Jocelyn Pook
Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist
Hoxton Hall
14 July 2018, 7.30pm
Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist
World première of a new work by Jocelyn Pook
Exploring anxiety, voice hearing and now hysteria, Jocelyn Pook presents the final part in her trilogy of works that probe mental health and wellbeing in its many manifestations, Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist, was commissioned by PS/Y and supported by the Wellcome Trust and Culture&. The work concludes the trilogy, which began with Hearing Voices in 2012 followed by the Anxiety Fanfare and Variations for Voices and Ensemble commissioned for the 2014 Anxiety Arts Festival. The Hysteria song cycle will receive its world première at Hoxton Hall on 14 July. This groundbreaking new work is the final event in the PS/Y Hysteria programme, which over the past year has explored the impact of psychological trauma on the body in new commissions in visual art, dance and music.
The performers of ‘Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist’ are:
Melanie Pappenheim mezzo-soprano
Laura Moody cello/voice
Kate Shortt cello/voice
Jocelyn Pook viola/voice
Dragan Aleksić and Georgina Anderson video
With the participation of clinical advisor Dr Stéphanie Courtade, along with testimonies of others
Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist explores the impact of trauma and stress on the body through the testimonials of 10 people’s experiences of psychosomatic phenomena, alongside conversations with psychiatrist Dr Stéphanie Courtade who has been both clinical advisor and participant in the work. Scored for mezzo-soprano, viola, two cellos and recorded voices, with an accompanying video work by Dragan Aleksić and Georgina Anderson, the music explores health, illness and wellbeing and the relationship between mind and body in contemporary society. The performance will be followed by a Q & A with the composer Jocelyn Pook, Dr Stéphanie Courtade and members of the Dragon Cafe chaired by artistic director of Culture& and PS/Y Dr Errol Francis.
Cally Spooner
several lectures on Display (managed tears, unscripted skin, riots)
The Anatomy Lecture Theatre, King’s College
21 April 2018 – 2.00pm-5.00pm
several lectures on Display (managed tears, unscripted skin, riots) is the fifth in a series of transdisciplinary gatherings organised by Cally Spooner and commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. Bringing together neurologists, psychiatrists, cultural theorists and dancers the event will explore physical conditions that are psychosocial in origin, and which display themselves in response to psychological stressors or conflicts. Beginning with human skin, then expanding scale to humiliation and nervous breakdowns at a societal level, several lectures will be presented on how the historical and embodied character of experience arrives ‘hysterically’, symbolically (less so verbally) in today’s 21st Century infosphere.
Contributors include Dr Isabel Valli (neurologist and psychiatrist, King’s College London); Prof Naomi Segal (Visiting Professor in French & German Studies, Birkbeck, University of London); Cally Spooner, and more to be announced.
several lectures on Display (managed tears, unscripted skin, riots ) is made possible with support from King’s College London Arts and Humanities World Service Project 2016-18 and funding from Arts Council England and Wellcome Trust.
Image: Cally Spooner, several lectures on Display (managed tears, unscripted skin, riots), 2018. King’s College London.Commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. Photo by Anne Tetzlaff
Victoria Sin Ft Whiskey Chow and Shy One
A View From Elsewhere, a fantasy in three acts
Cafe OTO
30 March 2018 – 8.00pm
PS/Y’s Hysteria programme presents a multimedia fantasy on the experience of desire, shame and identification of the material queer body by artist Victoria Sin, featuring performance by Whiskey Chow and original soundtrack by Shy One. The performance will be followed by DJ set from Shy One.
A View From Elsewhere stages a series of narratives from personal to scientific, drawing on research into embodiment through lip syncing, the pathologization of queer behaviour in evolutionary theory, and a story of wilful self sacrifice in an attempt to join with an other. Structured in three acts, these narratives form a heavily constructed fantasy on the often-unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.
Lighting by Cecilia Barragan, Costumes by Ingrid Krafchenko and wig styling by Naomi Fuller.
Victoria Sin is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. This includes: Drag as a practice of purposeful embodiment questioning the reification and ascription of ideal images within technologies of representation and systems of looking; Science fiction as a practice of rewriting patriarchal and colonial narratives naturalized by scientific and historical discourses on states of sexed, gendered and raced bodies; Storytelling as a collective practice of centering marginalized experience, creating a multiplicity of social contexts to be immersed in and strive towards.
Shy One / Mali Larrington-Nelson has been working with music since 2003, when a youth club DJ course with scratch wizard DJ Blakey introduced her to mixing, after which she started collecting early Grime White Labels by artists such as Wiley, Target, Danny Weed, DaVinChe, Musical Mobb and Dizzee Rascal – and to DJ as part of a crew.
A year later she began to play with Fruityloops, and searching for her own sound Mali disguised herself using the face of a cartoon character and the name Shy One as she shared her music online. Shy One’s Decaffeinated Love EP was singed to Scratcha DVA’s label, and with her recent Waterfalls EP Shy One has found her individual sound and confidence as a musician.
Whiskey Chow is a London-based artist and Chinese drag king. Coming from an activist background in China, Whiskey has been engaging with political issues in her practice, Whiskey also explores female masculinity, stereotypes and cultural projections of Chinese/Asian identity. Studied at Royal College of Art (UK), Whiskey interdisciplinarily making performance, moving image and experimental sound piece.
Prior moved to the UK, Whiskey has worked closely with local queer communities in Guangzhou and contributed as actor, co-playwright and sound designer in the production of ‘For Vaginas’ Sake’ (2013) (將陰道獨白到底, the original Chinese version of The Vagina Monologues).
Image: Victoria Sin ft. Whiskey Chow and Shy One, A View From Elsewhere, 2018. Café OTO. Part of PS/Y’s Hysteria. Photo by Anne Tetzlaff
Farah Saleh
Brexit means Brexit!
Siobhan Davies Studios
23 March 2018 – 7.30pm
A new contemporary dance performance by Palestinian UK-based choreographer Farah Saleh, investigating the collective mental health of UK residents after the EU Referendum.
Beginning with Theresa May’s famously repeated phrase, “Brexit means Brexit!”, the performance considers factors that led to the vote, but more importantly the impact of the current political situation: the uncertainty, frustration, and polarization of society.
Developed in collaboration with Victoria Tischler, Professor of Arts and Health, Head of the Dementia Care Centre, University of West London, Brexit means Brexit! explores how the political divide manifests on a physical, emotional and social level. How does Brexit affect the UK’s European residents, for both those who voted to leave and those who voted to remain?
Choreography: Farah Saleh
Research: Farah Saleh and Victoria Tischler
Dancers: Robert Hesp and Tanja Erhart
Costume design: Jill Skulina
Produced by PS/Y, with initial research period supported by Candoco Dance Company
Commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria
Film by Beth Chalmers
Thanks to Dance Base, Edinburgh
Farah Saleh is a Palestinian dancer and choreographer active in Palestine, Europe and the United States. She has studied linguistic and cultural mediation in Italy and in parallel continued her studies in contemporary dance. Since 2010, she has taken part in local and international projects with Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Company (Palestine), the Royal Flemish Theatre and Les Ballets C de la B (Belgium), Mancopy Dance Company (Denmark/Lebanon), Siljehom/ Christophersen (Norway) and Candoco Dance Company (UK). Also since 2010, Saleh has been teaching dance, coordinating and curating artistic projects with the Palestinian Circus School, Sareyyet Ramallah and the Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival. In 2016 she co-founded Sareyyet Ramallah Dance Summer School, which runs on a yearly basis. In 2014 she won the third prize of the Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) organised by A.M. Qattan Foundation in Palestine for her installation A Fidayee Son in Moscow and in 2016 she won the dance prize of Palest’In and Out Festival in Paris for the duet La Même. She is currently an Associate Artist at Dance Base in Edinburgh, UK.
Image: Farah Saleh, Brexit means Brexit! 2018. Siobhan Davies Studios. Commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. Photos by Anne Tetzlaff
ULAPAARC (Paul Abbott and Cara Tolmie)
Eagress
Camden Arts Centre
7 March 2018 – 7.00pm
PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and Camden Arts Centre present Eagress, a new performance by ULAPAARC, the collaborative work of Paul Abbott and Cara Tolmie.
Through drums, voice, movement and text, Abbott and Tolmie will investigate the psychoanalytic concept of ‘hysteria’ as a complex, historical set of negotiations between bodies and their description.
Drawing from questions surrounding language, performance and the body as page, their work will explore the conflict of articulation that arises between authorial institutions – such as The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders (1952) – and the enigmatic language of ‘somatic symptoms’ spoken through the skin of the so-called hysteric body.
Eagress aims to generate learning through site-specific experimentation and derail authoritative, normalising vocabularies in favour of a more complex set of agrammatic and non-verbal languages, referencing Naomi Segal’s observation: ‘If the hysteric’s body does the speaking, it is on her surface—gestures, voice, the skin—that the act of speaking takes place.’
Naomi Segal, ‘Witnessing through the skin: the hysteric’s body as text’, in Journal of Romance Studies, vol 9 no. 3, Winter 2009: 73–85.
Paul Abbott is an artist and musician based in London, working through questions and feelings connecting music and language: using real and imaginary drums, synthetic sounds, performance and writing. His current collaborations include XT & lll人 with Seymour Wright and Daichi Yoshikawa, Falls with Keira Greene, ULAPAARC with Cara Tolmie and a quartet project with Tolmie, Wright and Will Holder. Recent releases include solo’s Sphuzo, qno, & Vagus and Pah’ (XT), and vjerhanxsk (lll人). He is one of the co-editors of Cesura//Acceso and was one of the Sound and Music ‘Embedded’ resident artists at Cafe Oto 2015-16. Abbott has collaborated and performed with numerous other artists and musicians, including Benedict Drew, Pat Thomas, Ute Kanngiesser, Billy Steiger, Bill Orcutt, Danny Haywood, Joel Grip, Brandon La Belle, Eddie Prevost, Steve Noble, Sebastian Lexer, Evan Parker and Otomo Yoshihide.
Cara Tolmie works from within the intersections of performance, music and moving image. Her works probe the site-specific conditions of performance-making by finding ways to vocalise and place her body in order to access the political and poetic capabilities of physical, written and musical languages. Collective practice is an intrinsic component of Cara’s ongoing work. She regularly collaborates with: Paul Abbott as ULAPAARC; artists Kimberley O’Neill/France-Lise McGurn; collective vocal group DRANG (Mia Edelgart, Deirdre Humphreys, Katrine Gjerding and Anna Waerum); artist Patrick Staff on the ongoing performance Litmus Shuffle; and, as a quartet with Will Holder, Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright. More recently, Tolmie has also collaborated with artist Corin Sworn and on new performance Aphelion Slip with dancer Zoë Poluch and artist Kim Coleman using intelligent lighting, movement and sound.
Images: ULAPAARC (Cara Tolmie and Paul Abbott), Eagress, 2018. Camden Arts Centre. Commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. Photos by Manuela Barczewski
RE:CREATE Psychiatry and Dragon Café
Hysteria: Contested, Popularised, Diagnosed
Dragon Café
5 – 26 March – Mondays 6.30pm-8.30pm
A series of RE:CREATE Psychiatry events – performances, screenings, and openhearted discussion – at The Dragon Café every Monday throughout March 2018, 6.30pm to 8.30pm
Hysteria is a contested term. It has been framed as an exaggerated, uncontrollable emotion, and diagnosed as the emanation of a psychological trauma manifesting through physical symptoms. Rooted in medical history, our relationship with the term “hysteria” has evolved, mediated by notions of gender, race, and politics. It is entwined with our cultural identities, and firmly embedded in popular vocabularies. We have all laughed hysterically, looked away when someone was “being” hysterical, or worried about being branded hysterical ourselves.
This March RE:CREATE Psychiatry will study the term:
• to understand the social constructs within which it has evolved, • to understand how these constructs influence perceptions of people with mental health experiences in services and beyond • and to crystallise what mental health services can learn from the complex history of the hysterical.
The weekly series of evening events will include an exploration of colonial hysteria and post-colonial experiences in Being BAME, an examination of the politics of language and gender performativity in Unreliable Narrator. We will be asking whether Fake News and the NHS is a modern hysteria, and delving into the shared experiences of the Heterotopias of Mental Health Care.
Grounding our study of hysteria in PS/Y’s research and wider Hysteria programme, RE:CREATE Psychiatry will look to further our understanding of the term – its history, and its present – by considering it within a RE:CREATE Psychiatry contextual framework and bringing the voices of mental health professionals and those with experience together to bear on the conversation.
RE:CREATE Psychiatry events are open to all and are open drop-ins – there is no need to RSVP. All mental health professionals and those with lived experience are welcome and free to arrive later or leave earlier.
RE:CREATE Psychiatry is an exploratory platform, born of The Dragon Café, which works to facilitate open and equal forms of dialogue between those who use mental health services and those who provide them. Through conversation, facilitated yet unfettered, RE:CREATE Psychiatry carves out a space where engagement is predicated on experience not role.
By piecing together the collective, multi-perspectival yet genuinely shared understandings elicited through its unique dialogic model, it allows clinicians and service-users to address – together – the challenges of working in and working through the mental healthcare system.
To receive further information about RE:CREATE and for opportunities to take part in RE:CREATE Psychiatry events and workshops, email amneet@mentalfightclub.com, or visit www.recreatepsychiatry.com to subscribe to their mailing list.
Image: RE:CREATE Psychiatry ShrinkRadio event ‘State of Emergency: is there space for empathy in a time of crisis?’ at Wellcome Collection, November 2016. Photo by Liz Gorman
Fiona James and Jessica Wiesner
YOU ARE THAT TECHNICALITY
Flat Time House
3 March 2018 – 11.00am-5.30pm
PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and Flat Time House present a daylong workshop with Fiona James and Jessica Wiesner.
As artists and researchers coming from a sculptural background, Fiona James and Jessica Wiesner consider neurological plasticity to be a sculpt-able surface. Building on their previous collaborative practice, this daylong workshop investigates trauma and involuntary gesture as manifestations of the assertion that ‘the body critiques its environment’ (James/Wiesner).
Following an introduction to Polyvagal theory, participants are invited to take part in embodied exercises and group discussion to consider the body as a site of continual adaption, addressing how control, security, neglect and transience work for, and against, typical notions of subjectivity. This will be followed by an experience of Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE), a series of simple exercises activating natural reflex mechanisms to assist the body in releasing deep muscular patterns of stress, tension and trauma.
Due to the nature of the workshop, there are a limited number of places and a requirement to commit to the whole day. A meal will be provided and shared during the workshop.
ARTISTS’ STATEMENT:
‘My body critiques me daily – sluggish from drinking or tense from slack stress management, I try its complaints on for size and walk around in how they sculpt me.
Perhaps, the question is how do these outfits hack the hold of habit?’ (James/Wiesner)
This day long workshop is concerned with conveyance. Following the hysteric and their wisdom that even the self is a blind spot, these flows of understanding, communication and coherence exist not in binaries of say voluntary and involuntary actions but across a spectrum of corporeal operations. After all we are creatures of gesture, motioning out into environment consciously and otherwise. This work-day will be a space to collectively embrace and exploit this abundance, not to work towards correction but to suggest coherence is a shifting state from which adaption sculpts and becomes sculpt-able.
Split into three segments we will begin with an in-depth introduction to Polyvagal theory; a recent paradigm shift, radically overwriting notions of ‘the self’ through its material emphasise on interpersonal adaptation and collective regulation. We will move through embodied exercises and group discussion to further our grasp of how the body critiques its environment, offering transient testimony legible in a logic of inter-relational grounding; a non-verbal lexicon.
The second leg of the day will pivot off the offer to experience Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) which uses the feedback of flesh to enter the brain’s archive, reconfiguring potential behavioural responses via the evolutionary structures of memory and effects it has on our armouring and activation. We have been working with this readership modality (that utilises a mammalian mechanism, normally suppressed by the strain of the social, made visible by the tremor; an involuntary yet knowing release) for the past year to assert that the subject is supple, and its resources abundant when trained in a receptive trust that looks beyond what is already articulable.
From this state of enhanced activation, pulsing and plastic, we will move on to dissect how the bodies natural coping systems and networks of conveyance, so often overwritten by language could be scaled up and outward towards a felt infrastructural knowledge; finding abundance in this elusive evidence towards a form of ‘fleshtimony’.
– Fiona James and Jessica Wiesner
Through their long-term collaboration, Fiona James and Jess Wiesner consider collective anxiety a mobiliser of alternative realities with outcomes including: ‘The Distractible Reading Room’ Kunstraum, London; ‘Co-rroboration’, South London Gallery, London; ‘The Incident’, Whitstable Biennale; and, ‘Kino’, Queen Mary University.
Fiona James’ work alines theoretical investigation with performance and has been presented at Residency Unlimited, New York; JVE, Maastricht; Kunstraum, London; Anxiety Arts Festival, London; ICA, London; and, Temporary-Kunsthalle, Berlin. Co-founder of Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, a not-for-profit site (opening 2018), she is currently training in Brainspotting and as a Trauma and Stress Release (TRE) practitioner.
Jess Wiesner is an artist and researcher whose collaborative projects and solo work have been exhibited at Hessel Museum of Art, New York; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge; Tate Modern, London; KW, Berlin; Montague Space, London; CIC, Cairo; Chisenhale Gallery, London. With a practice that looks to alternative forms of agency, she is currently undertaking research into ill-fitting actions through an AHRC funded PhD (Northumbria/Sunderland Universities).
Cinenova Distribution
Hysteria and the Hybrid Body
Cafe OTO
17 February 2018 – 7.30pm
FILM PROGRAMME PRESENTED BY PS/Y’S HYSTERIA AND CINENOVA
PIA ARKE, LALEEN JAYAMANNE, LANA LIN AND TRAN, T.KIM-TRANG
DJ SET BY EVAN IFEKOYA
PS/Y’s Hysteria and Cinenova Distribution present a programme of moving image work made by women that utilises the female body or feminist perspective to redefine iterations of the term hysteria as a tool for colonial power.
This evening takes its title from an essay written by Priyadarshini Vigneswaran about Sri Lankan-born filmmaker Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon, which will be screened in 16 mm alongside work by Tran, T. Kim-Trang, Lana Lin and Pia Arke, with a DJ set by Evan Ifekoya.
Laleen Jayamanne, A Song of Ceylon (1985, Australia), 16 mm
The title A Song of Ceylon mimics Basil Wright’s 1934 documentary about the then British colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). However, where Wright’s film employs a colonial voice to narrate the life of the island’s inhabitants, Laleen Jayamanne invokes a woman’s ritual exorcism – expanding the language of filmmaking into a study of perception, emotion and hybrid states of being.
A new essay by Jayamanne about A Song of Ceylon will be available on the evening.
Tran, T. Kim-Trang, ekleipsis (1998, USA), SD Video to Digital
ekleipsis delves into two histories: the history of hysteria and the Cambodian civil war. Tran, T. Kim-Trang weaves together texts of these histories along with a composite case study of Cambodian women living in California who are suffering from hysterical blindness – that is, sight loss brought about by traumatic stress – and the artist’s mother. The video speaks about the somatisation of pain and loss and expresses the inspiration found in those who survive traumatic events and utilise their experiences to reflect on life in positive ways.
Lana Lin, Stranger Baby (1995, USA), 16 mm
Substituting sly metaphor for political rhetoric on immigration, Lana Lin examines our world of ethical and racial complexities. Framed as a mock science fiction, Stranger Baby, offers different perspectives on what it means to be human and what is labelled alien: A woman is haunted by an androgynous apparition; female characters peer out of sci-fi past; curious faces flicker on a TV screen. Their often anxiety-ridden communications issue from technology, memory and fantasy. Excerpts from interviews and scripted narrative weave into an internal monologue that addresses both the threatening and attractive aspects of the alien.
Pia Arke, Arktisk hysteri [Arctic Hysteria] (1996, Denmark), S-VHS to Digital
The term ‘Arctic Hysteria’ was coined by western explorers to describe an allegedly culture-specific psychopathological phenomenon affecting Inuit people living within the Arctic Circle. The condition, which manifested as screams, convulsions and loss of self-control, supposedly appeared in the winter and especially in women. In Arktisk hysteri, Greenlandic-born artist Pia Arke crawls naked across a photographic image of the landscape of Nuugaarsuk, Greenland. Padding, stroking, sniffing and rolling around, she penetrates the landscape of her childhood home and slowly destroys the image.
Pia Arke was born in Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, and lived and worked in Copenhagen, Denmark. Arke is recognised as one of the Nordic region’s most important postcolonial critics. Through photography, collage, video, installation and writing, Arke examined the places where she lived as a child and the historical colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. Her work encouraged Denmark to re-examine the colonial history of Greenland. While she participated in a number of exhibitions during her lifetime, the first major survey of her work did not take place until after her death in 2007 with Tupilakosaurus at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art and The National Museum of Denmark (2010), Copenhagen, both curated by Kuratorisk Aktion. Arkes’ work has recently been shown and collected by museums including Louisiana, Copenhagen, Denmark; Brandts Museum of Art and Visual Culture, Odense, Denmark; and Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden. Most recently, her work has been shown as part of the exhibition Muros Blandos [Soft Walls] at Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile (2017-18).
Evan Ifekoya’s work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle. Ifekoya’s recent work has been presented at: Contemporary Arts Centre New Orleans as part of Prospect 4; Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh, New Art Exchange, Nottingham; Plymouth Arts Centre; Serpentine Galleries, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire; (2017); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; and, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2016). Recent performances have taken place at ICA, London and KW institute, Berlin (2017) and Jerwood Space, London and Whitstable Biennial (2016). Ifekoya was an Art Foundation Fellow in Live Art for 2017.
Laleen Jayamanne taught cinema Studies in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney. She received her BA from the University of Ceylon, her MA from New York University and her PhD from the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on cross-cultural film criticism, feminist film theory, and Deleuzean film theory. Some of Jayamanne’s published works include: The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (2015), Towards Cinema and its Double: Cross-cultural Mimesis (2001), The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (1997) and Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment (1995).
Lana Lin is an artist/filmmaker and scholar whose recent work concerns embodied vulnerabilities that emerge at the confluence of race, gender, technology and malignant cell growth. Lin has produced a body of experimental films and videos that interrogate the politics of identity and cultural translation through attention to the formal capacities and historical contingencies of moving image media. For over a decade she has also focused on collaborative multi-disciplinary research-based projects (as Lin + Lam) that examine the construction of history and collective memory. Her work has been shown at international venues including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, New Museum, The Kitchen, and the Queens Museum, New York, Mass MOCA, the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China. Her manuscript on the psychic effects of cancer, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press.
Tran, T. Kim-Trang was born in Vietnam and emigrated to the USA in 1975. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and has been producing experimental videos since the early 1990s. Her work has been exhibited internationally. In 1999 Tran presented her Blindness Series in a solo screening at the Museum of Modern Art. Two of her videos were included in the Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Blindness Series was featured at the 46th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, both in 2000. Her video project, an eight-video series investigating blindness and its metaphors was completed in 2006. Tran has been nominated for a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts and was named a 2001 Rockefeller Film/Video/Multimedia Fellow. The fellowship has enabled her to develop an experimental narrative feature titled Call Me Sugar, based on the life of her mother.
Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women. Each was formed in the early 1980s in response to the lack of recognition of women in the history of the moving image. Both organisations, although initially self-organised and unfunded, aimed to provide the means to support the production and distribution of women’s work in this area, and played critical roles in the creation of an independent and radical media. Cinenova currently distributes over 500 titles that include experimental film, narrative feature films, artists’ film and video, documentary and educational videos made from 1912 to 2001. Cinenova holds a large collection of paper materials, books and posters related to works it distributes, and the history and politics of film and video production. The thematics in the work at Cinenova include oppositional histories, postcolonial struggles, domestic and care work, representation of gender and sexuality, and importantly, the relations and alliances between these different struggles. Cinenova is a collectively organised volunteer led organisation.
Image: Laleen Jayamanne, A Song of Ceylon (1985, Australia), 16 mm. Still from film
Florence Peake and Eve Stainton
Slug Horizons
CoolTan Arts
5 – 16 February 2018
PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and CoolTan Arts present workshops and a new performance by Florence Peake and Eve Stainton.
Although the study of hysteria is multifaceted, historically the term hysteria has been defined by men and associated with women: the male gaze of society observing and analysing women’s bodies and behaviours. Florence Peake and Eve Stainton’s on-going collaborative project Slug Horizons radically reimagines this relationship by exploring the expressive potentialities of women’s bodies through intimacy, touch and collective reclaiming. Their work promotes an emotional landscape of bravery in response to restrictive normative attitudes to the intimate bodies of women.
Through a residency at CoolTan Arts, Peake and Stainton will develop their project, holding workshops that invite CoolTan Arts participants and the public into their development process. The residency will culminate in a new performance on Friday 16 February, 7.00 pm.
During the public workshop on Sunday 11 February (3.00 – 5.00 pm), artists and participants will explore sound-vibrations, intimacy and qualities of touch through movement, discussion, reflective drawing and writing.
Florence Peake is a London-based artist, dancer, choreographer, and teacher, who has been making work since 1995. Her performance practice uses drawing, painting and sculpture combined with found and fabricated objects placed in relation to the moving body. Site and audience, live and recorded text, wit and candour are key to her work, which has been presented internationally and across the UK, in contexts including Wysing Arts Centre (2017), Serpentine Galleries (2016), Whitechapel Gallery (2016), ICA (2015), Harris Museum (2015), Hayward Gallery (2014), BALTIC (2013), Frieze (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012). Florence Peake is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique, and has taught Contemporary dance technique, improvisation, and cross art form practice extensively.
Eve Stainton is an artist occupied with dancing, the process of creating performance, collaboration (notably with Michael Kitchin as The Uncollective) and recently digital collage making. Eve Stainton’s artistic work focuses on developing a space to engage with dialogue around queer identity politics, often revealing intimate parts of her life to imagine futures beyond normative societal pressures. Eve Stainton and The Uncollective have presented works at Tangente Theatre Montreal (2017), Royal Academy of Art (2017), Adelaide Fringe (2017), Guest Projects (2016), Chisenhale (2015) and The Place (2014). She also performs in the fashion and commercial industry including Vivienne Westwood, Dior, London/Paris/Shanghai Fashion Week, Goldfrapp, St Vincent and Holly Blakey.
CoolTan Arts is an award-winning arts in mental health charity for adults with experience of mental health distress, operating in South London for over 25 years. They run a vibrant community arts centre, providing a safe and supportive space, which offers creative workshops, self-advocacy, art projects, stigma-busting cultural walks, a public art gallery and an inclusive volunteering and training programme. They provide creative outlets for self-expression through art workshops, and give adults training, support and volunteering opportunities to help build professional and personal skills. Believing that mental wellbeing is enhanced by the power of creativity, they aim to help people reintegrate into life again with their friends, family and pursue education and employment.
Image: Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, Slug Horizons, 2018. CoolTan Arts. Commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. Photo by Anne Tetzlaff
Marie Kølbæk Iversen – Star Messenger
LUX
17 December 2017 – 3.00pm
PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and LUX host a screening of Star Messenger, a new moving image work by Danish artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen, accompanied by Diana Policarpo on percussion, and Gaia Fugazza’s Other Ways – a series of 90 unique porcelain sculptures to be displayed in the mouths of visitors.
The screening of Star Messenger takes place close to Winter solstice and follows Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s recent performance Autumn equinox celebration which took place at LUX earlier this year as part of PS/Y’s Hysteria programme. Expanding the artist’s research exploring the transformative potentialities of fright encountered through traumatic and shamanist processes, Star Messenger proposes a softening of the historical western divide between the rational and the irrational, the material and the magical.
In 1610 Galileo Galilei published his accounts of discovering four of Jupiter’s moons. He titled the publication “Siderius Nuncius” – star messenger – thus naming the book after Io, the innermost of the moons. Over the course of two months Io had visually – slowly, but consistently – conveyed her message to him: That she is orbiting Jupiter. That the Earth is not the centre of the Universe.
Marie Kølbæk Iversen attributes the English translation of the title of Galileo’s opus magnum to her dreamy video work Star Messenger, whereby she questions what we know and how we know it, and suggests a collapse of scientific vision with the spiritual/mythological visionary: Both draw on sightings obtained through extraordinary set-ups that may challenge habitual world-views.
Star Messenger has been produced in extension of Kølbæk Iversen’s artistic research at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Aarhus University.
Image: Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Star Messenger, 2017, still from video.
Larry Achiampong – Relic 1
The Chapel, King’s College
13 – 15 October 2017
In a seemingly desolate United Kingdom, a child-like protagonist apparates across the landscape, uncovering fragments of data that bear testimony to a forgotten Empire. Informed by technology, agency of the body, and narratives of migration, Relic 1 invites its audience on a journey consisting of moments that are simultaneously claustrophobic, traumatic, poetic and sublime. These constructed and yet familiar feelings of otherness embody situations of colonial hysteria. Relic 1 is part of Relic Traveller, Achiampong’s on-going multi-disciplinary project, which also includes PAN AFRICAN FLAG FOR THE RELIC TRAVELLERS’ ALLIANCE hoisted atop Somerset House in 2017.
Part of the King’s College Arts and Humanities Festival 2017
Image: Larry Achimapong, Relic 1, 2017. Still from film. Commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria
Marie Kølbæk Iversen
Autumn Equinox Celebration
LUX
22 September 2017 – 6.30pm
An outdoor celebration of autumn equinox led by Danish artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen and accompanied by Diana Policarpo. The evening centred around the performance of magical songs inherited by the artist from her great-great-great-great-grandparents, who in 1873 were the ethnographic subjects of folklore collector Evald Tang Christensen. The songs relate to the Southern Scandinavian shamanist culture Sejd and springs from a very different cultural source than the Protestant Christian time of their collection: They are largely (and in places explicitly) feminist, apocalyptic, anti-Christian, anti-nationalist and anti-Danish.
In the Northern hemisphere autumn equinox marks the threshold into winter darkness – and symbolically into the dreams of an extended night. It therefore celebrates the power of dreaming to unsettle the fabric of reality by rendering weird—Wyrd—and contingent, the waking life of our troubled modernity.
Image: Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Autumn Equinox Celebration, 2017. Photos by Christa Holka
Larry Achiampong, Victoria Sin, and Zadie Xa
The Soul of an Octopus
Pump House Gallery
16 September 2017 – 2.00pm
On the occasion of her solo exhibition, The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell at Pump House Gallery, Zadie Xa was joined by artists Larry Achiampong and Victoria Sin to discuss the themes of PS/Y’s Hysteria programme with director Errol Francis. Beginning with the classical definition of hysteria as it relates to bodily manifestations of psychological trauma, the conversation drew upon Xa’s work to explore forms of shapeshifting as strategies for resistance and healing.
Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc and Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld Songs of Hain
Kunstraum
9 September 2017 – 6.00pm
PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and Kunstraum presents the UK premiere of Songs of Hain, a new collaborative work by Spanish artists Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc and Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld.
Songs of Hain is an expanded documentary about the Selknam people, one of the native communities from Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego (the largest island in the southern tip of Chile and Argentina) who were almost made extinct by the European settlers in the early 20th century.
The Selknam did not use a writing system and were not image-makers but their rituals, dances, and chants had a complex and rich performativity. Their main cultural manifestation was the Hain ceremony in which men dressed up as spirits to perform the Selknam cosmogony for an audience of women and children who – not knowing that the spirits were men in disguise – experienced the performances with fear. Through the Hain ceremony masculine power was legitimised and the patriarchal social organisation of the Selknam people safeguarded.
Songs of Hain is a re-enactment of the Hain ceremony. Through research with archaeologists, Selknam descendants, and feminist activists, choreographer and musician Pablo Esbert and filmmaker Federico Strate have reinterpreted different passages of the ceremony. In collaboration with a choir and a group of folkloric dancers of diverse origins, the artists have adapted costumes, makeup, masks, chants, gestures, and dances.
Image: Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc and Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld, Songs of Hain, 2017. Still from film.
Cally Spooner
Soundtrack for a Troubled Time and Notes on Humiliation
Whitechapel Gallery
30 August – 26 November 2017
Using text, sound and choreography Cally Spooner stages absurdist replays of the political, economic and media rhetoric of our time. Comedic and dystopian, her writing nips and tucks subjectivity into the abstract phrases of a high performance economy.
At Whitechapel Gallery, Spooner presents a new sound work; and the publication of a year long interview with psychiatrist Isabel Valli. In the right channel, performer Michelangelo Miccolis counts in his native Spanish. Miccolis and Spooner collaborate regularly, she as artist in his curatorial projects, he as producer to her live productions. His numerical monologue is choked by barrages of water being bucketed over him. In the left channel we hear the sharp thwack of a golf club, obliviously and relentlessly driving the ball.
The poster series Notes on Humiliation transcribes extracts from Spooner’s interview with psychiatrist Isabel Valli. They are overlaid with drawings of human organs that produce the stress hormone, cortisol. In order to understand hysteria at a societal level, doctor and artist probe into pre-verbal communication, trauma, apocalypse and protest asking how these conditions can be captured and made visible as fact, fiction or the symbolic in 2017.
In collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery – More information
Image: Cally Spooner, Notes on Humiliation, 2018 (detail). Courtesy the artist.
Zadie Xa
The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell
Pump House Gallery
3 August – 23 September 2017
In collaboration with Pump House Gallery, PS/Y’s Hysteria programme presents the first major solo exhibition in the UK of London based Canadian artist Zadie Xa. The exhibition The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell is the narration of a displaced body’s journey and return to a ‘homeland’. Through spatial aspects of the gallery, the protagonist searches for an understanding of belonging but instead finds a concoction of excitement, rejection, and bewilderment.
Across moving-image, soundscapes, objects and textiles Zadie Xa interlaces imagined and learned Korean folklore in search of a reflexive space in which diasporic knowledge can be transformed into new realities. Filmic flashbacks, almost recognisable figures and looping dream states invite the audience to join Xa on a journey through her own memory, Korean cultural memory and future possible scenarios. Using the transformative structure of the ritual – storytelling, rhythm, and repetition – the exhibition responds to a desire to reach states of ecstatic enlightenment.
In her work Zadie Xa interweaves fact with fiction, past with future, to explore identity, desire and personal fantasy. Through circular narratives and perplexing fiction she seeks to create a space in which we can reconsider notions of national identity, cultural ownership, and folkloric displacement. Employing painting, textile, video, and sound within her storytelling, Xa’s practice is preoccupied with performative presentations where traditional cultural knowledge is passed between diasporic bodies.
This exhibition is part of PS/Y’s Hysteria programme and is curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst in partnership with Pump House Gallery.
Image: Zadie Xa, The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell, 2017, Pump House Gallery. Part of PS/Y’s Hysteria programme. Photos by Eoin Carey
Symposium
Hysteria and Art: Traumatic Coincidences
Toynbee Studios
14 January 2017
PS/Y is working towards Hysteria, a multi-disciplinary arts programme that will explore the intersection between arts and mental health with a focus on how psychological trauma is experienced as physical symptoms. The programme will take place across a range of venues and institutions in London during autumn 2017. The project explores hysteria from different points of view. In this symposium we will share the research done in collaboration with artists, scientists, academics, and clinicians towards the coming Hysteria 2017 programme.
This symposium presents research and work in progress by Prof. S P Sashidharan, Larry Achiampong, Prof. Sander L Gilman, Candoco Dance Company with Farah Saleh and Prof. Victoria Tischler, Cally Spooner with Dr. Isabel Valli, Florence Peake, Jocelyn Pook with Dr. Stéphanie Courtade and Melanie Pappenheim, and Cara Tolmie.
Visionist and Zadie Xa
Hysterical X
Cafe OTO
17 December 2016
Zadie Xa presents a new performance piece bringing together elements of video projection, sound and live storytelling. Written by Taylor Le Melle, Basic Instructions B4 Leaving is a non-linear narrative venturing into a distant cosmos where shape shifting, mutation and magic are the central themes explored.
For Hysterical X Visionist will present new material. His debut album Safe is a ‘personal portrait of anxiety’. It takes its listener on a journey through the human condition. In his own words the album is “a sound representation of an anxiety attack, from having that one thought and that thought turning into multiple thoughts, and finding yourself having an attack, and then coming out of that and managing to relax again. It takes you through that experience. That’s one of the reason’s it’s called ‘Safe’. For me, when I have anxiety I take myself away from the place that I’m in and take myself to somewhere I can be more in control.” (Dazed)
Hysterical X is part of PS/Y’s coming Hysteria programme, 2017 and follows on from Anxiety, 2014 and Anxious Xmas, 2013 and 2012.