Friday 16th October, 7-10pm, 2020, OPEN Ealing Arts Centre
‘D I S T A N C E D’ is a series of events born out of necessity. It’s motivated by a desire to support performance art, artists and audiences in London at this challenging time.
‘D I S T A N C E D’ provides a supportive inclusive environment and encourages inter generational dialogue by working with emergent, mid career and established artists. It doesn’t impose curatorial themes. It simply works with a set of precautions designed to limit the risk of infection.
See below to find out more about our participating artists…
VIVIAN CHINASA EZUGHA
‘HAVING DOUBLE TONGUE’
Vivian Chinasa Ezugha, Winner of the NAE Open Main Prize 2019.
Ezugha is a Nigerian-born artist living and working in Hampshire. Her work looks at the transition of Black women and their identity within culture from colonised subjects to emancipated figures. Vivian works predominantly in performance, using the medium to decontextualise and reconstruct what it means to be alive in this present time and protest for a world where dreams are equal. She is the founder of Live Art in Wymondham, a one-day site-specific event that aimed to bring emerging artists working in live art to rural Norfolk.
Ezugha’s work has been presented in venues across Europe, America and the UK to include: In Between Time Festival as part of the New Bloods Commission, SPILL Festival and Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival.
Visit Vivain’s Website…
Selected Works…
JOSEPH MORGAN SCHOFIELD
‘DEVOTION, OR A MONUMENT IN THE WIND’
I work with action and words. I understand my works as acts of mythopoesis, as process driven embodiments of different ways of being in other possible worlds. I think of art-making as technology of divination, a way to vision, prophecy or fiction [other] [queer] futurities.
I describe my performances as queer ritual action. Ritual is primarily a way of entering into a different mode of being, of tuning into a different frequency, a kind of mythic time found in the cracks and forgotten places of quotidian experience. Ritual is about process, about fidelity to the senses, about subverting the primacy of observation [sight], a commingling of the senses with desire and memory. Ritual is a strategy through which alternate forms of gathering and belonging, and different kinds of kinships and relations might be imagined.
My queer identity and non-binary body charge my work and politics.
My ritual actions often involve difficulty and duress, foregrounding the immediacy of the sweating, bleeding, leaking body. Myths and memories are disassembled and distilled into a queer poetics of body, material, text, time and space.
I value sustained attention, focus, connection, challenge, discomfort. In distillation, I hope to complicate. I seek to tug on all kinds of (in)visible tensions – noise violence beauty silence resilience refusal plurality excess hope.
I often work in ways that are semi-scored, ‘channeling’ desires, impulses and ideas as ‘spirits’ in unfolding explorations of desire, memory and endurance.
I seek always to be responsive to site and environment. I draw on encounters with landscapes – which I understand as the meeting of self(s), place and time – and seek to (un)earth them, finding, remembering or imagining new and lost terrains.
I am seeking, through performance, to hold a space where one might feel time, and meet ghosts – a space where we (you and I) might process, mourn, desire or commune.
They are an associate artist of ]performance s p a c e[, a member of Chisenhale Dance Space, and a frequent collaborator of Venice International Performance Art Week. Joseph has performed throughout the UK – including at Tempting Failure, Arnolfini, Camden People’s Theatre and ]performance s p a c e[ – and internationally in France, Germany, Greece and Italy.
Photo Credits: Ian Whitford
Performance Platform 