Join us for Live Art Day at Peopling the Palaces Festival 2025. The afternoon is curated by Martin O’Brien and brings together an intergenerational group of artists performing across multiple spaces over a three-hour duration. The day will culminate in a performance party, curated and hosted by Julia Bardsley.
The Arts One Building at QMUL will be taken over by an afternoon of durational performances and video art. Live Art Day includes some of the UK’s best-known artists, and most exciting young performance makers. All works are presented 3-6pm, and you are welcome to move between them all, coming and going as you like. Pieces will take place in studios and public spaces.
Performances from:
Julia Bardsley
The Abyss System #1.
In the grey-scale of the Abyss System, a non-seeing photographer operates by touch in the changing bag, utilises the single eye of the black box to capture, conjures the image in the chemical bath, projects the inverse onto the grid, traces the utterances, cultivates the third dimension, plants a hex in the abyss-mal garden, refracts the ellipse onto the negative rage, locates the punctum and reverses the process. Backwards into the dark, into the grain. Licking the limits. An enchantment.
You are invited into the abyss arena – come + go at your leisure
A real-time process event bought to you by Julia Bardsley
Julia Bardsley is an artist working with the interplay of performance, pinhole photography, video projection, sculptural objects, psychological garments and hybrid personae. Works include: The Divine Trilogy: Trans-Acts, Almost The Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture) and Aftermaths: a tear in the meat of vision(London, Glasgow, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Croatia, Belgium, Italy); meta-FAMILY(Brazil, UK, Belgium, Slovenia) and Medea: dark matter events (Brazil & London).
Under the creative umbrella The House of Wonder & Panic, she developed a series of durational process events entitled Reading Rooms. The Reading Rooms have repurposed a political, a philosophical and an entomological text. The third of the series, An Apian Paradox, conjures an apicultural BJ hive party, that offers a feminine ecology of creativity, pleasure and female bee-ing. (London, Lisbon, Birmingham).
A new phase of exploration comes under the collective title: The Abyss System #3…#2: #1. The first in the series, Elliptical Abyss Ellipses #3…, was presented in 2024.
Tonny A
140822
A male body. A chair. A (semi-wooden) piece of floor. A Mirror. All in an empty space.
A movement starts. A sound follows. What happens next?
140822 is a durational performance conceived and performed by Tonny A. specifically for Peopling The Palaces Festival. The durational performance is a poetic reflection on the concepts of identity and representation of self. It aims to explore the various patterns, repetitions and directions Tonny’s body will subject itself to, throughout the piece, to construct, expand, alter, subvert, destabilise and/or recompose its image.
Tonny A. is a London-based French dancer, performer and live artist. He makes live performances sitting often at the margins of dance, physical theatre and performance art to explore the multi-faceted representations of the male body in relation to his own physicality, sexuality and identities. He has performed his work in theatres, festivals, Cabaret nights and dance platforms all around London and beyond, including Bethnal Green's Working Men Club, The Chelsea Theatre, The Blue Elephant Theatre, Resolution! At The Place and SPILL Festival. Recently, Tonny’s started to present his work internationally, in Belgium in particular where he has performed in TicTac Art Centre for their Crude Saturdays Open Platform on several occasions and premiered his new full-length solo piece Version of Me at le Grand Hospice in May 2025
Lynn Lu
Unbosom
Unbosom is a performance drawing from Lynn Lu's current research on the figure of the Crone, and the lived experience of female ageing. Though there is much literature on menopause, very little of it has been written by women. When Virginia Woolf tried to bring menopause and menstruation into her greatest novel, Mrs Dalloway, these references were edited out of later versions. Before 2000, there was hardly a female voice writing about experiences of ageing in women, and of reaching the end of reproductive life. In Unbosom, Lynn will bring women's voices on these themes back onto the pages of Mrs Dalloway by inscribing in milk excerpts from Miranda July's All Fours, Darcey Steinke's Flash Count Diary, Susan Mattern's The Slow Moon Climbs, Victoria Smith's Hags, Germaine Greer's The Change, and many others. These excerpts will then be disclosed one page at a time.
Lynn Lu (PhD, AFHEA) is a visual artist from Singapore. Her research-led multidisciplinary practice emerges from her interests in context and site specificity, participation and collaboration, and the poetics of absurdity.Her current research revolves around the figure of the Crone, and investigates female aging through creative practice, to subvert and deepen the ways we collectively understand and experience menopause.
Lynn exhibits and performs worldwide, including at Brent Biennale in London (2025), National Gallery Singapore (2022), SFMOMA (2021), Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2019), Framer Framed in Amsterdam (2018), Saatchi Gallery (2017), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2015), The Barbican (2015), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2013), Tate Modern (2010), Beijing 798 Art Zone (2009), and Singapore Art Museum (2007).
Lynn is Visiting Artist at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and Associate Lecturer at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.
Ash McNaughton
Ash McNaughton is an action-based performance artist whose practice unfolds through a process-led exploration of materials, movement, & sound. Often site-responsive & durational, they utilise endurance & repetition to access altered states of being. Their actions seek to foster a synergetic exchange between their [physical, psychological, spiritual] body & the environments they inhabit. Attuning to transcorporeality & somatic practices, their embodied approach navigates thresholds evoking precarity, tension, & fragility —holding in reverence that which lies in-between.
An attempt to articulate what often escapes language: a poetics of fluid presence within a fixed world.
Ash McNaughton (b.1990, SCT) is an artist & producer based between London & Folkestone. They obtained their BAHons from Grays School of Art (2013) & MA from the Royal College of Art (2018). They are co-founder of SITE & a member of the international collective ANAM CARA. They are Associate Director of ]performance s p a c e[, & a Local Associate Producer for Marlborough Productions New Queers on the Block programme, producing QUEERCALL Festival in 2024.
Ewan Hindes
Pagan of the Cthulucene
The Creature writhes. Perhaps it fell from the heavens. Perhaps it crawled its way out of the earth. Either way, it writhes. And as it writhes, it opens, and the Pagan of the Cthulucene emerges. Together they extend, connected and connecting to all that surrounds them. The Pagan worships the Creature, the Creature sustains the Pagan.
This is an alien mythology, a tale of cycles and symbiosis, and becoming a part of something greater than no individual could ever achieve. It is an exercise in tentacularity (Donna Haraway’s theories on the connectedness between all life and objects), and consequently in immersing oneself in the network. Its peculiar, bizarre and, frankly, garish, but these enable enough distance from humanity for us to look back and confront ourselves. So, sit back, relax, and become one with the Creature and the Pagan of the Cthulucene…
Ewan uses performance, costume and sculpture to explore the interrelations between queer ecologies and speculative fiction. It’s an examination of tentacular bodies, connected to each other and freed from human assertions, within alternative worlds and non-linear narratives. Their work is an artistic and narrative adventure into how we can live in symbiosis with the worlds around us, to learn from the past and the stories we’ve concocted to visualise and exist within utopian futures. In doing so, it is also an embodiment and exploration of the vague aspects of their identity, particularly around their gender. This process of tentacular world-building and sprawling story-weaving help them to understand the ambiguities within themself, which in turn inform said narratives. It’s cyclical, and, along with the animation of the inanimate, transcends them as an individual.
Helena Walsh
Nagging
This durational performance interrogates housing precarity. It responds to community activism on Nags Head Estate, Tower Hamlets, where I have lived since 2009 and act as the Secretary of the Tenants Association. This densely populated estate, built in the 1930s, is run by social housing landlord, Peabody. Tenants are campaigning against our landlord’s lack of action on damp, mould and disrepair, which causes illness and excess domestic labour. Through embodied actions with materials, including bricks and mortar, the work responds to our fight for healthy homes. Featuring a soundscape that includes the diverse voices of the Nags Headcommunity related through media interviews and protest recordings, the performance is titled ‘Nagging.’ This references how through our collective activism we positively mobilise complaint as a political strategy. We refer to ourselves as the ‘Nags Head Naggers’ and we know ‘you don’t get anything unless you nag.’
Helena Walsh is an Irish Live Artist, activist and educator. She has been making live art for over twenty years working with time, liveness and the materiality of the body; both within constructed installation environments and site-specific spaces. Her work explores issues of gender, class, labour and cultural identity. Drawing on her lived and embodied experience she seeks to positively violate the systems, borders and rules that construct gender. From her diasporic vantage point as an Irish woman living in Britain, Helena has examined histories of colonialism, migration and labour, alongside the activism of Irish feminist diaspora. Helena has performed widely in galleries, museums, theatres and non-traditional art spaces, including public sitesand regularly presents and writes on feminist performance practice. She completed her PhD in the Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London in 2013 and is a Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts, London.
www.helenawalsh.com
Live Art Development Agency
On Resistance: A curated collection of video documentation from the Live Art Development Agency Study Room
LADA’s Study Room in Bethnal Green holds a collection of over 8,000 publications, resources and audio-visual documentation of live art history, research and practice. In response to this years Peopling the Palace theme of Resistance, LADA has curated a selection of video works from the collection that explore different artistic approaches to resistance including documenting to survive displacement, writing as a record of living, intimacy in replace of brutality and humour in the face of dehumanisation.