London Open Live

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

While the group also produce drawings, posters, installations, comics and films, performance is central to their practice, which involves storytelling, ritual actions, tarot readings, singing, noise and music making. Performances involve transformations of avatars, film projections and use of masks, objects, food and other ‘tech-animals’ to tell a story. The group draw upon science fiction and folk traditions – fictions of the near and far future and from the past – to produce events, communiqués and performances that embody spirits, draw on the sciences and aim at affective transportation, for the group and their audience. The group recently exhibited in Profanations at Fidelidade Arte Lisbon (2023), The Inverted Tower La Casa Encendida Madrid (2024) and Tarot – Origins and Afterlives, Warburg Institute London (2025).

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).

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.

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.

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.