Weightless ghosts / Accidental spectators

Weightless ghosts / Accidental spectators is an experimental live performance programme interrogating the distinction between spectator and witness.  

This new series for Humber Street Gallery takes Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention as a point of departure to re-align, misinterpret, and make distorted the relationship between artist and audience. As we slip between the blurring of dance, ritual, sound, voice, and body, we’ll be exploring the meaning of performance art, its orbit in our city and how we bear witness to impermanence. 

Performance artists:

• Sean Roy Parker
• Sym Stellium
• Nathan Walker
• KP Culver

  Quote from Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention:  “The care of art objects comes into direct conflict with care for performers, especially when the latter need hydrating. The audience, meanwhile, changes its character: from sedentary, self-selecting theatre goers to multiple mobile publics – or occasionally, no audience at all.” Bishop, p.93. 

  We take our understanding of performance art from the definition offered by Tate. You can read more about this here. We think of performance art to exist in a blurriness between choreography and spontaneity, and as a method for artists and audiences alike to process the changing relationship between the body and the spaces it exists and moves in.  

  At Humber Street Gallery we are interested in bringing new performance works to the city and providing space for artists to explore and share challenging work. Our city has a long history of radical performance, from COUM Transmissions to Hull Time Based Arts. With a contemporary community of artists exploring the potential of sound, dance, and theatre in their work, we want to celebrate Hull as a place where expectations are challenged and where new understandings of art can emerge. 

  At Weightless ghosts / Accidental spectators, you can expect to see: 

  • Live readings of poetry and spoken word. 
  • Artists using their voice to create new sounds. 
  • Visual projections of film and moving images. 
  • Alternative interpretations of dance and movement.