Saturday 19 August, 6.30–9pm

Current residency artists Harold Offeh, Tai Shani and Maxwell Sterling invite you to join them for an evening of newly developed performances and on-going research. Transport from Cambridge is available here.

Please note that this event contains adult content and is not suitable for under 18s. Part of the event will be outside on Wysing's site, so please wear appropriate clothing and footwear. 

Harold Offeh will be in conversation with Dr Zach Blas discussing shared research interests from Edouard Glissant's concept of "opacity", through to technology that documents the body and ideas around "hyper-subjectivity".

Tai Shani will invite the actress Maya Lubinsky to read from her feminist horror film, I Am Paradise, a fleshy Promethean myth told in space but not in time. The text forms part of Tai's on-going project Dark Continent Productions, an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies, within which Pizan builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred.  

For his residency at Wysing, Maxwell Sterling is observing, experimenting and re-synthesizing the human voice, as a way of de-coding and studying its profound role as a communications device and musical instrument. Maxwell has been recording with youth choir Harringey Vox and drawing on an archive of late night conversations compiled by artist Max Hawkins for the Call in the Night app. Maxwell's research will culminate in a performance with vocalist Teresa Winter (The Death of Rave). Live voice and instrumentation will converse with recorded voices, creating a dialogue between permanence and transience, fragility and beauty, ancient and modern.

Schedule 

6.30 pm: Informal welcome with light refreshments 

6.45 pm: Harold Offeh in conversation with Dr. Zach Blas

7.30 pm: Break with light refreshments

7.45pm: Tai Shani reading of I Am Paradise. Read by Maya Lubinsky

8.15pm: Maxwell Sterling live performance with Teresa Winter

8.45pm: Closing reception with light refreshments 

9pm: Ends

Biographies 

Maxwell Sterling is a composer and musician whose work ranges from film soundtracks to live performance, studio albums to ballet scores. With a background in jazz improvisation and film music, his work is often focused on how music is used as a mode of communication and signifier of emotions. In 2016, he released his debut album, ‘Hollywood Medieval’ which explores the role of synthesis and digital sounds and their effect on us emotionally. Sterling collaborated with artist Linder and curator Kathy Noble on Art Night 2016, Destination Moon, You must not look at her! which featured a live tableaux of dancers, two choirs, a string ensemble and two drummers. Sterling currently works between Los Angeles and the UK. 

Tai Shani’s multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism. 

Harold Offeh was born in Accra, Ghana and grew up in London. He works in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. In 2017 he will be exhibiting as part of Untitled: art on the conditions of our time at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK and Tous, des sangs-mêlés at MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Val de Marne, France. He lives in Cambridge and works in Leeds and London, UK.

Dr. Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice engages technology, queerness, and politics. Blas’s recent works respond to technological control, biometric governmentality, and network hegemony. Facial Weaponization Suite (2011-14) consists of “collective masks” that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition software. Contra-Internet (2014-present) explores subversions of and alternatives to the internet and is supported by a 2016 Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields.

Teresa Winter is a musician from the Yorkshire coast who makes bedroom pop. Her music is comprised primarily of wordless vocals and other kinds of sounds made with synthesisers, field recordings and various instruments. Teresa's musical explorations began a couple of years ago as a distraction from studies when her heart had been mercilessly broken, she found it to be a strangely life affirming experience. Teresa has recently been preoccupied with the permeation of death and life, and the absence of vocabulary around loss. The Death of Rave will release her next record, Untitled Death.

Maya Lubinsky grew up in London, Israel and New York, her life and work still span these three homes. Maya completed her theatre training at ArtsEd, London, and established herself acting in theatre, television, film and in the fine art context. Her collaborations with artists such as Tai Shani​, Anja Kirschner and Gail Pickering have featured in art galleries including Tate Modern, Barbican Centre, Hayward Gallery, ICA, Arnolfini, the Kunstverein in Stuttgart and the Artists Space gallery in New York. In 2007 Maya joined the theatre company Punchdrunk in devising and performing Masque of the Red Death at the Battersea Arts Centre. When Punchdrunk opened Sleep No More in New York City's Off-Broadway, they invited Maya to join them there as part of the original cast of the show, now in its fourth year. Maya co-wrote Peter Burr's performance art piece Special Effect, which premiered at the Museum of Moving Image in New York. She co-wrote and acted in the film Moderation by Anja Kirschner, which premiered in the 2016 Berlinale.