Collaborators

Oreet Ashery is a London-based visual artist, working in performance, still and moving image, objects and writing, mainly in the context of post-identity and minority discourses, and continuously explores the participatory nature of events, situations and public platforms. Ashery is interested in the body and everyday life, presently around performances of western liberation; current and historical trajectories of political nakedness under the meshing of changing ideologies. Ashery explores eccentric performances, actions and speeches of fictional and real public figures in the realms of populist and trashy mediascapes, currently in relation to neo-orientalism and imagined nationhood.

Ashery exhibits, performs, intervenes and screens her work extensively in an international context. Public spaces have included the Liverpool Biennial, Venice Biennial, ZKM, Tate Modern, Brooklyn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Freud Museum and the National Review of Live Art. Context-responsive locations have included curators’ bedrooms in various cities, a men only religious celebration, Qualandia checkpoint and a derelict fishermen’s hut. Ashery is represented by the Other Gallery in Shanghai and Beijing. Ashery’s work has been discussed in numerous art, academic and cultural publications in many languages. She has published Dancing with Men: Interactive Performances, Interactions and Other Artworks (Live Art Development Agency, 2009), and The Novel of Nonel and Vovel, a collaborative graphic novel with Larissa Sansour (Charta, 2009), an expanded project including live events, solo exhibitions and residencies.

Ashery is an honorary research fellow in the drama department at Queen Mary University London, and a lecturer in the art department in Goldsmiths.

Dickie Beau is a London-based drag fabulist who performs internationally. His shows include BLACKOUTS: TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS (2012), LOST IN TRANS (2013) and the Duckie productions READERS WIFES FAN CLUB (2010) and COPYRIGHT CHRISTMAS (2011). He won Best Alternative Performer in the 2012 London Cabaret Awards and is currently shortlisted for the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2014.

www.dickiebeau.com

Mel Brimfield is an artist working in film and live performance. The roots of her practice lie in her long-term commitment to devising support structures for the development and coherent presentation of interdisciplinary performance work. Operating as an independent curator and producer in the early part of her career, she devised projects ranging from gallery exhibitions, cabarets and performance festivals spanning several days, to radio and website broadcasts, book and CD publications, and short film productions and screenings for a variety of institutions and agencies. Between 2006/2008, she was Associate Producer at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, and also founded Brown Mountain College of the Performing Arts with Sally O’Reilly and Ben Roberts.

Brimfield continues to rope in the services of a diverse range of performers to realise her own complex productions. Much of her recent work is based on fictional landmark multi-part TV series This Is Performance Art, hosted by arts broadcasting figurehead Sir Francis Spalding (actor Tony Green) – a bitchy raconteur, bon viveur and national treasure modelled after Ned Sherrin and Kenneth Tynan. An ongoing succession of exhibitions and large-scale live works accompany the release of each new episode, the first supported by a residency at Camden Arts Centre in 2011 and a solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2011.

Brimfield is a Cocheme fellow at Byam Shaw (Central St Martins), and is represented by Ceri Hand Gallery.

Hélène Cixous’ experiments in writing, including the development of ‘l’écriture feminine’ for which she is renowned, have had a wide-ranging influence on the fields of cultural theory, feminism, philosophy, literary criticism and theatre practice. She is Professor Emerita of English Literature and Women’s Studies at the Université Paris 8 and Andrew D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University, New York.

Hugo Glendinning is an internationally renowned photographer whose work spans collaborations with visual artists on photographic and video works, theatre, dance and performance documentation, and portraits of prominent figures.

www.hugoglendinning.com/

Alphonso Lingis is one of the most original voices in Contemporary American philosophy. He is the author of fourteen major works over the last forty years, including The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, The Imperative, Dangerous Emotions, Trust, and Violence and Splendor. He is also the preeminent English translator of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Penn State University.

Brian Massumi is the author of major works in contemporary philosophy including Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. He is also the translator of significant works of French philosophy including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, and Jacques Attali's Noise.

Bernard Stiegler is the author of numerous works of philosophy including his three volume series Technics and Time (Stanford), For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010), Uncontrollable Societies and Disaffected Individuals (2013) and What Makes Life Worth Living (2013). He is one of the founders of the political group Ars Industrialis based in Paris, which calls for an industrial politics of spirit, by exploring the possibilities of the technology of spirit. He was the director of the department of cultural development at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, Deputy Director General of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, then Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).

Ben Walters is cabaret editor of Time Out London and creator of BURN, the platform for moving images by cabaret artists. As a film and television critic, Ben has written books about Orson Welles, The Office (BFI TV Classics) and, with JM Tyree, The Big Lebowski (BFI Film Classics). He has also programmed seasons on Bernard Herrmann and the Coen brothers for the National Film Theatre and presented research on Orson Welles’s television work to the Film and Education Research Academy at Columbia University, New York. He remains a regular contributor to Film Quarterly, Sight & Sound, the Guardian, BBC Radio and Time Out, where he was deputy film editor from 2005 to 2007. While based in New York from 2007 to 2009, Ben wrote about the work of the Kuchar brothers, Kenneth Anger, John Waters, Quentin Crisp and Penny Arcade, as well as Joe E Jeffreys’ Drag Show Video Vérité archival project. As Time Out London’s current cabaret editor, Ben is particularly interested in the collaboration between performers and audience on which cabaret depends. He has co-produced events for Time Out Live including Alternative Eurovision and Art or Bust? The Great Burlesque Debate. In 2010, Ben created BURN, which has showcased film, video and video-interactive live work by many of London’s leading cabaret artists. He holds a BA in English from Trinity College, Cambridge, an MA in the history of film and visual media from Birkbeck College, University of London, and an MA in arts journalism from the Journalism School at Columbia University, New York.