As part of its Emerging Practices programme this autumn, Iniva is delighted to present Contemporary Rites; a three-week series of live art performances.
For Contemporary Rites, Iniva has invited 10 artists and curators to consider the role of ritual and rite in contemporary performance and live art. The act of ritual is explored from the viewpoint of three distinct rites; rites of passage, communal rites and rites of personal devotion in contemporary life.
A ritual act can feel out of place in a gallery because it may connote an act designated to be part of a religious practice. However, rituals are acted on a daily basis in everyday formats from a handshake to an act of devotion.
Social rituals of beautification and modification of the body, certain cultural and religious traditions, and the presence and historical trajectory of ritual in performance, in general, are explored through the work of the 10 artists and curators.
Thursday 6th November, 6.30-8.30pm: Jack Tan/ The Office of Public Ritual. Opening this series of performances and discussions is Jack Tan’s ongoing project The Office of Public Ritual (OPR). The OPR is a service that creates bespoke rituals for significant occasions or life events. Iniva has commissioned a ritual performance from OPR for public presentation.
Saturday 8th November, 3-5pm: Nail’d It and Rhoda Boateng. This afternoon of performance considers the corporeal and projected notions of rituals in the performance of everyday life.
Thursday 13th November, 6.30-8.30pm: Raju Rage / Raisa Kabir / Evan Ifekoya. These three performances explore the complexities of identity in contemporary artistic practice by exploring repetition, exploration and identity through communal rites of discovery.
Saturday 15th November, 3-4.30pm: In Conversation with Collective Creativity: reflections on radical creativity and space. This panel conversation will facilitate an audience discussion sparked by presentations on artistic practice around contemporary performance.
Thursday 20th November, 6.30-8.30pm: Season Butler / Ria Hartley / Jade Montserrat. A series of performances that each take distinctly different positions on the body as a site of the articulation of identity through ritual practice.
Each event is followed by a post-performance social space attended by the artists and the public to promote dialogue around each piece experienced.
Notes to Editor
Jack Tan makes work that explores the connection between the political or social and art. Prior to retraining as a potter and artist, Jack had a background in law, social policy and the voluntary sector. Jack currently teaches performance at the University of Roehampton where he is also researching the performativity of political resistance in his PhD.
Nail’d It is a curated, nomadic nail salon run by Dunya Kalantery & Angelica Sule. Working within the conventional exchanges of a nail salon, Nail’d It provides artist-designed nails for men and women, that are applied by the curators. Current artists include BEHIND THE X, Louise Ashcroft, Patrick Coyle, Nicky Deeley, Clea Jentsch, Alice Morey, Bella Pace, Adrianna Palazzolo, Kate Rieppel and Rafał Zajko. Dunya Kalantery is a curator and writer with a particular interest in audience engagement, based in London. She is currently researching the relationship between performativity, desire and labour in social, professional and everyday life. Angelica Sule is a curator whose practice focuses the use of performance and sound in exhibition-making, in both conceptual and logistical terms. Rhoda Boateng, GET REAL WITH RHODA is a brand service mainly dealing in tutorial and advice. Its current research project, SASS, A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE aims to educate on sass as a resistance tool and as a form of power projection.
Monster Terrorist Fag is a cultural collage portrait by Raju Rage. In his work Dilemma of the Diaspora to Define feat Monster Terrorist Fag he explores the concepts of how to define the diaspora as a communal act through reconstructing a space, conflicts and tensions inherent in the diasporian body. Raju Rage is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organiser who is proactive about creating space, self-representation and self-empowerment using art and activism to forge creative survival. Raisa Kabir is an art activist and has written on dress, cultural appropriation and South Asian and Muslim identity. Evan Ifekoya is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the politicisation of culture, society and aesthetics. Together with Rage and Kabir, she has formed QTIPOC, a creative practice and space that is explicitly inclusive of, created for, and by people of different sexualities, genders and colour.
Collective Creativity is a collective of artists that considers notions of identity, whether sexual, gender-based or ethnic and the performance of this in art and society. Amanprit Sandhu is a London-based curator who specialises in performance art and art in the public realm. Rituals and Rites in contemporary art is an ongoing research thread in her curatorial practice
Season Butler is a London-based writer, performance artist and teacher, and an associate producer of the I’m With You art collective. Ria Hartley is an interdisciplinary solo performance artist, researcher and educator based in the South West of England. Her current research is autobiographical and investigates the retracing of her diasporic identity through (re)locating her absent, representational, material and genetic body. Jade Montserrat is an artist and writer whose work assumes a vernacular that tears up and cuts out, magnifying symbols, repeated text and imagery that determine, question or potentially threaten aspects of her identity. The works offer a proliferation of meaning, shift existing perceptions of reality and question the nature of the artwork.
Exhibition listings Information
Live Art & Contemporary Performance: Contemporary Rites
Dates: 6 – 20 November 2014
6, 13, 20 Thurs evenings 6.30 – 8.30pm
8, 15 Sat afternoons 3-5 pm
Venue: Rivington Place, London, EC2A 3BA
Rivington Place public opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 11am – 6pm
Late Thursdays: 11am – 9pm
Saturday: 12noon – 6pm
Admission: free
info@rivingtonplace.org
www.rivingtonplace.org
Tubes: Old Street/Liverpool Street/Shoreditch High St
Rivington Place is fully accessible, for parking & wheelchair facilities call +44 (0)20 7749 1240