Roshana Rubin Mayhew: Feeling the Blues (2025) - Whitechapel Gallery

Roshana Rubin Mayhew: Feeling the Blues (2025)

  • 23. Roshana Rubin Mayhew, 2022

    Roshana Rubin Mayhew, Film still from performance of ‘4’45”, hold , 2022, Performed at Southwark Park Galleries, Video: Sophie Chapman 

Thu 19 Jun, Thu 24 Jul & Thu 21 Aug, 7-7.45pm

Gallery 2

Monday Closed
Tuesday 11am–6pm
Wednesday 11am–6pm
Thursday 11am–9pm
Friday 11am–6pm
Saturday 11am–6pm
Sunday 11am–6pm

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Topless dancer outside whitechapel gallery

London Open Live

Full Performance Programme

Performance
Roshana Rubin Mayhew: Feeling the Blues

Feeling the Blues is a work in three movements performed over three months by Roshana Rubin Mayhew. In each, a bodyweight of clay is wrestled through a score of 12 wrestling holds. The sounds generated are mixed live during each movement by music producer Wayne Adams.In Movement I, the clay is malleable – held, stretched and body slammed through each hold. For Movement II, the dried bodyweight of clay, hardened and resonant with how it was held, is broken down through the rub and friction of the body. Movement III gathers up the pieces. Through grinding and wetting, the remains return a malleable bodyweight of clay, rocked n rolled into motion. Feeling the Blues investigates how to tune into and creatively hold weight and the weighty. Embracing the indeterminacy of live performance, it taps into and feels-through its rhythms, rubs, and sweet spots.

Movement I – Thu 19 Jun, 7-7.45pm
Movement II – Thu 24 Jul, 7-7.45pm
Movement III – Thu 21 Aug, 7-7.45pm

About Roshana Rubin Mayhew:

Roshana Rubin Mayhew is an interdisciplinary artist whose work plays in a variety of mediums including performance, sound, sculpture, and writing. Roshana is presently focused on wrestling-with a bodyweight of clay, artistic research that is steeped in the poetics of the Blues. This forms a long-term project investigating how to move with weight and the weighty, a practice that is interested in dissonance, rhythmic feel, and the charge of live performance.

Rubin Mayhew is currently undertaking doctoral research at Royal College of Art funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership Award, is associated with Radical Matter proto-Centre, and lecturing at Istituto Europeo di Design, Milan. Rubin Mayhew has shown extensvely across the UK and Europe, with more recent publications and projects including Queereal Secretions: Artistic Research as Exquisite Practice (Article Press: 2023); Modern Queer Poets (Pilot Press: 2019); MiArt & Milano Art Week, Nowhere Gallery Milan; CounterPulse San Francisco; Art Stations Foundation Poznań; Southwark Park Galleries London; Radical Matter proto-Centre (RCA); and The Queer Materialities Research Network (GSA).