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20 October | 7pm | £5
Whitechapel Gallery hosts a discussion between Hetain Patel, a multidisciplinary artist and contributor to Whitechapel Gallery’s Moving Bodies, Moving Images exhibition, Lois Keidan, co-founder of Live Art Development Agency (LADA), and artist Leah Clements, asking the question – has performance art become institutionalised or does it still hold the power to challenge the institution?
During the course of the evening these two speakers will reflect on the space practitioners have carved for themselves in the canon of contemporary art and developments in the field during the latter half of the 20th century, while approaching the obstacles that performance art continues to face, and visions for the future of live art.
It has been some 60 years since performance art entered the contemporary art institution, and 20 years since Whitechapel Gallery staged A Short History of Performance Part One. As Whitechapel celebrates a season of live art practice through three new exhibitions, the Gallery takes stock of where the discipline stands now.
Hetain Patel works across film, performance, painting and costume design to look at ‘identity and language, challenging common assumptions based on how we look or where we come from.’ Growing up in a working-class British Gujarati household on the outskirts of Bolton, Patel turned to popular culture as an escape from racial abuse and social alienation. Patel works across multiple languages, culturally and artistically, and often collaborates with artists from different disciplines and with family members.
Lois Keidan co-founded the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) in 1999, serving as its director until 2021. Prior to this she was Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, Performance Art Officer at Arts Council of Great Britain, and previously held roles at The Midland Group Nottingham, and Theatre Workshop, Edinburgh.
Leah Clements is an artist from and based in East London whose practice spans performance, film, photography, writing, installation, and other media. Her work is concerned with the relationship between psychological, emotional, and physical states often through personal accounts of unusual or hard-to-articulate experiences. Her practice also focuses on sickness/cripness/disability in art, in critical and practical ways. Recent commissions include work for the Chisenhale Gallery, Eastside Projects and the ICA, an artist residency at Serpentine Galleries, and the upcoming solo exhibition ‘INSOMNIA’ at South Kiosk, London.
IG: @leah_r_clements
