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Elly Clarke

Felixstowe/London/Berlin
Artist interested in the role, value and performace of the physical body in the digital age. I explore this through photography, video, performance, music, curating and community engaged projects.

I am an artist interested in the performance and the burden (‘the drag’) of the physical body in an increasingly digitally mediated world, as well as the snap-to-grid of templates. I work with analogue and digital photography, video, music, and community-based projects – and #Sergina, a border-straddling, multi-bodied drag queen who, across one body and several, sings and performs songs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. In this format, #Sergina (plural) has performed in venues of all persuasions in the UK, Europe, Canada and the USA. Over the past 10 years, #Sergina has been embodied and sculputed by Vladimir Bjelicic, Raul de Nieves, Katy Pendlebury, Thomas Doherty, Liz Rosenfeld, Matt Miwa, Kaajel Patel and Shiva Raichandani.

I have exhibited my photographic, audio and performance work internationally, including at Galerie Wedding, Berlin; Kiasma, Helsinki; Franklin Furnace, New York; The Other Gallery, Banff, Canada and Techno Park Studios, Melbourne, and have taught at insitutions that include Munich Akademie den Bildene Kunste; Birmingham City University; Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne; Coventry University; Central School of Speech and Drama in London and, currently, on the MFA programme at Goldsmiths.

From 2008-13 I ran Clarke Gallery out of my 2-room apartment in Berlin. I am now dragging my way through a PhD at Goldsmiths, looking at the drag of physicality in the digital age alongside a study of early netcast performances commissioned and presented by Franklin Furnace in New York, 1998-2000.

 

HOW ARE YOU? #Sergina’s Participatory Soap Opera about Wrestling with Wellbeing in the Digital Age (7 hours), 2020

#SERGINA’S REWATCHABLE WEBINAR ABOUT RELATIONSHIP ADVICE IN A TIME OF COVID, 22.10.20

Performance Anxiety (2020)

Airdrop (I want your data)

HOW ARE YOU? #Sergina’s Participatory Soap Opera about Wrestling with Wellbeing in the Digital Age, 31.03.20

A Class(y) Lecture by Elly Clarke, Galerie Wedding, Berlin, November 2018

IS MY BODY OUT OF DATE? THE DRAG OF PHYSICALITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE (Episode 2) November 2018

IS MY BODY OUT OF DATE? THE DRAG OF PHYSICALITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE (Episode 3) 2019

HOW ARE YOU? #Sergina’s Participatory Soap Opera about Wrestling with Wellbeing in the Digital Age (2019)

#Sergina's Stimulatingly Sexy Simultaneous Simulation of Herself

BIRMINGHAM - BEYOND / #24 photos / 24 hours / 24 days

Half Crowns in their Petticoats, for 'Thrift Radiates Happiness' at Birmingham Municipal Bank

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