What’s good for me is good for you? A physical multilogue is an event/exhibition-series that explores narratives of intersectionality through performance practices. Taking place at Mimosa House in Central London from 24th August - 15th September, these performances and exhibitions will set a framework for emerging artistic practices examining the importance of physical presence and challenging the default setting of a gallery space - looking at historical narratives of womxnhood and their role in contemporary art.
What’s good for me is good for you? consists of two main parts - the event/exhibition-series and commissioned writings, published on this website and in a booklet which will be available at Mimosa House.
Artists Katarzyna Perlak, Rebecca Bellantoni and Rowdy SS; Monika Janulevičiūtė and Antanas Lučiūnas; Travis Alabanza and Daniel Brathwaite-Shirley and STASIS challenge normativity in their practices based on their lived experiences. They will each take over Mimosa House for a weekend making the artistic practices themselves the centre of the project. Evolving around topics of identity politics and queer-feminist ideas, the project highlights the differences in artistic approaches and personal realities.
With commissioned texts by Agnieszka Roguski, Momtaza Mehri, Göksu Kunak and Ulijona Odišarija
Curator: Nora-Swantje Almes
Associate Curator: Lxo Cohen
Organised with the European Commission Representation in the UK, in partnership with the Lithuanian Culture Institute London, supported by @oldbluelastbeer
Nora-Swantje Almes’ research explores queer-feminist performance practices in relation to censorship and possibilities of queering art institutions. As a Curatorial Assistant at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin, she worked closely on solo exhibitions by Goshka Macuga and Dominique Gonzales-Foerster and on the performance exhibition by Adam Linder and Shahryar Nashat, amongst many others. With performance artist Lulu Obermayer, Almes curated dance and lecture performances at Kunsthaus KuLe for Gallery Weekend 2017 (Berlin) and is a founding member of Artist in Research programme AiR Berlin Alexanderplatz where she co-developed a collaborative Salon series taking place in different locations across Berlin. Almes is a member of the curating collective TWTMC. With London-based Lxo Cohen as Associate Curator, she curated What’s good for me is good for you? A physical multilogue and will introduce the project with her text Chapter 1.
DOWNLOAD TEXT HERE
PV, 24 August, 7–9 PM
PERFORMANCE at 8 PM
25/26 August
EXHIBITION 1–7 PM
Katarzyna Perlak is a Polish-born London-based artist whose practice employs video, performance, sound and installation. Driven by politics and feelings, Perlak’s work examines queer subjectivities, migration and potentiality of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present, continuous and past historical moments, and the relationships between notions of utopia, hope and the concept of the ‘wish landscape’.
Collaborating with Perlak is Rebecca Bellantoni, a London-born artist of Caribbean descent who mines and abstracts everyday occurrences. Through the lens of spirituality and its aesthetics, Bellantoni investigates the notions of the excepted ‘real’ and the experiential ‘real’ questioning: how may the blurring or removal of the borders between the two offer meditative experiences? Bellantoni’s practice includes video, textile, performance, installation and writing. They will work with multidisciplinary artist Rowdy SS, to present their first ever group project.
For What’s good for me is good for you? they will also explore the notion of friendship as a support network, a site of contention, a place of honesty, a holding space; activated via dialogue through action. Bouncing off of each other, shifting virtuality to actuality through installed shelters, soundscapes and live performative actions.
Perlak was part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2017. Her films have been shown widely at film festivals across Europe. She also hosted workshops on “Folk, Love and Utopia” at The Showroom and performed at the Diaspora Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2017. Perlak and Bellantoni were both part of Hotline at Arcadia Missa earlier in 2018. Bellantoni’s work was presented at Arts Licks, 2017, at OPEN DIALOGUE: Artists and Designers of Afro-Caribbean descent curated by Kelly Waters of University of Connecticut and most recently performing at the launch of Block Universe in collaboration with Rowdy SS.
Momtaza Mehri is a poet and essayist. She won 3rd prize in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and is a co-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She is the current Young People’s Laureate for London and a columnist-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space.
DOWNLOAD TEXT HERE
PV, 31 August, 7–9 PM
PERFORMANCE at 8 PM
Monika Janulevičiūtė and Antanas Lučiūnas’s work as an artistic duo and are based in Vilnius. In their first international exhibition together, they will present their performance GIRLISONFIRE: Dedicating to the sick and blooming. Layering an 8-channel sound installation, two floral scent compounds, and a scaffold setting together, their live performance will play with a mixture of exhaustion, adventure and constant visual stimulation: A is on a hike in the Tatra Mountain constantly texting, while M is at home wanting to watch a documentary on volcanoes in Hawaii. Realities overlap and timelines shift. The duo attempt to exercise spatial understandings where these factors are not just plain backdrops but constructed, enforced, conditions of life and co-dependency. At times these determinants are personal, sometimes communal and normalised contingencies. Janulevičiūtė and Lučiūnas explore the vernacular as a new type of language, examining paradoxical intimacies of the digital and physical space.
- “Dualism and its corollary -
What is sexual deviancy?”
- “I was 8 years old, I was chatting to a stranger online and suddenly a concept
of being used appears in my mind; I lie that I’m 12.”
The performance piece is developed in conjunction with the Rupert Alternative Education Programme as a continuation of their project The Great Outdoors: GIRLISONFIRE presented in December 2017 at CAC Vilnius.
1/2 September
EXHIBITION
1–7 PM
Monika Janulevičiūtė and Antanas Lučiūnas’s work as an artistic duo and are based in Vilnius. In their first international exhibition together, they will present their performance GIRLISONFIRE: Dedicating to the sick and blooming. Layering an 8-channel sound installation, two floral scent compounds, and a scaffold setting together, their live performance will play with a mixture of exhaustion, adventure and constant visual stimulation: A is on a hike in the Tatra Mountain constantly texting, while M is at home wanting to watch a documentary on volcanoes in Hawaii. Realities overlap and timelines shift. The duo attempt to exercise spatial understandings where these factors are not just plain backdrops but constructed, enforced, conditions of life and co-dependency. At times these determinants are personal, sometimes communal and normalised contingencies. Janulevičiūtė and Lučiūnas explore the vernacular as a new type of language, examining paradoxical intimacies of the digital and physical space.
- “Dualism and its corollary -
What is sexual deviancy?”
- “I was 8 years old, I was chatting to a stranger online and suddenly a concept
of being used appears in my mind; I lie that I’m 12.”
The performance piece is developed in conjunction with the Rupert Alternative Education Programme as a continuation of their project The Great Outdoors: GIRLISONFIRE presented in December 2017 at CAC Vilnius.
Ulijona Odišarija is a Lithuanian Georgian London-based artist who makes video, photography, music, objects and installations. She completed Masters in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2016. Her work has been presented at Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), Close Up Cinema, SET and ICA (London, UK), Contemporary Art Centre and National Art Gallery (Vilnius, Lithuania), Import Projects (Berlin, Germany), PAKT (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Showroom (New York, USA) and was published in a book on young Lithuanian photography ‘Like there’s no tomorrow’ (Rupert, 2013) and ‘Lithuanian Photography: Yesterday And Today’ (2016). She is a singer in a band Steve & Samantha and sometimes djs and performs under her alter ego Sweatlana. Next to her artistic practice, she writes and published on online platforms such as AQNB as well as contributed to numerous DIY zines.
DOWNLOAD TEXT HERE
PV, 5 September, 7–9 PM
PERFORMANCE at 8 PM
Two black, trans gender non conforming artists (and friends) Travis Alabanza and Daniel Brathwaite-Shirley take over Mimosa House. Softly. With care. With anger. With feelings. With live performance, visual archives, film and sound - these friends create something for themselves, for each other, for other 'other's'.
Travis Alabanza is a writer, performer and artist based in London. Combining spoken word with soundscapes, projections and animations in collaboration with Daniel Brathwaite Shirley, Alabanza will present a variation of a performance based on their debut poetry book “Before I Step Outside [You Love Me]”. Through diary entries, images, poems and essays, Alabanza reveals their experience as a trans person navigating public spaces. Brathwaite-Shirley’s work centres the voices of QTIBPOC - mixing animation and footage, manipulating the two together and creating plans for these bodies to exist. Juxtaposed with a clothes swap initiated by Alabanza during the exhibition period, Brathwaite-Shirley’s video work will take over the gallery space.
Alabanza and Brathwaite-Shirley first collaborated at this year’s Brighton Art Festival. Alabanza was a resident of the Tate Modern workshop programme in 2016/17, has given lectures and performed at numerous venues in the UK and abroad, amongst them the ICA London, Harvard University and ngbk Berlin. Brathwaite-Shirley’s films were recently shown as part of “I want to show you a body” (2017) at Tate Britain where they also ran a workshop. They also gave artist talks at the Royal Academy and the Photographers Gallery and performed for SPIT! Collective at Frieze Projects 2017.
8/9 September
EXHIBITION 1–7 PM
Two black, trans gender non conforming artists (and friends) Travis Alabanza and Daniel Brathwaite-Shirley take over Mimosa House. Softly. With care. With anger. With feelings. With live performance, visual archives, film and sound - these friends create something for themselves, for each other, for other 'other's'.
Travis Alabanza is a writer, performer and artist based in London. Combining spoken word with soundscapes, projections and animations in collaboration with Daniel Brathwaite Shirley, Alabanza will present a variation of a performance based on their debut poetry book “Before I Step Outside [You Love Me]”. Through diary entries, images, poems and essays, Alabanza reveals their experience as a trans person navigating public spaces. Brathwaite-Shirley’s work centres the voices of QTIBPOC - mixing animation and footage, manipulating the two together and creating plans for these bodies to exist. Juxtaposed with a clothes swap initiated by Alabanza during the exhibition period, Brathwaite-Shirley’s video work will take over the gallery space.
Alabanza and Brathwaite-Shirley first collaborated at this year’s Brighton Art Festival. Alabanza was a resident of the Tate Modern workshop programme in 2016/17, has given lectures and performed at numerous venues in the UK and abroad, amongst them the ICA London, Harvard University and ngbk Berlin. Brathwaite-Shirley’s films were recently shown as part of “I want to show you a body” (2017) at Tate Britain where they also ran a workshop. They also gave artist talks at the Royal Academy and the Photographers Gallery and performed for SPIT! Collective at Frieze Projects 2017.
Göksu Kunak a.k.a Gucci Chunk is a writer born in Ankara and based in Berlin. Ze performed zir texts and lectures at Batard Brussels 2016 (invited by Tom Engels), Stadtsprachen Festival 2016, Poesie Festival 2017, Fuchsbau Festival 2017, Broken Dimanche Press reading series at Tropez Berlin curated by John Holten, Pioneer Works NYC curated by Belladonna* Collaborative at Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneve as one of the CAMPers invited by Andrea Bellini and Julian Weber. The short book #225 I thought this would is published by Belladonna* Collaborative. Zir texts have appeared on the official page of The Absence of Paths, the Official Tunisian Pavillion of the 57th Venice Biennial and on the blog The History of Painting Revisited in collaboration with Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle for the Fahrelnissa Zeid Retrospective. Invited by Meg Stuart and Maria F. Scaroni, as a part of City Lights -- a continuous gathering, ze had the pleasure to perform with amazing female artists of Berlin at the old and renowned theater Hebbel am Ufer. Göksu is one of the co-founders of the blog Viereinhalbsaetze that consists of 4,5-sentence-dance-criticism. Ze is working on zir PhD on queer chronopolitics in relation to performance and contemporary dance with Prof. Dr. Bojana Kunst. Göksu’s texts can also be read on goksukunak.tumblr.com
DOWNLOAD TEXT HERE
15 September
PERFORMANCE at 5 PM / 6.30 PM / 8 PM
Tickets are free, but limited. Please RSVP via Eventbrite.
SAVE YOUR SPOT HERE!
STASIS is a London / Glasgow based dance collective consisting of Aniela Piasecka, Isabel Palmstierna, Olivia Norris and Paloma Proudfoot. Their work explores, with an ethical imperative, contemporary femininity. The feminine subject’s social dysfunction is considered, embodied by the performances’ qualities of fracture and disconnect. The group was born out of a common desire to probe the intricacies of gender identity through performance. They make work for galleries, clubs, theatres, film and outdoor spaces and are drawn to transforming ‘non-performative’ spaces into temporary stages, exploring their meaning and, by extension, opening up a dialogue between the performers, the space, and the audience. At Mimosa House, they will present their newly commissioned work Cherry lips, Crystal skies.
STASIS dance and performance works were recently shown at BALTIC39 in Newcastle, in collaboration with Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s MEGA HAMMER as part of DRAF’s night of performances at KOKO, London, and at Glasgow International 2018.
Agnieszka Roguski is a freelance writer and curator based in Berlin. She uses different practices to approach the exhibition as medium. Her work is articulated in different formats and encompasses both the art – and academic – world, particularly dealing with strategies of representation and staging among shifting technologies. She is writing her PhD thesis “The Self on Display – visual performances in the digital society” at Freie Universität Berlin about the re-/presentation of the creative subject. Mediating her research, she gave lectures and workshops at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, Louisiana Museum Copenhagen, and Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. Her works were recently shown at KV—Kunstverein Leipzig, HKW Berlin, Torrance Shipman Gallery New York; and published by Tectum, Kerber, Peter Lang, Broken Dimanche, Revolver, Spike Art Magazine, Camera Austria, vonhundert, KubaParis and Springerin. Most recently, she reviewed “Left Performance Histories” at ngbk Berlin for Texte zur Kunst.
DOWNLOAD TEXT HERE