Lena Simic

Lena’s performance ‘Medea/Mothers’ Clothes’ is one of three projects that are interconnected thematically, as a series of interventions into female archetypal figures. Lena is interested in questioning contemporary assumptions about motherhood, the 'naming' of Others and heroism. Her projects were developed out of the 'home' setting. How she uses her creative material (script writing, home-made video style, family and friends as collaborators, close contact with audiences) is charged with 'intimacy'. She describes her art practice as an intervention into her everyday living.

Drunken Chorus

Drunken Chorus’s performance ‘Just the regrets’ is about failure, losing and regrets. It is an intimate performance piece in which five performers read out a never ending list of regrets from a stack of post-it notes, which they then stick to their bodies.

Simon Bowes

Simon Bowes’ ‘Shambolic chorus of popular songs’ is a performance project exploring popular song as a site for, or process of participation in, communal meaning / production. The project is intended to collapse the distance between performer and audience, as Simon challenges the audience members to take responsibility for the performance's success.

Johanna Gullin

For Johanna’s untitled performance, she was dressed in a garment made of fresh raspberries frozen into semi-spherical pieces of ice. A telephone call from her friend in Sweden signaled the start of the performance in which Johanna walked round and round the edge of a white sheet to the sound of her friend’s footprints in snow. The ice gradually melted producing red stains from the raspberries on Johanna and the sheet.

Yaron David

Yaron David was also on his way to perform in the NRLA. His performance a version of the "Phallic Series" was in three parts: a video, live action interacting with video, live action with objects.’The work is like a collage of different languages, connecting with phrases from the psychoanalysis (interpretations or a parody), a kind of a dark-poetic-grotesque-sometimes funny surrealistic game about sexuality, Mother and Oedipal complex, castration, women power, with a strong phallic element. The work has a strong tension between being artificial, theatrical, symbolic, and being in a real experience of body and flesh.’

Wladyslaw Kazmierczak and Ewa Rybska

We were able to welcome Wladyslaw Kazmierczak and Ewa Rybska back to Carlisle as they were en route for the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow. Their performance ‘Insecurity’ addressed the perilous state that we are in worldwide. The performance began with them handing out a text to each member of the audience which read as follows: ‘Traveling through Jakarta, Jerusalem, London, Ground Zero, Boston, Madrid, Mexico City and many other places, we have noticed that there is no time for art whose main value lies in modernistic background or Dadaists' perfidy, irony, jokes, displaying the sense of humor or eccentric imagination anymore. The time for this kind of art had already passed. Now we have time of the true (culture) war, all-present limitations, isolating our freedom in the name of security, copy rights and political correctness. The Western culture having the fantastic ability to assimilate and proclaim ideas of open-ness is in fact a hermetic structure forcing its own rules, which are not understandable to everyone.’