Live Art Weekender
Special Weekender Ticket Price £20.00/£15.00 Concs
As part of Port City, Arnolfini presents a programme of performances informed by global processes migration, exchange and cultural transformation. From a range of perspectives, they question our objects of identification: my country, my city, my body, me, and ask what happens at the points where the lines are breached, the points of entry.
Curious (Be)Longing
Fri 28 Sep 7.30pm
£8.00/£6.00 concs
What do you long for? Where do you belong? Camouflaged in cowboy shirts with fancy stitches made to hide broken hearts and cowboy boots custom made for the walking wounded, this is Curious at their most personal and poignant. Beneath the neon glow of a highway road sign, their yearnings take them across vast desert landscapes in frustrated searches for fulfilment and fitting in.
Curious (Be)Longing (Video)
Sat 29 Sep 12pm – 6pm & Sun 30 Sep 12pm – 4pm / Free
A group of African teenagers brought or trafficked into the UK overcome desperate situations and build new lives for themselves in London. Now in college, fluent in English, with dreams of going to university, the girls face deportation on their 18th birthdays under current Home Office rules. This film produced and directed by Curious asks them what they long for and where they feel they belong.
Roza Ilgen: In My Shoes
Sat 29 & Sun 30 Sep 12pm – 6pm
Foyer / Free
Using human hair gathered from the barbers and hairdressers of Bristol, Roza Ilgen will occupy Arnolfinis foyer area creating uncanny images that hover between the familiar and the alien and reveal the rich diversity of Bristols population. Born in Kurdish Turkey and living between Norway and the UK, Roza Ilgen has a unique understanding of the relationship between western and middle eastern cultures.
Qasim Riza Shaheen: Queer Courtesan
Queer Courtesan is part of a body of work that was born out of a two-year process of working with the Khusra (transgendered) community of the red light district of Lahore. Building relationships with a group of sex workers, the artist lived and experienced their unique transgenderism.
Qasim Riza Shaheen: Queer Courtesan
Video Installation
Sat 29 Sep 12pm 6pm
Dark Studio / Free
Monitors present six adaptations of friendships built between the artist and the sex workers within the Khusra community. Retelling their stories, Shaheen mediates between them and the audience Wearing their clothes, made up by them and carefully positioned and postured. The viewer watches them watching the artist re-tell their stories.
Qasim Riza Shaheen: Queer Courtesan
One-On-One Performance
Sat 29 Sep 3pm 5pm
Light Studio
Free Booking Advised Contact Box Office To Reserve A Performance Slot
This voyeuristic one-to-one performance which lasts five minutes plays out the relationship between dance and prostitution. Viewing the performance through a two-way mirror, watching the dancer (who in turn watches himself) the audience member is lured and seduced through expression and gesture. The audience member also gets to select the soundtrack to the piece from the vinyl collections of the artist and his father, a rich and at times incongruous mix of Hindi and Western, classical and pop.
Jiva Parthipan: Necessary Journey
Sat 29 Sep 6pm
£8.00/£6.00 Concs
This is a performance lecture about the privilege of travel.
Having been offered a travel scholarship by the British Film Institute and Arts Council England to travel to Mexico, Jiva Parthipan discovered that while for some, travel is taken for granted, for others it is impossibility. The artist unravels a Kafkaesque tale of embassies and red tape, frustrations, knock backs and ultimately, failure in his attempts to work with artists in other countries. Geopolitics and cultural power games come into play as the story becomes increasingly absurd.
Tim Brennan: Performing Northumbria: Empire
Sat 29 Sep 7.30pm
£8.00/£6.00 Concs
Performing Northumbria: Empire explores ideas of imperialism and cultural dominance through the historical optic of the North of England. It focuses in part on Hadrian’s Wall, constructed to keep those to the north at bay and also to regulate the flow of people and goods from the north to the south, functioning like todays border controls between nation states. For Rome, the wall also marked the northernmost boundary of empire. Brennan asks what it means to stand at a point between worlds and how do we now construct our identities at the edge of empire, an outpost of the ‘New Imperium’ of the United States of America?
Hello Sailor!
Port City Weekender Party
Sat 29 Sep 8pm – Late
Cafe Bar / Free
With DJs mixing up an eclectic cultural cocktail and a secret special guest performing for your dubious delectation, be sure not to miss the weekender’s big night on the docks with special promotions on rum.
Alex Bradley & Hetain Patel: Morris Dancing
Sun 30 Sep 12pm 3pm
Dark Studio / Free
In last years Migrate, Bradley and Patel marked each other’s bodies, one black, one white, with henna paste. Visually transforming their skin, they explored how meaning can be mapped onto the body.
The tattooed marks have long since disappeared, but the dialogue has continued. Now, the
artists conduct their second live encounter with henna, a culture specific pigment, as a tool of interaction with one another and the audience. Taking William Morriss patterns and designs
as a starting point, Bradley and Patel look at how ideas of the exotic can be transformed
and camouflaged within the domestic.
Steve Robins & Shi Ker: Niceday
Sun 30 Sep 1pm 4pm
Light Studio
Free
‘We started with our separateness: an Asian man and a Caucasian man. Me and him, him and me. There is a gulf of experience between us; years of memories, relationships, a myriad of hopes, disappointments and stories.’
Through a childish game and a series of actions, the artists play out a casually abusive interaction. The enforced tasks that vary from the absurd to the genuinely painful speak of the inability of one person or one culture to comprehend the pain of another. The artists bring their separateness to each other and play out a game for the audience to adjudicate.
Duncan Speakman: For Every Step You Take, I Take A Thousand
Sun 30 Sep 4pm
Dark Studio
Free
Following a four day walk across the fields worked by migratory farm workers in Somerset, Duncan Speakman will (hopefully) arrive at Arnolfini to present an immediate audio map of his encounters. While walking he will plant seeds that will grow to mark a path of trade and travel between Bristol and its surrounding rural industries. Duncan Speakman is a sound artist who works in both live and mediated spaces. Emergent technologies are often used to explore ideas of navigation, memory and the poetics of the everyday.
Harminder Singh Judge: Live Sermon
Sun 30 Sep 5pm
£3.00/£2.00 Concs
A speaker installed inside the artists mouth plays a curious sound piece whilst the body acts as its passive housing. Ritualistically painted and dressed, and standing in a large purpose built aluminium tray containing 4mm of milk, Judges performance becomes a struggle to swallow and breathe.
Judges work questions the authoritative nature of religion, whilst revealing a fascination with the power and sublimity of religious imagery. His performances locate Sikh and Hindu symbolism within new cultural and geographical contexts in order to explore the way ideology and spirituality can migrate.
Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island
Fri 26 Oct 7.30pm
£6.00/£4.00 concs
Leading contemporary performance ensemble, Goat Island return to Arnolfini on the eve of their final tour. Their intimate, low-tech, intensely physical performances represent a unique hybrid of strategies drawn from live art, experimental theatre and post-modern dance. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, is the first book to explore the companys performances, processes, politics, aesthetics, and philosophies. Join us, Goat Island and their special guests as they launch the publication, present the texts live and discuss their distinctive collaborative processes.
