Live performance event
Saturday 4 November, 2-5pm   

Please note that this event contains adult content and is not suitable for under 18s.

This event is now sold out and the waiting list is now full. We kindly ask anyone with a ticket who can no longer attend to cancel their ticket on eventbrite, or to contact us.

As part of their exhibition, Florence Peake and Tai Shani have developed a live performance event, followed by an in-conversation with Dr Amy Tobin of the University of Cambridge, on feminism and the collaborative nature of the exhibition.

Peake and Shani will perform two separate works simultaneously within the installation:  

The first is a reading from Tai Shani'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. Read by actress Gemma Brockis.

At the same time, Peake will perform with dancer Eve Stainton - interpenetrating waves of energy constellating in time and space, a vocal and movement score that demonstrates some of the methodologies used in the wall paintings and looks at penetration from an energetic perspective and how bodies are porous to their environments. 

Running Times

2pm Arrival & Welcome in Wysing's reception

2.10pm Viewing of the show 

2.30pm Performances in the gallery 

3pm Break

3.20pm In conversation in the open studio

4.10pm Discussion

5.00pm End 

Refreshments will be available to purchase from Café Abantu in reception

Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. As a trained dancer Florence Peake’s background in choreography and painting stimulates a studio practice that is both diverse and immersive. Peake is often working performatively to incorporate drawing, painting and sculptural materials. Florence Peake’s work has been shown nationally and internationally; she is a recipient of the Jerwood Choreographic Research project, 2016. Her solo performance piece, Voicings, has toured to Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, 2017; the Serpentine Gallery, Mysterical day, 2016; Somerset House for Block Universe performance festival, 2016. Solo exhibitions include: WE perform I am in love with my body Bosse and Baum Gallery 2017, The Keeners Solo show at SPACE 2015; Hall of the swell, Gallery Lejeune, 2015; The BALTIC, Newcastle ensemble piece MAKE. Group exhibitions include: Walled Gardens in an Insane Eden, curated by Marcelle Joseph 2017, Hayward Gallery, a 3 month performance installation as part of Mirrorcity, 2015; National Portrait Gallery, performing group work Paper Portraits, 2015. She has done commissions from: Whitechapel Art Gallery; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Modern Art, Oxford; Chapter Arts, Cardiff; Harris Museum, Preston; David Roberts Art Foundation, London. 

Eve Stainton‘s ongoing practice with The Uncollective over the last four years has been focussed on collaboratively using movement, choreography and performance/improvisation to develop a space where politics can engage with and provoke dialogue around instinct, aesthetics and desire. The Uncollective's work has been presented at venues including: The Place, Yorkshire Dance, Royal Academy of Arts, Tangente Danse Montreal, Chisenhale Dance Space, Paris Fashion Week, TripSpace, RichMix, Guest Projects, Lake Studios Berlin, Greenwich Dance, Adelaide Fringe and other venues in Montreal, Canada. Eve has worked freelance for artists/companies/platforms including: Compagnie ECO (Sicily), Oreet Ashery, Goldfrapp, Sonia Boyce, Dog Kennel Hill Project, Susannah Hood (Montreal), Eleesha Drennan, Gary Clarke, Vivienne Westwood, Eva Kotàtkova, Jacopo Miliani, Florence Peake, Holly Blakey, Fashion Week (London, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin).

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 to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism. Shani's on-going project Dark Continent Productions that proposes an allegorical city of women is an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies within which Christine builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. This non-hierarchical approach also determines the construction of the characters and narrative of Dark Continent. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, recent exhibitions and commissions include, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); RADAR commission, Loughborough University, (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); ICA, London (2011) 

Amy Tobin is an art historian and writer. Her research looks at the history of feminist-influenced art and the possibilities of feminist futures. She completed her PhD at the University of York in 2017 with a thesis titled 'Working Together, Working Apart: Feminism, Art and Collaboration in Britain and North American, 1970–1981'. She has taught Modern and Contemporary Art and Theory at the Universities of York and Birmingham and Goldsmiths. Her research is published in British Art Studies, MIRAJ and Tate Papers and she has contributed chapters to Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents, (Courtauld Books Online, 2017), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017), Feminism and Art History Now (IB Tauris, 2017) and A Companion to Feminist Art (Blackwell, 2017 [forthcoming]).