F O L L Y in Love Letters to a (Post-) Europe at BIOS Athens : 3 October 2015

I will be showing new work F O L L Y at BIOS Athens in Love Letters to a (Post-) Europe, a two-day festival curated by Lisa Alexander in the context of a rapidly changing Europe and in a country bearing the brunt of austerity. This 2-day event asks artists to respond with 'the action, idea or form of a love letter. Of now. It may also be ending it. An action approaching another, a double listening'.

F O L L Y ia a short live performance accompanying a video of David Bowie performing "Heroes" in post-Wall Berlin, in 2002, having written it when he had a studio beside the Wall in 1977. It is intended as act of accompaniment, an absurd attempt to share a stage with Bowie, a singular gesture of trying to meet his soaring voice and spirit in virtual space. Working with the material, I have been thinking about Berlin’s changing fortunes and the longer narrative of “Heroes”; how each time Bowie played it in Berlin, the city’s position in the world was utterly different.


Participating artists: Kate Adams (UK), Demosthenes Agrafiotis(GR), Brian Catling (UK), cris cheek (UK), Robin Deacon (UK/USA), Vassiliki Dimou (GR), Tim Etchells (UK), Alec Finlay (UK), Matthew Goulish (USA), Guy Harries (UK), Steven C Harvey (UK), Catherine Hoffmann (UK), Wendy Houstoun (UK),Mikhail Karikis (GR/UK), Brian Lobel (USA/UK), Claire MacDonald (UK), Georgios Makkas (GR), Ivana Müller (HR/FR), Mariela Nestora (GR), Kira O’Reilly (IE/UK),Florence Peake (UK), Erica Scourti (UK/GR), Maria Sideri (GR), Anna Sherbany (UK), Jungmin Song (KR), Yoko Tawada (JP/DE), Nikki Tomlinson (UK)

Friday 2 & Saturday 3 October 2015 at BIOS in Athens

Florence Peake : The Keeners : Performance 19 September 2015

Florence Peake 'The Keeners', 2015. Courtesy of the artist and commissioned by SPACE.
Image credit Tim Bowditch.

Performance in London Fields, E8 : Saturday 19 Sept, 12noon-4pm
(If raining, the performance will move to Space Studios, Mare St E8 3RH
Exhibition of film and objects from the performance launches on Thursday 1 Oct, 6–8pm
and runs until 1 December.

The Keeners takes its title from the notion of ‘keening’, where professional mourners in Irish and Celtic traditions grieve others' losses on their behalf. Peake’s work abstracts this tradition and presents a collective grief in the form of a public performance to mourn the commodification and instrumentalisation of art in the corporate world, enacted by a chorus of dancers on a glossy mirrored dance floor.

A public open call asked for people to submit notions of what they feel they have lost culturally. Every one of these submissions is read out and then mourned by the dancers. The performance is situated in London Fields, which is classified as common land (Lammas Rights for grazing animals), and links to its history as a plague burial site.

Highlighting a framework of collective support and a platform for discussing the notion of ‘artwashing’, personal ethics and moral dilemmas the piece is also a playful and slyly ironic comment on the hypocrisy that faces us in daily life.

A commissioned essay on The Keeners written by Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt will be available online and at SPACE.
The Keeners is by Florence Peake. Performed by Charlie Ashwell, Lizzie Lequesne, Susanna Recchia, Nikki Tomlinson, Rosalie Wahlfrid