics in which the camera does not merely report but instead catalyses and participates in the production of a new political space that comes into existence before our ears and eyes. Courtesy of Harun Farocki Filmproduktion, Berlin.

Friday 16 June
Screenings of Amar Kanwar's A Season Outside ( India ,1998] and To Remember (India, 2003) followed by lecture and discussion led by Nicole Wolf. Amar Kanwar achieved recognition when A Season Outside was screened at Documenta XI in 2002 to major acclaim. The film is a meditation on the poetics and politics of non-violence prompted by Kanwar's question: Can non-violence prevail in a context of persistent, intractable atrocity? Navigating between legends, anecdotes, memories of Partition in 1947 and government inquiries into Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of Satyagraha, this visual essay refuses to propose easy solutions. To Remember is a portrait of Birla House, the site of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948. Located in Delhi, Birla House has become a gallery and shrine attracting hundreds of visitors daily. This short silent film is an homage to Gandhi as well as the visitors who embody the spirit of his pacifist teachings. Against the backdrop of a surge in militant, Hindu nationalism, Kanwar's work is particularly telling. Clearly, the historical turn of events from non-violence to nuclear armament, suggest a deep ambivalence about Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. Courtesy of Amar Kanwar

Saturday 17 June
A screening of Coco Fusco's Operation Atropos (2006) followed by lecture by Brian Holmes. The British debut of artists and critic Coco Fusco's latest video-work Operation Atropos promises to be a special event. With eager art students in tow, Fusco signs up for an intensive field course in U.S. military interrogation techniques. This demanding program involves an immersive simulation of the POW experience that makes for uneasy watching and raises difficult questions about the changing relations between femininity, militarization and the privatisation of torture. Courtesy Coco of Fusco.

Sunday 18 June
A screening of Zhou Hongxiang's The Red Flag Flies, followed by lecture by Chris Berry.  A rare opportunity to see Zhou HongXiang's extraordinary video-essay screened here in its full 70 minute version. The Red Flag Flies restages the Maoist tropes of the Cultural Revolution as a theatre of provocation. Maoist poems, slogans and icons are reworked as incongruous tableaux that move across time and place with dazzling iconoclasm. Neither narrative nor documentary, The Red Flag Flies is a series of rhythmically arranged episodes whose cumulative effect is defiantly singular. Courtesy of Zhou Hongxiang

2. Performances, Lectures and Special Events

Chumpon Apisuk,
 Kumjing – an installation

Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 June, from 18.30

Kumjing is an ongoing work in which Chumpon Apisuk transports dolls made by Burmese migrant workers internationally, and encourages audiences to adopt the dolls, which come with their own passports, and, in the process, to engage with the issues of immigration and displacement they raise.

And

Chumpon Apisuk, Silence – a performance

Saturday 17 June, 20.00

The government of Thailand is committing innumerable abusive actions against its own people: allowing officials to assassinate more than 3000 people in an anti drugs campaign, killing innocent youth in the southern Muslim provinces, and oppressing community leaders and human rights activists. Silence is dedicated to those who have been effected and abused by the government's power, and especially the Muslim human rights lawyer Somchai Nilapaijit  who has been kidnapped by the Thai police since 2004.

Rabih Mroué, 
Looking for a Missing Employee

Thursday 15 June, 19.30

Based on real events, Missing Employee centres on a notebook in which Mroué has collected everything published in local papers about the disappearance of a government employee in Beirut: an affair that started as a small announcement in the papers and ended, with the news of finding his body, on the front pages of every paper a few months later. The performance has been described as a 'surrealist saga' and an investigative performance in which the artist becomes a 'detective' interested in using actual documents to understand how rumours, public accusations, national political conflicts, and scandals act on the public sphere as shaped by print media. Performed by Rabih Mroué and Hatem Imam.

And

Rabih Mroué,
Three Posters: A Lecture

Saturday 17 June, 
21.00
Rabih Mroue presents a lecture about his acclaimed and controversial work in which one actor, one resistance fighter and one politician search in front of a camera for their “last” images before each one heads towards his own death. Three Posters, a performance by Elias Khoury and Rabih Mroue, represents a moment between fiction and truth by offering a voyeuristic view to the spectator of, on one hand a performance and on the other a real suffering, and questions the rhetoric of the role of the martyr within the context of the ideological disintegration of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP).

Curious, 
(be)longing: a process in progress

Thursday 15 June, 21.00

Curious present a showing of a process in progress of the (be)longing project,  that is in part a film collaboration with sex workers and trafficked women in the east end of London and in part a performance of longing. Financially assisted by Arts Council, England, Awards for All, and The Women's Library. An Artsadmin Project.

People First and Powerhouse,
A Mile in My Shoes

Thursday 15 and Friday 16,
 20.00

A collaboration between Ali Campbell (Queen Mary, University of London), Andrea Encinas-Meade (British Gospel Arts), and two leading Learning-Disabled groups, People First (Client-Led Advocacy) and Powerhouse (Learning-Disabled Women). In this interactive performance the collaborators celebrate their work in using performance and visual practice to train carers, staff, families and other Learning-Disabled people in Advocacy Awareness, which has had a profound impact in the field of Arts for Social Change.

Coco Fusco and Naeem Mohaiemen, A double bill of artist's talks

Friday 16 and Saturday 17 June, 19.30

Fusco and Mohaiemen will talk about their respective current works. Fusco's new performances and video deal with the role of female interrogators in the War on Terror. Mohaiemen's work with the Visible Collective looks at hyphenated identities and loyalty tests in post 9/11 security panic.

Karen Finley, George & Martha: an affair between George Bush and Martha Stewart

Friday 16 June, 21.00

A lecture performance about Finley's new illustrated novella George and Martha, a political satire about a mythic, illicit, sexual, love-hate, ongoing affair between George W. Bush and Martha Stewart. Finley will perform texts from the book and  discuss issues raised by it in relation to the concept of parody , the ways in which America lives through the legends of George and Martha, and the appropriation of a collective knowledge for influencing critiques of a disastrous presidency. George and Martha is published by Verso, 2006.

Oreet Ashery, Welcome Home: a gathering for those who are not allowed to return.

Friday 16 June, from 19.30

The State of Israel was formed in 1948. Within fourteen months 369 Palestinian villages were eradicated and villagers dispersed as refugees mainly into the Middle East, where they are still denied the Right to Return to their homeland. Welcome Home is a gathering especially created for Performing Rights by Oreet Ashery to celebrate a symbolic home coming to all those who can not return home. 
Welcome Home includes Memorial Service 369 Villages, a voice and video performance by Oreet Ashery and Mikhail Karikis conceived as a commemoration of the villages and an imagining of the return of their inhabitants; and Palestinian Folk Dancing by the London based Al  Zaytouna, Group  who perform Dabke, the national dance of Palestinians since 1948 that is strongly linked to a sense of Palestinian identity and prevalent in refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.   Welcome Home is also an opportunity to see a selection of contemporary film and video works curated by Reem Fadda, Director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art, Ramallah, including Annemarie Jacir and Nassim Amaouche's Quelques Miettes Pour les Oiseaux; Nahed Awwad's Lions, Sharif Waked's Chic Point, Ayreen Anastas' Pasolini Pa* Palestine, and Ahmad Habash's Coming Back – films by Palestinian artists and filmmakers who go beyond the realm of the merely territorial to question the basic issue of rights and freedoms, of war, and of the right for an extended free cultural and actual existence.  All this and music, drinks, party decorations, refreshments, and interactions. 
Produced in association with London Artists Projects. R&D financially assisted by Arts Council, England.

Go Loko!
Touch and let yourself be touched!
Saturday 17 June, from 19.30

Celebrating Peoples Palace's long-lasting collaborations with Brazil and the exciting exchanges between artists and activists between Brazil and UK in recent years, Performing Rights presents a special night of performances, presentations, music and videos.  And dancing! Go Loko! is an invitation to get to know part of the contemporary panorama of Brazilian Performance and Live Art –  to discover, to dialogue and to dance in a celebratory festa tropicalista.

Gustavo Ciriaco presents An Imaginary Lecture on my whereabouts. Out of private memories and popular clichés, a dancer invites his audience to follow him on a journey through a foreigner's view on Brazil.  Nayse Lopez and Lia Rodrigues present a video lecture about performance art on the frontiers of Rio's divided city.  They represent a new initiative by Brazilian artists not simply to speak about the marginalized sections of Brazilian society, but to mobilize themselves to locate the creation and production of their work on the urban peripheries.  In his performance O Samba do Crioulo Doido [The Samba of the Crazy 'Nigger'], Luiz de Abreu contemplates the objectification of the “black body” in Brazilian culture through the constitutive stereotypes of samba, carnival and eroticism, and embodies the resistance of the black population throughout Brazilian history.

Tetine take us into the night with their electro/rap/psychedelic creations, alongside graffiti banners on ideas of human rights created by local young people, and visuals by Gringo Cardia from Afroreggae's recent UK tour, From the Favela to the World.

Co-ordinated by João André da Rocha [People's Palace] in collaboration with Eduardo Bonito of Panorama Festival/Rio de Janeiro and the British Council/Rio de Janeiro. Graffiti banners project developed in partnership with the Shoreditch Trust.

Performing Rights
 Closing Plenary

Sunday 18 June, 
11.00

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.  Performing Rights Artistic Director Lois Weaver and Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Chumpon Apisuk, Monica Ross, Oreet Ashery and other participating artists perform manifestos of what it means to be alive and present in contemporary political and creative environments.

Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes of La Pocha Nostra,
Mapa-Corpo: Oppositional Rites for a Borderless Society
Sunday
18 June, 19.00

Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, in collaboration with local artists and audiences create a poetic interactive ritual that explores the post-9/11 “body politic.” Amongst a series of tableaux vivants, audiences are invited to participate in the colonization and decolonization of a body with 40 acupuncture needles, each representing a nation of the 'coalition forces'.

Yara El-Sherbini, 
Rights and Wrongs. A Pub Quiz
And
Performing Rights Closing Party

Sunday 18 June,
 21.00

A conference is what type of fruit? Name one movie in which an Arab was not shown as either a bomber, a belly dancer, or billionaire? Join the quizmaster, test your knowledge and win a prize in this entertaining and irreverent pub quiz specially devised for Performing Rights.
The Performing Rights closing party features Bobby Baker's Mad Meringues, a special performance by Richard Dedomenici's Fame Asylum vocal harmony boyband, and other special guests.

3. Artists in Residence
Stacy Makishi, Richard Dedomenici, Bobby Baker and Adrien Sina instigate four days of actions and activities.

Stacy Makishi
 with Wan-Jung Wang, Song Chang and Juan Chin, You Are Here… But Where Am I?
Part interrogation and part ritual, You are here…but where am I? is an intimate one to one intervention that happens in the (terror)tory between here and there, within the border of Passport Control. Originally commissioned by Bluecoat for Liverpool Biennial 2002

Richard Dedomenici, 
Fame Asylum
Richard sets out to alter attitudes towards immigration issues among the difficult to-reach opinion-influencing female adolescent demographic by inviting four young male asylum seekers to form a vocal harmony boyband, to be launched at Performing Rights as part of Refugee Week 2006.

Bobby Baker,
 Ballistic Buns, Diary Drawings and Mad Meringues
Often involving food Bobby Baker's work is mostly based on her own experiences and concerns, including issues of women's rights, daily life, the significance, complexity and the relevance of paying attention to daily details.  For the past 6 years she has been making work about mental health issues and rights and, as an AHRC Creative Fellow Queen Mary is exploring the notion of a 'Model Family' and it's relation to mental health. For Performing Rights she will present three projects Ballistic Buns, Diary Drawings and Mad Meringues.

Adrien Sina,
 Declaration of Human Hearts
For the four days of PSi Adrien Sina will invite participants to write on specially prepared napkins their own innovative rights, emotional rights – all the emergency rights that the too-abstract grid of human rights keeps in an inaccessible area never reached by any political system, even in western countries. The napkins and texts will be accumulated as a Declaration of Human Hearts for a collective performative Gun Amnesty Picnic Party where picnickers will be invited to bring along personal items which could, in other circumstances, be considered weapons.

4. Declarations

Artists respond to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Monica Ross, 
rightsrepeated
Thursday 15 June

A recitation of the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The General Assembly of the United Nations; Resolution 217 A (111) 10 December 1948, as an act of memory. The work was prompted by events in London in July 2005 and is the artist's attempt, despite flaws and gaps in her recall, to both physically internalise the Declaration as part of her own consciousness, and respond to the largely unheeded first call of the Declaration. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be found at www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

Rebecca Louise Collins,
 Untitled
Friday 16 June

One performer. 3 hours. 30 Articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A collection of objects related to the 30 articles from the Declaration of Human Rights. An open invitation to the audience to do as they desire.

Leibniz, The Book of Blood: Human Writes
Saturday 17 June
A participatory performance installation exploring the status of human rights in relation to the realities, constraints and pressures experienced by the displaced and marginalised in the UK.  Around a central mise en scene, and amongst a montage of performances, audiences will be received by a nurse and a scribe and invited to donate a drop of blood, which is used to write one letter from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a thick, leather-bound book. Throughout the performance the text progresses drop by drop and letter by letter.

The Clod Ensemble, Red Ladies
Sunday 18 June

Announcing their arrival at PSi by singing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights dressed in identical red scarves, trenchcoats, sunglasses and vanity cases, the Red Ladies will be keeping an eye on Performing Rights – watching, witnessing, circulating, gathering information; monitoring how people interact with each other, what they wear, how they move; locating the people with the power; recording speech patterns; decoding cryptic languages; counting surveillance cameras. They will regroup on the final day before making an emergency exit. Produced by Fuel and funded by Arts Council England, PRSF, Awards for All, The Hinrichsen Trust and Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust.

5. Gallery of Utopias

Artists imagine different ways of seeing the places and spaces around us.
 
Lisa Wesley and Andrew Blackwood, The Project
 (Saturday and Sunday only)
A live durational installation mixing storytelling and architecture to produce a narrative on modern urban life. The artists will be in residence constructing a monumental model of a dystopian, frozen landscape which is partly imaginary, partly based upon memories of places, upon the failure of town planning, upon the clash of old and new. This culture-clash city will constantly evolve, each overhaul mirroring shifts in society. The Project was commissioned by The National Review of Live Art 2006, and was partly developed from White Settlers, a Bonington Gallery / Now Festival Commission.

Wrights & Sites, 
A Mis-Guide to Anywhere
Three years in the making, A Mis-Guide to Anywhere is like no other guide you have ever used before. Rather than telling you where to go and what to see, it gives you the ways to see your city or environment that no one else has found yet. It suggests a series of walks and points of observation and contemplation, and provides provocations for reader-walkers to make their own exploratory journeys in whatever environment they choose: metropolis, home town, countryside, holiday destination… anywhere. Unlike an ordinary guide book, it is guided by the practice of mythogeography, which places the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal on equal terms with 'factual', municipal history. Author and walker become partners in ascribing significance to place. Financially supported by Arts Council England.

Graeme Miller, Held (an extract)
For two years Graeme Miller has captured photographs of places around the world where people have fallen from the sky – stowaways who have hidden in the wheel bays of commercial airlines.   Held is an installation of fragile, glass bowls of sky, each representing a lost life and acknowledging the political and social significance of their death. Held is not is a static and monumental memorial. By the act of lifting the bowls we reach through our finger-tips to another persons life, acknowledging the political and social significance of their death. The exhibition, Held is an Artsadmin project, jointly presented with Cafe Gallery Projects at Dilston Grove, London, 4 June to 16 July.

Yara El-Sherbini,
 A Demonstration
A performance to video in which El-Sherbini playfully considers ideas around authorship and the production values of the artwork, through the making of a visual pun.

Chris Johnston and Saul Hewish of Rideout, The Creative Prison
An animated film describing the interior of an imagined prison that works from the premise that creativity and learning are essential to the development of the human. Working with a group of prisoners, prison staff and the architect Will Alsop, the project asks what would a prison look like if it was built to primarily rehabilitate rather than primarily punish?

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination,
 Utopia is in you (Graffiti, Oxford, Spring 2006)
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (lab of ii) is an ephemeral network of socially engaged artists and activists who believe that playful forms of cultural intervention in everyday life and the development of free convivial spaces that enable participants to cultivate full confidence in their own creative capacity are fundamental tools for social change. For the Lab of ii, Utopia is not an elsewhere or fictitious nowhere, it isn't a plan or blueprint for the future but a way of working in the here and now, a way of radically changing patterns of social and ecological relationship in the way we work and play together. the Lab of ii sees every one of its experiments as the creation of temporary moments of imperfect yet beautiful Utopias.

Lois Weaver,
 Domestic Terrorism
Lois Weaver commits acts of domestic terrorism by hanging laundry in public.  Women spend their time washing and hanging laundry worldwide – a domestic act with universal resonance.  This installation offers small domestic details for public consideration and provides the screens on which to project messages of urgency and visions of utopia.  Domestic Terrorism includes Trouble with My Sheets, Video No. 1, created by Lois Weaver and Eleanor Savage.