Costume / Performance / Identity 2024

Costume and performance have long shaped how artists explore identity, power and belonging.

In summer 2024 we brought together four artists whose work uses dress, gesture and character as tools for story, culture and social change. Their talks opened up conversations about how the body carries memory, how costume can shift meaning, and how performance can help us imagine new ways of seeing and being. 

The season formed part of our wider aim to make contemporary art more open, more thoughtful and more connected to lived experience.

Programme

Costume, fashion and the creation of character

Artist talk and Q&A with Zinzi Minott
Presented June 2024

Zinzi spoke about practice and the links between bodies and politics. Moving across film, sound, sculpture, prints, performance and objects, Zinzi uses disruption and the glitch to question lineages and invite critical reflections on Black Queer life.

About Zinzi
Zinzi Minott explores cultures around film, sound, sculpture and movement, with a specific interest in Black Sonic production, bass, mixing, remixing, vibration and dark space. She is interested in the temporary building and dismantling of communities which occur in rave spaces,performances,and theaters and what this can teach us about contemporary communities and life. She is also interested in telling Caribbean stories, highlighting the histories of those enslaved during The Atlantic Slave Trade, the resulting migration of The Windrush Generation to the UK and its links to contemporary life.

She is a Laban alumnus, the first  artist trained in dance to be Artist in residence at both Serpentine Gallery (London, UK, 2018) and Tate (London, UK, 2017). She was artist in residence at La Becque 2023, shortlisted for the 9th edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2023). She was recently nominated for the Live Art award – Shortlist LIVE! 2022 (Finland), received The Continuous commission for 2020-2022 (UK) ,The Jerwood Live Work Award in 2020 (UK), and won The Adrian Howells Award for 2019/2020 (UK).

Her work has shown at Tate, Baltic, Spike Island, Somerset House, V&A and Wellcome Collection and internationally at Artist Space (USA), Tropenmuseum(AMS),Caribbean Film Festival (USA &TT), Kunsthall (NL), Austland (GER) amongst others.

• https://zinziminott.com
   

New Mythologies and Collective Fictioning

Artist talk by Eelyn Lee
Presented 19 June 2024

Eelyn introduced the use of fictioning as a tool for collective reimagining. The talk covered work with young people using allegory, avatars, doubles and masks as routes to self-liberation. Eelyn also discussed Performing Identities, which reimagines diasporic East and Southeast Asian identities through contemporary myth-making. Each chapter draws on embodied memories and migratory energies to imagine new futures.

About Eelyn
Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker of Hong Kong-English heritage who has shown work at Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Palais de Tokyo, and at international film festivals. Her art practice combines collective research, performance and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration. With ‘organising’ a key aspect of her practice, Eelyn has convened a range of community building projects including the Social Art Summit [2018] - an artist-led review of socially engaged arts practice, and the ESEA Artists’ Futures Town Hall [2023] - a place to imagine new landscapes for East and Southeast Asian artists in the UK and beyond. Her ongoing body of work, Performing Identities is a collective reimagining of ESEA identities through the creation of new mythical characters and their cosmologies.

• Eelyn's website: https://www.eelynlee.com
   

Worldbuilding with Ritual Objects

Artist talk by Hanna Tuulikki
Presented 26 June 2024

Hanna explored the role of costume, props and gesture in multidisciplinary work. The talk looked at ritual, worldbuilding and mimesis as ways to form relationships with the more-than-human.

About Hanna
Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland, who specialises in working with voice and movement to tell 'stories' about reworlding in times of biospheric crisis. Her practice spans vocal composition, choreography, costume, and visual score drawing, within performance, sound, moving image and installation. With a largely place-responsive process, she considers how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific places, often drawing on embodied vernacular knowledges, in particular practices of vocal and gestural 'mimesis' of the more-than-human, to offer alternative approaches to making kin. Most recently, her work has engaged directly with urgent questions around the psychology of the climate emergency and biodiversity loss, and how to meet and process complex emotions that come with ecological awareness.

Selected recent commissions, exhibitions and performances include Glasgow Cathedral with Historic Environment Scotland and Arts&Heritage (2023), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2023), National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One (2021-23), British Art Show 9 (2021-22), Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2022), Biennale of Sydney (2022), Helsinki Biennial (2021) and Take Me Somewhere festival, Tramway, Glasgow (2021).

She was Magnetic North Theatre’s first Artist Attachment supported by Jerwood Arts (2017-19) and shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women (2020). She was a finalist in the Arts Foundation Music for Change Award (2022), won a Scottish Award for New Music in Sonic Arts (2017), and was twice shortlisted for a British Composer Award (2015, 2017).
 

Artist. Alien.

Artist talk by Paul Kindersley
Presented 14 August 2024

Paul shared a playful and theatrical practice that mixes drawing, performance, stage and script, video and film. Paul’s work explores self-expression, character and the meeting point of fashion and art.

About Paul
Paul Kindersley (b. 1985, Cambridge, UK), graduated from Cambridge Regional College, before studying Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Abundant in their otherworldly unfolding, Paul’s work takes up the mantel left by whimsical intellectuals, such as the Bloomsbury Group. Brought to life through drawing and performance, stage/script and video/film, Paul creates paracosm-like realities filled with absurdity, chance, and lashings of kitsch.

Season reflection

The season brought together artists who use costume and performance to explore identity, culture and social change. Across four events we saw costume used as a tool to question power, reclaim stories and imagine new forms of belonging. Each artist showed how the body can hold personal history, collective memory and political force.

Together, the talks opened up wider conversations about how we choose to present ourselves, how we navigate systems that shape identity, and how art can offer space to experiment with new ways of being. The series supported our aim to make contemporary art more open, more thoughtful and more connected to lived experience.

Recordings from the season sit in our Member Knowledge Base.