APT Gallery, Deptford, London SE8
Alice Gale-Feeney presented Two Speakers, One Speaker, a Hall, a Room, a performance she gave using 3 microphones, with a backdrop of a hand-drawn diagram projected behind her. She used a series of different monologues – some apparently autobiographical, others clearly not – in different registers on the different mics, weaving together a number of narratives that also referred to the drawings on the diagram. This lead the group to suggest that the diagram was acting as a kind of score, whilst the body of the performer became an active site, like a sort of medium or shaman. There was a sense that the work had its own internal logic framed by an abstract meta-narrative that was not instantly decipherable.
Denise Ackerl presented a performative lecture proposing Austrian actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a rebel figure. She interspersed details from Schwarzenegger's biography with her own, showing clips from his films to indicate the parallels with his fictional personas in movies and his public persona as a bodybuilder and politician. The presentation was followed by a "performative" Q&A, leading the questions about the role of the presenter in terms of over-identification and pastiche.
Alice Gale-Feeny is an artist who uses performance, video, writing and facilitation. Interested in dialogical ways of working and the relationship between voice, rythym and architecture, she examines individual subjectivity and embodied knowledge within shared space. Alice lives and works in London and Nottingham and has a studio at V22, London. She is an HPL Lecturer in Ba Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
Denise Ackerl is a performance artist, investigating strategies of resistance from a feminist perspective.