London Open Live

Devika Bilimoria 
Offerings (2022-2025)
Thu 5 Jun, 4-8pm
Fri 6 & Sat 7 Jun, 1-5pm

Nando Messias
Complete Breech (2025)
Thu 12 Jun, 7pm

Roshana Rubin Mayhew
Feeling the Blues (2025)
Movement I – Thu 19 Jun, 7pm 
Movement II – Thu 24 Jul, 7pm  Jun, 4-8pm
Movement III – Thu 21 Aug, 7pm

Season Butler
Do You Remember the Good Old Days Before the Ghost Town? (2025) 
Sat 21 Jun, 12-5pm

i.as.in.we 
The Score(s): III (2022-2025)
Movement III – Thu 21 August, 7pm
Thu 26 Jun, 7pm

Helen Davison
aggregate (2025)
Thu 3 July, 5.30-8.30pm
Sat 5 & Sun 6 Jul, 2-5pm

Helena Goldwater
gathering in (2025)
Fri 11, Sat 12 & Sun 13 Jul, 1-5pm

Will Pegna
Parasound (2024)
Sat 19 Jul, 2.30pm & 4pm

Aaron Williamson
Slangon (2025)
Sat 2 & Sun 3 Aug, 12-5pm each day

Mahsa Salali
THE CALL – MUBĀH مباح (2024)
Thu 7 Aug, 7pm

Joshua Woolford with Lie Ning, Sippin’ T and Yodea Marquel
Dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor (2024)
Sat 9 Aug, 2-5pm

Shaun Caton with Weeks & Whitford
Tales From a London Grotto (2025)
Sat 16 Aug, 4-5 pm

William Mackrell
Breaking a dance (2025)
Thu 28 Aug, 7pm

Tim Etchells with Aisha Orazbayeva
By Word of Mouth (2025)
Thu 28 Aug, 7pm

Plastique Fantastique
The Hares, The Trolls, Dragon and Tooth Cruise (2025) 
Thu 4 Sep, 7pm

Offerings (2022-2025)
5 Jun, 4-8pm
6 & 7 Jun, 1-5pm

Offerings is a durational performance installation by Devika Bilimoria that brings together ritual, chance and cultural memory in an enquiry into diaspora, socio-cultural hierarchies and metaphysical frameworks. Over three days, the artist enacts task-based processes guided by the roll of dice, generating randomised choreographic ‘offering

About Devika Bilimoria:

Devika Bilimoria courts a practice of performance, dance, moving image, photography and installation to explore notions of queering, time and materiality. Raised in Naarm/Melbourne, they combine practices of Bharatanatyam, theatre, live art, and visual art with lived experiences of South Asian diaspora, through queer, feminist and cosmic perspectives. Central to their practice is a concept of ‘body-ing’, which places formations of matter in perpetual movement, affecting and affected by forces of sociality, texture, pressure, light, and chance. By enlisting chance methods, duration and somatic listening as tools of making, they strive to agitate embodiments of separateness, hierarchies, and gestures across socio-cultural conditions, moving toward slower and attuned ways of being.

Bilimoria has shown works in Melbourne, Australia including the Museum of Australian Photography; the National Portrait Gallery; Incinerator Gallery; Blindside Gallery; and Dancehouse. They have created award-winning works, been a finalist for numerous awards and commissioned by festivals such as PHOTO International Festival of Photography (2022); Flash Forward (2021); Sangam: Performing Arts Festival of South Asia & Diaspora (2019); and Mapping Melbourne (2018). In 2022, Bilimoria was the recipient of the Rodger Davies Award for their performance installation Offerings from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.

Complete Breech (2025)
Thu 12 Jun, 7pm

In Complete Breech, Nando Messias stages a new performance utilising sculptural acrobatics and a choreography of mythmaking, trans rights and bodily autonomy. The work weaves together the ancestral rhythms and imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian sacred rites as well as the mock births of London’s eighteenth-century molly-house subculture. The artist’s body is poised on a pedestal as a monument of transition, honesty and precarity. It is deconstructed and flayed, stripped of power or signification, in an exquisite critique of rights, identity and historicity.

About Nando Messias:

Nando Messias is a performer who is trans-disciplinary and resistant to easy categorisation, forging a dynamic tension between the opposing demands of live art, performance art, fashion, academia and queer approaches. Messias’ work deliberately blurs the lines of form, centring the trans/non-binary, excluded and oppressed body—a body for which they have had to make room for in the world. Messias has performed in different spaces: nightclubs, theatres, art galleries and the streets.

Messias’ practice is rooted in their personal experience of being in the world, offering very individual, creative and critical responses to the violence, transphobia and other forms of discrimination and exclusion they have experienced as a trans/non-binary, ageing immigrant. Despite the political and ethical foreground to their performances, the work is distinctive and unique in its engagement with radical beauty, awe, rigour, glamour and fierceness— all inflected with a light dash of humour. Recently, Messias has been focusing their attention on trans archives, and turned towards a more sculptural engagement with the body in its relation to discourses around identity and historicity.

Feeling the Blues (2025)
Movement I – Thu 19 Jun, 7pm 
Movement II – Thu 24 Jul, 7pm  Jun, 4-8pm
Movement III – Thu 21 Aug, 7pm

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. 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.

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).

Do You Remember the Good Old Days Before the Ghost Town? (2025) 
Sat 21 Jun, 12-5pm

Season Butler presents a new, durational performance, which over the course of several hours, dramatises the Capitalocene condition, and the Proletarocene attempt at care, repair and persistence. In dialogue with academic and philosopher Lauren Berlant’s term ‘situation tragedy,’ which describes a condition of ever-diminishing certainty and always on the brink of collapse, the performance explores matter that, once altered by human use, cannot return to its original form. Transformation is a one-way trip, and the only certainty is change. ‘This piece is for and about London as a city under the ongoing betrayal and assault of austerity, and the labour of living in the ruins wrought by a ruthless ruling class – work we will do imperfectly, in state of flow and in frustration

About Season Butler:

Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and teacher. Her work looks at ideas of youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to a future of elusive horizons. Butler’s artwork has appeared at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Tate Exchange, London; Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga; and Hotel Maria Kapel, The Netherlands. Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in 2019 and won the 2020 Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel.

Butler’s current research looks at the US scholar Lauren Berlant’s notion of the ‘situation tragedy’, articulated in their 2011 book Cruel Optimism.  The central concepts of this research continue to inform Butler’s work: specifically, climate crisis and racial capitalism; the alienation and exhaustion of the contemporary worker; and flight as an evolving sphere of signification and conflict, from Icarus to The Tuskegee Airmen and beyond.

In addition to her creative practice, she is also on the curatorial team of the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland.

The Score(s): III (2022-2025)
Thu 26 Jun, 7pm

i.as.in.we will present an in-person public sharing of The Score(s): III. Weaving together a growing body of ‘texts’, this live performance is an embodied translation of Yewande YoYo Odunubi and Rohan Ayinde’s collaborative studying practice. Staged in the domestic space of a kitchen across five scenes, each scene is a speculative unfolding of a photograph from American artist Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990), using dance, sound, dialogue and poetry. Drawing on a Black radical tradition that spans a multiplicity of b/Black geographies and spacetimes, the performance asks what exists between everyday experiences of ‘Black aliveness’ and the desire to create structural change and imagine new worlds.

About i.as.in.we:

i.as.in.we is the wayward, motile collaboration between artists Rohan Ayinde and Yewande YoYo Odunubi. Working across mediums and between individual practices, their work explores the relationship between source material and final output, experimenting with different modes of translation, citation, assemblage, and collaborative improvisation as methods of enquiry. Grounded in shared explorations of Black feminist thought, speculative imagination, and embodied practice, they generate an unfolding landscape, which they’ve termed the ‘b/Black Expansive Imagination.’ Through their exploration of material and movement, their work drifts between text, movement, mark-making, video, and curatorial projects, seeking to develop language(s) that might help us understand new ways of being/becoming in this world.

Rohan is an ‘anadisciplinary’ artist and poet who, through an entanglement with the phenomenon of the black hole, attempts to excavate an architecture of ideology through the analytical framework of Black feminist thought. His work investigates how the politics of place is shaped by conceptual positions.

Yewande is an artist and cultural producer whose practice revolves around the inquiry, ‘What does the body need to dream?’ She draws on freestyle-improvisation as both choreographic and pedagogical methods to experiment with the body’s present and imagined possibilities.

aggregate (2025)
Thu 3 Jul, 5.30-8.30pm
Sat 5 & Sun 6 Jul, 2-5pm

In aggregate, Helen Davison tests the human form under the weight of various materials, layered over time. The durational performance tracks the body’s response to pressure and the moments of connection it finds outside of itself. Over a period of three hours, the artist lies between the concrete floor of the gallery and a sheet of reinforced glass. Suspended above is (in order of performance); a canopy containing grit salt; a canopy containing dandelion seeds and a small sock containing iron fillings. Vocalisations are made in response to the acoustics of the space, the feeling as the glass connects and disconnects with the artist’s skin, and the materials as they are agitated and released to fall onto the glass surface. While the overarching framework remains the same for each performance, adaptations to the materials and improvisations offer nuance to each iteration.

About Helen Davison:

Helen Davison is a process-led performance artist whose practice explores the moments where communication fails, leaning into action, gesture and sound to share experiences of otherness. Through the palpable qualities of the voice and the resonances of the body, Davison seeks moments of connection outside of self, with a desire to reach cathartic transformation.

Within their solo practice, and also as part of art collective SITE (collaboration with artists Selina Bonelli and Ash McNaughton), Davison often works directly in response to public sites of architectural, ecological and socio-historic interest that hold traces of conflict. These works are an attempt to divest sites of power and offerings of protest. Davison’s use of the voice stems from their research into sound, deep listening, and an ongoing practice of vocal improvisation as an extended form of touch. They use voice in relation to everyday materials and objects that hold personal significance, investigating their inherent sonic qualities and resonances. These combine as performances that move through a slow transition and (dis)integration of images, actions and sounds.

gathering in (2025)
Fri 11, Sat 12 & Sun 13 Jul, 1-5pm

Helena Goldwater presents gathering in, a three-day durational performance installation that changes over time. The work unfolds on the site where the former Whitechapel Library once thrived, known for a time as the ‘University of the Ghetto’ – a place of reading, learning, questioning. A space to think of the possibilities of the future, a place to dream and a haven from the noise and demands from the outside. Goldwater is interested in how the process is the work, and how slowness can offer intimate readings. Working over 12 hours, the artist transforms a range of materials from one state to another, in order to ask questions. Questions about what is hidden, unseen, lost and revealed; about those who went before us, their labour, what we have learned from them; and how we navigate place – in our body, a site, an area, a land.

About Helena Goldwater:

Helena Goldwater works across performance art, installation, and painting. Since the 1980s her performances have focused on the quality of certain materials and how they inhabit a space. The works are usually durational, repeating, revolving and returning. The labour is endless, exploring the impossibility of certainty, posing questions about belonging, and how we navigate our place.

Goldwater’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, including, Action: A provisional history of the 90s, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2021); 1st Venice International Performance Art Week, Venice (2012); gut flora, MOCA London (2018); If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, de Appel, Amsterdam (2011); Tate Britain (2012) and Liverpool (2003); and Western Front, Vancouver (1999).

Goldwater also researches and compiles material on UK performance art histories of the 1970s and 1980s. She co-curated (with Rob La Frenais, Alex Eisenberg/Live Art Development Agency) an online resource about 1980s UK-based Performance Art entitled, Edge of an Era.

She is the Course Leader for BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Parasound (2024)
Sat 19 Jul, 2.30pm & 4pm

Parasound is a hybrid sound and movement performance that continues Will Pegna‘s research into ‘athletic expansion’, as part of his project All Terrain Training. Re-purposing climbing equipment, the performers build a space between pragmatic systems and ethereal summoning, whilst displaying collective sound-making. Violin bows play across industrial wires that keep the Parasound members in collective balance, accompanied by a meditative soundscape of electronic frequencies and collected field recordings in collaboration with Max Frimout. The performance delves into ideals of connectivity—both physical and theoretical—posing questions about nature, behaviour and technology. Blending fantasy with function, Parasound invites audiences into a suspended realm where physical tension, sonic texture and group cohesion converge in a shared, immersive simulation.

About Will Pegna:

Will Pegna is a multidisciplinary artist with a performance practice centred around the collective potential of conceptual movement. With an aim to expand creative sensibilities found within sport, Pegna’s practice combines themes of athletic functionality, artificial harmony, and modern spirituality, proposing new micro-worlds for reflection and response. In 2020, Pegna founded All Terrain Training (ATT), a research-based performance series evolving through a programme of international showings in Berlin, The Hague, Milan, and Seoul, alongside UK performances, collaborations, and workshops. In its formative years, ATT’s movement task focused on connections to the earth and each other, unifying athletic endurance training with ongoing tectonic and glacial vibrations. In 2025, ATT has been developing a new narrative of athleticism, branching into fantasy and function with its new case study, Parasound.

Working predominantly with movement for performance and screen, Pegna’s choreographic approach utilises a system of structured improvisation, gravitating toward a movement language rooted in natural and synthetic questioning. The versatility of Pegna’s practice has seen previous work shown at Arnolfini, Bristol, Saatchi Gallery, London and Windmill Perform in South Korea, as well as online with Nowness and Geoscience Communication.

Slangon (2025)
Sat 2 & Sun 3 Aug, 12-5pm each day

Slangon is an open invitation to The London Open Live visitors to co-create a non-verbal artificial sign language. Artificial languages have a rich history from Klingon in Star Trek and the curious whistling in the children’s TV programme The Clangers to Martha Rosler’s 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, to the constructed Dothraki language in The Game of Thrones. Yet despite this, there isn’t a non-verbal equivalent. Artist Aaron Williamson is a deaf bilingual signer/speaker and will work one-to-one with visitors to translate a single ‘word’ of their choice into Slangon. Abstract gestures, whistling, stamping, anything that is non-verbal is encouraged. Having physically invented their ‘word’, participants are invited to record it direct to camera for inclusion in the ‘Slangon Introductory Vocabulary Video’ that will form a legacy artwork.

A BSL interpreter will be present.

About Aaron Williamson:

Aaron Williamson is an artist who, over the past twenty-five years, has created over 300 unique performances, videos and installations in Britain, Europe, Japan, China, Australia, USA, South America, Canada and other countries around the world. Aaron has a PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex (1997) and has published widely. His monograph Performance / Video / Collaboration was co-published by LADA and KIOSK in 2007. He has been awarded, among others, the Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the British School at Rome (2000-2001); a three-year AHRC Fellowship at BIAD, University of Central England, (2004-2007); and the Stephen Cripps Studio Bursary, Acme Studios (2013-2014).

Williamson’s work is informed by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised and progressive sensibility towards disability. At a University of California San Diego lecture in 1998, he coined the term ‘Deaf Gain’ as a counter-emphasis to ‘hearing loss’. In 2019, a retrospective of his work was exhibited at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester. Williamson is currently working on a full-scale exhibition and retrospective at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton to open in October 2025.

THE CALL – MUBĀH مباح (2024)
Thu 7 Aug, 7pm

THE CALL is a durational performance exploring resilience, identity, and the politics of the body. The work poses the central question ‘Is the body an enabler or an entrapment?’

Rooted in ritual and endurance, Mahsa Salali stands motionless, bearing 20 kilograms of chain, connected to seven double bassists. This sculptural stillness pays tribute to the radical Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya and the mythological force of Medusa. The performance confronts and dismantles societal and religious expectations, reclaiming the female-presenting body as a site of agency and resistance. Vulnerability becomes power. Stillness becomes protest. THE CALL invites the audience into a space of collective witnessing, ritual, and reckoning.

About Mahsa Salali:

Mahsa Salali is an Iranian multidisciplinary performance artist, contemporary pianist, activist and curator. They are a co-curator of MYTO, an ecosystem dedicated to interdisciplinary and politically charged art practice. They completed their Bachelors degree in Piano Performance from Goldsmiths University of London and Masters in Performance and Education from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where they specialised in performance art and contemporary piano practice.

In September 2023, Salali completed Cleaning the House Workshop, an intensive workshop by Marina Abramović which focused on mastering long-durational performance art practices and also participated in Abramović’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Salali’s current research and work focuses on the gender binary and body, the notion of modesty and misogyny in different cultures. Born and raised in Iran and immigrating to the UK at the age of 18, they reflect on Iran’s move after the 1977 Islamic Revolution to wear a compulsory hijab for women from the age of five. Salali’s performances critically examine the societal and religious expectations imposed on the female-presenting body. They perform to reclaim the body as a medium for political agency and self-expression, asking if the body is an instrument of liberation or a site of confinement.

Dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor (2024)
Sat 9 Aug, 2-5pm

In this performance, Joshua Woolford expands Dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor, which was originally performed for New Contemporaries at Camden Arts Centre in 2024. The artist will be joined by DJ and space maker Sippin’ T; sonic and visual artist Lie Ning; and fashion and installation designer Yodea Marquel for a three-hour durational performance exploring the potential for collective healing and transformation. Throughout the performance, simple interactions with external, natural and technological ‘organs’ are amplified through repetition, audio loops and electronic processing. In these tangled and fractured moments, Woolford tries to imagine a new liberation for those that are marginalised and oppressed in these unsettling global times.

About Joshua Woolford:

Joshua Woolford is a transdisciplinary artist working across performance, sound, video, and installation. Woolford’s work is grounded in cultural research and their personal experiences of being a member of the queer Black Afro-Caribbean diaspora living in England. Through their practice, Woolford acknowledges and confronts experiences of violence, aggression, and misalignment through installation, sound, language and their body. They embrace reflection, transition and movement as powerful and disruptive states which provoke critical dialogues.

Woolford graduated with an MA from the Royal College of Art (Contemporary Art Practice) and Cum Laude from the Design Academy Eindhoven (Media and Culture). They were the 2023-24 Interpretation Artist in Residence at Tate and a New Contemporaries 2023 Artist. In 2024 they were the recipient of an Arts Council DYCP grant, and the a-n Artists Bursary.  Notable exhibitions include live performances at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and exhibitions and performances across London, such as HOME by Ronan Mckenzie, Somerset House; Black Cultural Archives; V&A; Gucci flagship store; Camden Art Centre; and Tate Britain.

Woolford lectures at London College of Communication and the Royal College of Art in the School of Architecture.

Tales From a London Grotto (2025)
Sat 16 Aug, 4-5 pm

Tales From a London Grotto is a collaboration between Shaun Caton and Weeks & Whitford. This new performance installation will create an immersive space of visual alchemy and enchantment. The performers will interpret and perform folkloric historical narratives, in relation to local London tributaries, and their associated histories, narratives and spirits. This occult knowledge will be uncovered through a collective mediumistic research process borrowing from psychogeography, séance, dowsing, scrying, psychometry, hypnosis and electronic voice phenomenon. The resultant performance will incorporate a grotto comprised of artefacts, sound scores, and a choreography of interrelated actions.

About Shaun Caton:

Shaun Caton has created almost 700 performances globally since the early 1980s working in museums, galleries, festivals and alternative spaces. His work is often ritualistic and dreamlike, tapping into the unseen world and making it visible in immediate and spectacular ways. Caton draws all his performances when planning them as part of the creative process. He also makes unique photomontages that relate thematically to his live works, recycling the same ritualistic objects, masks and appendages that he frequently uses in a collage type format he has invented. Caton has exhibited his paintings, drawings and animated films extensively throughout the UK and Europe. Recent highlights include il Giardino Grottesco at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019.

Caton has collaborated with Weeks & Whitford since 2015 and will do so again for their new performance as part of The London Open Live in 2025.  Weeks & Whitford have performed together since 2010; they make complex intense durational performances featuring overlapping quotidian, magical, ritualistic and transformative processes.

Breaking a dance (2025)
Thu 28 Aug, 7pm

Breaking a dance is a new live work by William Mackrell in which he attempts to jump and move under the colossal weight of penny coins glued onto his overalls. The coppery outfit glistens in a visual overload reminiscent of the sparkling embroidered suits of the Pearly Kings and Queens of London’s East End. Surrounded by fluorescent light bulbs, flickering in a natural state of breakdown, the performance is flooded with the sounds of spilling coins. Sourced from artist studio associations across London, the obsolete bulbs echo the precarious temporality of London as an environment to live and work in. As the performance unravels, these all-consuming desires and illusions of capitalism drive Mackrell’s body into inescapable exhaustion.

About William Mackrell:

William Mackrell is an artist whose performance work uses the body to delve into sensations of touch, absence and desire. Throughout his works there is an embedded thread of expanding conversations with the constant trembling city, whether this begins with sleeping on a bed of carbon paper to produce a receipt of his sleep or positioning fluorescent light tubes at the end of their life, flickering and pulsating in the diaphragm of a performer.

Mackrell graduated from the MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths (2016) and BA Painting at Chelsea College of Art, London (2005). Public gallery exhibitions include Manchester Art Gallery (2025); Lapidarium Museum, Croatia (2024); Buffalo AKG Art Museum (2017); and Dundee Contemporary Arts (2012). Residencies and awards include, Krinzinger Vienna (2023 & 2017), LaunchPad France (2019); Fluxus Art Projects (2021); Manchester Contemporary Art Fund (2017); and Arts Council England (2014).

Public collections include Manchester Art Gallery; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Lapidarium Museum Croatia; and Goldsmiths Alumni Collection. Mackrell’s work has been exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, Paris (2021); Liste Basel (2022); ArtBo Bogota (2019); Arco Madrid (2018); LUNGLEY Gallery, London (2023); The Ryder – Art Gallery, Madrid (2021); and Galerie Krinzinger Vienna (2019).

By Word of Mouth (2025)
Thu 28 Aug, 7pm

By Word of Mouth is a new improvised work of 40 minutes, arising from Tim Etchells’ interest in the poetics of the commonplace, the discarded and the overlooked. After conducting research walks around Whitechapel, noting down fragments of overheard conversation, mobile phone calls, graffiti sentences, signs and slogans, the artist will animate the materials he’s gathered, tuning in to the desires, narratives and unconscious mutterings of the city. In the performance diverse language materials are placed side by side, mixing distinct impulses and reflections, in an improvised dialogue with Etchells’ collaborator, violinist Aisha Orazbayeva.

About Tim Etchells:

Tim Etchells is a UK-based artist and author whose work spans performance, visual art, and fiction. His projects and public installations have been presented at major institutions around the world including Tate Modern, Frieze Sculpture, Hayward Gallery, Kunsthalle Vienna, and Centre Pompidou Paris. Etchells has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as director of the world-renowned Sheffield performance group Forced Entertainment, as well as collaborating with numerous musicians, artists, and performers including Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods, Marino Formenti, Tony Buck (The Necks), and Aisha Orazbayeva.

Etchells’ collection of short fiction Endland was published by And Other Stories in 2019 and his book on Forced Entertainment Certain Fragments is widely celebrated for its insights on collective performance making. Monographs on his work with Forced Entertainment and on his body of neon installations were published in 2023 by Spector Books in Germany. Etchells’ awards include the Manchester Fiction Prize in 2019, the Tate / Live Art Development Agency Legacy: Thinker In Residence (2008), the artist of the city of Lisbon in 2014, and the Spalding Gray Award in February (2016). Under his leadership, Forced Entertainment received the International Ibsen Award 2016 for its groundbreaking contribution to contemporary theatre and performance.

The Hares, The Trolls, Dragon and Tooth Cruise (2025) 
Thu 4 Sep, 7pm

London-based collaboration Plastique Fantastique is produced by Ana Benlloch, David Burrows, Arianne Churchman, Tom Clark, Benedict Drew, Marie Marshall, Alex Marzeta, Vanessa Page, Frankie Roberts and Simon O’Sullivan. For London Open Live, they will present a new performance-fiction about humans and their technologies, and other animals. The group will use songs, improvisation, enaction of scenarios and storytelling, as well as masks, objects and projections, to present a communiqué addressing meme cultures and their political and social effects. The group draw upon Hollywood cinema, science fiction and folk traditions – fictions of the near and far future and from the past – to speculate on human-technological-animal relations and community.

About Plastique Fantastique:

Plastique Fantastique is a collaboration and performance fiction who have explored collective fictioning since 2005. The collaboration is currently produced by Ana Benlloch, David Burrows, Arianne Churchman, Tom Clark, Benedict Drew, Marie Marshall, Alex Marzeta, Vanessa Page, Frankie Roberts and Simon O’Sullivan. Together, the group develop fictions attending to digital and meme cultures, human and nonhuman relations, the colonisation of space and environmental change. They also address technological development and acceleration relating to their own lives and politics more broadly.