Somatic Distortion

Keike Twisselmann, Master of Fine Art Belfast – Berlin – existing since 1967 performance art since 1989, motorbike racing as performance since 2005 since 1989 works in painting, performance, film, neo-fluxus poetry, objects of wisdom and desire studied art in Belfast and Galway in the 1980s and 90s performance art with political and philosophical themes publication: “the politics of performance”, Belfast, 1992 lives and works in Berlin and Belfast; chair-committee member of Bbk Berlin from 2004-2014, performed and exhibited worldwide, among other locations: Kassel, Madrid, Venice, New York, Berlin, Belfast, Derry, Dublin, Barcelona, Werkleitz, Arnhem, Cologne, Dessau, Cleveland, Drogheda, Galway. Glasgow, Cardiff, Hanover, Kleve, Kiel, Leipzig. Quebec, San Lorenzo, Sheffield, Scarborough, Transylvania.

For the last 10 years Caroline Murphy has been a member of the performance art collective Bbeyond, taking part in collaborative performance monthly performance meetings in gallery and public spaces. Murphy is also an active member of B.B.D.B the Derry Branch of the collective. Murphy has performed extensively with solo gallery pieces in Belfast and Derry with her most recent performance at ‘60-120 Breaths' part of Humanism in Process in Flax Art Studios, Belfast. Murphy is a member of an experimental art lab (The Monday Lab) in Derry, which recently performed collaboratively at CCA Gallery (2019). Murphy's background is in arts based education, completing her PhD in 2009 at Ulster University.

James King developed his Performance Art practice, with its beginnings in Street Actions. King has performed extensively in Ireland North and South and internationally. Some performances include Kassel Documenta in 1980, Pallas projects Offside Live at The Hugh Lane in 2005, Solo Exhibition The Dock Leitrim 2015, Acción Mad 2016 at The Matadero Madrid, Collaborative Performance Installation Exhibition with Sandra Corrigan Breathnach at Void Gallery Derry, PAB Performance Art Bergen 2015, Interbeing Sound (in Performance) Sonic Arts Research Centre, Q.U.B., Kode Bergen 2017. During a period of more than 30 years James King taught Community Drama at the University of Ulster, introducing six modules into the Theatre Studies degree. King is a member of the Performance Art Collective Bbeyond, founding a Derry Branch of the collective BBDB. His most recent performance project is the collaborative Monday Lab. On 29/3/19 Two of the group King and Peter O'Doherty 'La Bratts' performed in the Online Festival of Performance Art, live on You Tube. The full group performed as part of the 'Celebration Factory CCA Derry-Londonderry 2019. King's largest achievement was curating a year long "Cumulator" performance project in 2016, beginning with one person performing for one hour in the first month and concluding with twelve people performing for twelve hours in December.

Born 1948 in Germany, Rainer Pagel lives and works in Belfast. His art practice developed from the 1970s in Hamburg and Belfast, very much under the influence of Bazon Brock, Max Bense and Joseph Beuys while in Germany, and Alastair MacLennan, Adrian Hall, Tony Hill and Dr Slavka Sverakova in Northern Ireland. After taking part on the invitation of Joseph Beuys in the Northern Ireland workshop in the Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany 1977, he became a co-founder of Art and Research Exchange in Belfast, and was very actively involved in establishing 22 Lombard Street in Belfast as an important art venue and centre for new and innovative art in NI. In 1979, Beuys invited him together with two others to mount an exhibition of their work in Northern Ireland within the context of his show in the Guggenheim Museum, New York. After an absence of 21 years from the visual arts scene, during which he engaged in “social sculpture” as per Beuys’ definition, he became a co-founder and the first chairperson of Bbeyond, the performance art collective in Northern Ireland in 2000. He has been a member of Bbeyond ever since and enjoys being able to show his work at performance events throughout the world, from China, France, Sweden, Spain, Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Analía Beltrán i Janés has a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid. She is a multi-media artist, but since 2001 she has focused his artistic activity on Performance Art. 
She has participated in numerous national and international festivals such as Acción! MAD in Madrid 2008 and 2014, X Biennial of Havana 2009 (Cuba), Infr'action Séte (France) 2009, Inf'action Venice 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017 (Biennial of Venice), Guangzhou Live 3 (China) 2012, Live Action 8 Gothenburg (Sweden) 2013, Navinki International Performance Festival, Minsk (Belarus) 2013, Biennale Anzio e Nettuno 2015 (Italy), La Muga Caula 2016 (Catalonia), Reihe Neu-Oerlikon (Switzerland) 2017, Perfomedia Bergamo (Italy) 2018, Viglienasei Art Gallery, Siracusa (Italy) 2018, Museo Vostell Malpartida (Spain) 2019, Perfomedia Venezia 2019, between others. She lives in Madrid where she develops a large part of her work in different spaces and galleries such as the Reina Sofia Museum, Matadero Centro de Creación Contemporánea Madrid, Room Art Fair, etc.

Since January 2017, she curates in Madrid "P.E.P.A." (Pequeño Evento de Performance Art), an event with four or five performance artists in different self-managed spaces. She is also a founder member of PACK, a Chinese – Spanish performance group, since 2016.

Fergus Byrne is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, sculpture and drawing. Underlying much of the performance work is the practice of life modeling of which he has extensive experience. In performance he tests the materiality of his body, sometimes combining such action with spoken word. Through rigorous physical discipline he creates mesmerising performances. 
Recent work includes Past/Present, (Cavan), The Autonomy Project (Limerick) 2018, Breath at Artwaves Skerries and Mermaid Dance Platform with Macdara O'Maolbhuaidh
His writing practice brings with it a particular viewpoint on performance work, exemplified in 'Fragments on the Performance Collective', in Performance Art in Ireland: A History. More recently he has contributed to Art Action 1918 -2018, published by Le Lieu. He has also curated events and brought to this role an approach that brought varied art forms and audiences together - Transversal series (2010-2012), curated in collaboration with dancer and songwriter Deirdre Murphy, Generation at The Dock (2013) and Offside Live I and II at the Hugh Lane Gallery with Pallas Studios (2005) In 2015 he collaborated with Ambra Bergamasco in curating and producing the Moving Bodies Butoh Film Festival at The New Theatre, Dublin.

www.fergusbyrne.ie

Brian Connolly is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art, Sculpture, in the Belfast School of Art at the Ulster University, Belfast. He is a multi-media artist creating works, which often relate to ‘place’ or context and which reflect on key socio-political issues of the day. He employs a wide range of artistic processes, including Performance Art, Public Sculpture, Installation Art, Art Workshops and a range of collaborative projects. In the early 1990’s he developed a genre of performance art called ‘Install-action’ and has created a series of Market Stall Performances since the mid 1990’s. He has performed & exhibited in diverse contexts throughout Europe, North America and parts of Asia. He has initiated and curated events and projects both nationally and internationally and has been involved with artist run organizations throughout Ireland including: Bbeyond, The Sculptors Society of Ireland, Visual Artists Ireland, Flaxart etc. He has been chairman of BBeyond on several occasions since it’s inception in 2001. He established an annual performance art festival – the Belfast International Festival of Performance Art, in 2013. He has created more than fifteen Public Artworks & Commissions in a range of media and contexts throughout Ireland.

Fausto Grossi was born in Arce, Frosinone, Italy in 1954. He is licensed as a sculptor by the A.A.B.B. of Frosinione, Italy and by the U.P.V. of Lejona, Basque Country, Spain. In 1992, he moved to Bilbao where he lives and develops his artistic activity. He is a multidisciplinary and intermediate artist, cook, interpreter, writer and graphic designer. As cultural manager, he organizes the activity of Spazio Grossi, collaborates with the Euskadi Experimental Poetry Biennial and the MEM Festival. He is also an email artist, with works in several international anthologies of visual poetry. Grossi has been invited and has participated in various cultural events in France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Serbia, China, Canada, the Philippines, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Colombia, Hungary and Mexico.

Elvira Santamaria Torres was born in 1967 in Mexico City and completed a Masters degree in Visual Arts at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. Her work focuses on public actions, process art, installation and performance and is currently based in both Northern Ireland and Mexico. In 1994, Santamaría-Torres obtained the First award of the 3rd X-Teresa, The Month of Performance Art and in the same year was invited to participate in the Rencontre Internationale d'art performance de Québec. Since then, she has presented her work in festivals, art centres, galleries, museums and public spaces in Mexico, Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America. Her most recent public projects include: Parábolas de desalojo y procesos de regeneración, 2013-2016 ( Mexico and various Latin American countries); Salt Cartographies, Sur Gallery, 2017 (Toronto) and Naming the Change, PS2 Gallery, 2017 (Belfast).

In 2013, Santamaría-Torres was postulated to the Artraker, Awarding Creativity in Art and Conflicto in London and was juror for the 2014 award. She is member of Black Market International. She has organised several events such as the annual International Performance Art Encounter in Yucatán, 2002-2006; InterSER0 I |& II, International Action Art Encounter at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, 2009, and recently, Humanism in process: Female Performance Artist at Work 1 & 2, 2019. Santamaría-Torres conducts workshops and conferences in art centres, universities and museums in Mexico and abroad. She is actual Member of the National System of Art Creators FONCA-Secretaria de Cultura.

http://www.elvirasantamariatorres.co.uk/

Sarah Risebourough's current work centres around the connection of human and nature. Threads of personal history and mythology interweave in an exploration of selfhood and embodiment the nature of spirit. Risebourough completed a Masters and a practice-based MRes at Northumbria University and performed in Newcastle, Belfast, London Madrid, and Poland. It was necessary for her to step outside of culture, to abandon art and navigate the narratives of contingency and conflict within culture that communicated affect. She explains 'I wanted to explore the conditions where I could let these narratives go, and also facilitate that experience for others'. She has recently trained as a bodyworker and a shamanic practitioner, continuing to make work in a variety of media, to write and tell stories, and facilitate creative and transformative workshops that explore the edge of the culturally ‘known.’ Activities have developed by necessity, where particular institutional environments triggered self-abandonment. She explains 'To go beyond culture, for me, is the environment to rediscover ‘the abandoned’ to explore selfhood that can’t be contained, or ‘fit in'. Recent activities include story-telling in Durham Castle, participation in a PhD conference at Northumbria University and sailing as crew on a refitted Baltic trading ship off the West Coast of Scotland.

Jayne Cherry has been influenced and affected by her physical and emotional surroundings from a young age. Unpicking and reexamining how she considered trauma, grief, abuse and pain and how best to perceive and take back control, have been her main focus for making work. Graduating from Ulster University in 2011 was a culmination of many years studying the human condition as an artist, qualified nurse, organic farmer and garden designer. Collaborating with performance artists, glass sculptors and fibre craftspeople continue to draw out new lines of thought which result in work which she imbues with clues, to assist in early recognition of, avoidance of and healing from pain inflicted by others and the uncertainty and perpetual pain it causes.

Sandra Corrigan Breathnach's practice deals with states of phenomenological expression, connectivity of the physical and meta-physical. It was the search for meaning within life, that brought her to performance art, where the vein of an innate knowledge as Beings in this world is explored. Corrigan- Breathnach has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, most recently her performance at '60-120 Breaths' in Flax Art Belfast as part of 'Humanism in Process'. Other performances include, La Chambre Blanche for Inter le lieu's prestigious Rencontre internationale d'art performance (RiAP) Québec Canada 2018, Pollen Gallery Belfast, The Belfast International Festival of Performance Art, Acción Mad 16 – XIII Encuentro De Arte De Acción, at the Matadero Madrid. Following a Collaboration with renowned artist Alastair MacLennan, Corrigan-Breathnach and MacLennan created their Performance Installation exhibition 'Breath And Blood' in the Burren College Gallery, Co. Clare, the exhibition included live performance, drawings, video, sound works and sculpture. Previous collaborations include working closely with Artist James King, their 2016 exhibition 'Pollenate' in the Void Gallery Derry, was a combination of live performance, video, animation, photography and sound works. Sandra is a member of the performance art organisation Bbeyond. In organising and curating this event Corrigan-Breathnach aims to widen the current scope of events for performance practice in Ireland.

Video Artists

Andre Stitt has produced hundreds of unique performance artworks at major galleries, festivals, alternative venues and public spaces throughout the world From 1976- 2013. Stitt's work and research focuses on themes and issues of conflict and conflict transformation, trauma and marginalisation within contemporary social and cultural structures. He has also produced exhibition and installation work based on a broad interdisciplinary approach that includes painting, drawing, print, and mixed media. Since 2007 Stitt has been actively involved in developing a painting practice as main focus of artistic output. He has been active in academic and arts research for over 30 years. He currently runs research and innovation activity within the Centre For Fine Art Research and founded the Shiftwork and Painting Performance research groups. Stitt has producing and curated numerous projects, exhibitions, and events throughout the world. Between 2000-2010 he was director of TRACE: Gallery & Collective in Cardiff curating a research based programme of international time-based work

Boris Nieslony was born 1945 in Germany, lives in Cologne. He has worked intensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist and independent scholar, staging various installations, interventions and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realise group performance projects. And also the instigator of the ASA foundation, a platform for a self-organizing rhizomatic network of performance artists and theorists.
Nieslony is recognised as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art. Nieslony creates unpredictable and unrepeatable improvisational performance works that manifest “an encounter and its effects”. Responding to local circumstances, Nieslony develops images attuned to the moment, rigorously searching for the truth of self-recognition at the intersection of history and live presence. His impressive performance style stems from the motto “life is art enough”.

Bruce Nauman born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941 is widely regarded as among the most important living American artists and as a catalyst for the recent shift in international artistic practice toward conceptual and performative uses of language and the body. Since his first solo gallery show in 1966, Nauman has been the subject of many notable museum exhibitions, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1972), Whitney Museum of American Art (1973), Kunstmuseum Basel (1986), Walker Art Center (1994), Tate (2004), and the Menil Collection (2007-08). Nauman represented the United States at the 2009 Venice Biennale, for which the pavilion was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Most recently, “Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts,” a comprehensive retrospective, debuted at Schaulager, Basel (2018) and traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York and MoMA P.S.1 (2018-19). He lives and works in New Mexico.

Kim Gurney is a South African Artist based in Cape Town. Gurney's art practice responds to disappearances of different sorts and makes restorative gestures. Gurney has exhibited widely in South Africa and has held two solo exhibitions in Johannesburg. Gurney is involved in engaging other artists on curatorial projects including Guerilla Gallery a nomadic platform for experimental practice. Gurney works across visual art, writing, and academic research. She is the author of two books that traverse this interdisciplinary domain: 'August House is Dead; Long Live August House!', a creative nonfiction account of a Johannesburg atelier and its artistic thinking, and 'The Art of Public Space', a monograph about performative art interventions and common space.

Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, director, choreographer, filmmaker, and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. Considered one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer of what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance”. Over the last six decades Monk has received numerous awards and honors, including the MacArthur “Genius” award and being named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. Recently, Monk received three of the highest honors bestowed on a living artist in the United States- induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2019), the 2017 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize and a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. In conjunction with her 50th season of performing and creating work, she was named Carnegie Hall’s 2014-15 Debs Composer’s Chair. Celebrated internationally, Monk’s work has been presented at major venues throughout the world.

Nigel Rolfe is recognised as a seminal figure in performance art, in its history and among current world practitioners. Born in the Isle of Wight in 1950, Nigel Rolfe lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He works with many media – video and photography and sound.
For the past fifty years he has made performances throughout Europe, the former Eastern Bloc, North and South America and across Asia. Since 2005 the central core of his work and practice is making images live and in the moment.

Stuart Brisley born in 1933 in Haslemere, Surrey, England. Brisley studied at Guildford School of Art (1949–54) and the Royal College of Art in London (1956–9), as well as at the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Munich (1959–60) and Florida State University in Tallahassee (1960–62). He has been singularly consistent throughout a career spanning over 60 years in his involvement with political and social issues (he was a founding member of the Artists Union) and a desire to challenge the established cultural expectations has been embedded in his subject matter. He is a republican and throughout his career has made works which question the British class system. Brisley has come to the conclusion, as stated in his novel "Beyond Reason: Ordure" (2003) that 'what goes down comes up'. Influenced by Marxist cultural appraisal of the 1960s and it's critical afterlife, Brisley adopted performance as the democratic basis for a new relationship between artist and audience. In Brisley's work, a strong formalist aesthetic together with an internal realism (lyricism) underpins the image making process, which is converted into a political dialogue. Brisley's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide including the Tate, Arts Council England, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Museums & Galleries, The British Museum and Moma.