London Open Performance 2025

The visceral experience of performance art is one of Art’s treasures. From Joseph Beuys to John Giorno to Ken Turner and Marilyn Arsem the freedom of performance art is in how to takes an unconstrained view of the role of artist to produce the unexpected. Reading through this years programme there is a strong mix of the topical and the sublimely leftfield, the latter being part of the enduring spark of this uncompromising artform.

The London Open Live Performance Programme

Building on Whitechapel Gallery’s long history of commissioning and staging performance, The London Open Live provides a vital opportunity to map the different types of live art practices in London.

The live art scene was badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, not least due to the cancellation of live events and programmes during the various lockdowns. In addition, lack of funding has led to many higher education and university courses scaling back their provision for performance programmes, resulting in decreased visibility and a lack of wider investment and support. The London Open Live aims to highlight the vitality and importance of live art practices by offering a platform for artists to present new and recent work throughout Whitechapel Gallery’s Summer season.

The 13-week programme will showcase artists from different generations whose broad responses to ‘live-ness’ offer an invitation to gather around new ideas and experiences. Encompassing a wide range of concepts including testing the limits of the body under endurance, investigating gender constructs, exploring the texture of verbal and non-verbal language and imagining new worlds, each performance will provide a distinct and timely snapshot of live art practice today. The participating artists are Devika Bilimoria, Season Butler, Shaun Caton, Helen Davison, Tim Etchells, Plastique Fantastique, Helena Goldwater, i.as.in.we, William Mackrell, Nando Messias, Will Pegna, Roshana Rubin Mayhew, Mahsa Salali, Aaron Williamson and Joshua Woolford.

Performances will take place Thursday to Sunday throughout June–September 2025 at Whitechapel Gallery. An accompanying film programme will be presented in the Zilkha Auditorium & Studio featuring: Babeworld, Rita Evans, Rosie Gibbens, Adrian Lee, Lynn Lu, Jonas Lund and Sweat mother.

About the performances:

Devika Bilimoria Offerings (2022-2025) 5 June, 4-8pm 6 & 7 June, 1-5pm

Offerings is a durational performance installation by Devika Bilimoria that brings together ritual, chance and cultural memory in an enquiry into diaspora, socio-cultural hierarchies and metaphysical frameworks. Over three days, the artist enacts task-based processes guided by the roll of dice, generating randomised choreographic ‘offering scores’ over four hours. These scores instruct the artist to release flowers, food, and sacred powders found in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions into a demarcated zone, building an accumulative, shifting assemblage of formless matter. In this concentrated scene of chance and ritual, Offerings gives rise to agency, uncertainty and the mutability of culture in search of alternative temporalities.

Nando Messias Complete Breech (2025) 12 June, 7pm

In Complete Breech, Nando Messias stages a new performance utilising sculptural acrobatics and a choreography of mythmaking, trans rights and bodily autonomy. The work weaves together the ancestral rhythms and imaginaries of Afro-Brazilian sacred rites as well as the mock births of London’s eighteenth-century molly-house subculture. The artist’s body is poised on a pedestal as a monument of transition, honesty and precarity. It is deconstructed and flayed, stripped of power or signification, in an exquisite critique of rights, identity and historicity.

Roshana Rubin Mayhew Feeling the Blues (2025) Movement I – 19 June, 7pm Movement II – 24 July, 7pm Movement III – 21 August, 7pm

Feeling the Blues is a work in three movements performed over three months by Roshana Rubin Mayhew. In each, a bodyweight of clay is wrestled through a score of 12 wrestling holds. The sounds generated are mixed live during each movement. In Movement I, the clay is malleable – held, stretched and body slammed through each hold. For Movement II, the dried bodyweight of clay, hardened and resonant with how it was held, is broken down through the rub and friction of the body. Movement III gathers up the pieces. Through grinding and wetting, the remains return a malleable bodyweight of clay, rocked n rolled into motion. Feeling the Blues investigates how to tune into and creatively hold weight and the weighty. Embracing the indeterminacy of live performance, it taps into and feels-through its rhythms, rubs, and sweet spots.

Season Butler Do You Remember the Good Old Days Before the Ghost Town? (2025) 21 June, 12-5pm

Season Butler presents a new, durational performance, which over the course of several hours, dramatises the Capitalocene condition, and the Proletarocene attempt at care, repair and persistence. In dialogue with academic and philosopher Lauren Berlant’s term ‘situation tragedy,’ which describes a condition of ever-diminishing certainty and always on the brink of collapse, the performance explores matter that, once altered by human use, cannot return to its original form. Transformation is a one-way trip, and the only certainty is change. ‘This piece is for and about London as a city under the ongoing betrayal and assault of austerity, and the labour of living in the ruins wrought by a ruthless ruling class – work we will do imperfectly, in state of flow and in frustration.’

i.as.in.we The Score(s): III (2022-2025) 26 June, 7pm

i.as.in.we will present an in-person public sharing of The Score(s): III. Weaving together a growing body of ‘texts’, this live performance is an embodied translation of Yewande YoYo Odunubi and Rohan Ayinde’s collaborative studying practice. Staged in the domestic space of a kitchen across five scenes, each scene is a speculative unfolding of a photograph from American artist Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990), using dance, sound, dialogue and poetry. Drawing on a Black radical tradition that spans a multiplicity of b/Black geographies and spacetimes, the performance asks what exists between everyday experiences of ‘Black aliveness’ and the desire to create structural change and imagine new worlds.

Helen Davison aggregate (2025) 3 July, 5.30-8.30pm 5 & 6 July, 2-5pm

In aggregate, Helen Davison tests the human form under the weight of various materials, layered over time. The durational performance tracks the body’s response to pressure and the moments of connection it finds outside of itself. Over a period of three hours, the artist lies between the concrete floor of the gallery and a sheet of reinforced glass.Suspended above is (in order of performance); a canopy containing grit salt; a canopy containing dandelion seeds and a small sock containing iron fillings. Vocalisations are made in response to the acoustics of the space, the feeling as the glass connects and disconnects with the artist’s skin, and the materials as they are agitated and released to fall onto the glass surface. While the overarching framework remains the same for each performance, adaptations to the materials and improvisations offer nuance to each iteration.

Helena Goldwater gathering in (2025) 11,12 & 13 July, 1-5pm

Helena Goldwater presents gathering in, a three-day durational performance installation that changes over time. The work unfolds on the site where the former Whitechapel Library once thrived, known for a time as the ‘University of the Ghetto’ – a place of reading, learning, questioning. A space to think of the possibilities of the future, a place to dream and a haven from the noise and demands from the outside. Goldwater is interested in how the process is the work, and how slowness can offer intimate readings. Working over 12 hours, the artist transforms a range of materials from one state to another, in order to ask questions. Questions about what is hidden, unseen, lost and revealed; about those who went before us, their labour, what we have learned from them; and how we navigate place – in our body, a site, an area, a land.

Will Pegna Parasound (2024) 19 July, 2.30pm & 4pm

Parasound is a hybrid sound and movement performance that continues Will Pegna’s research into ‘athletic expansion’, as part of his project All Terrain Training. Re-purposing climbing equipment, the performers build a space between pragmatic systems and ethereal summoning, whilst displaying collective sound-making. Violin bows play across industrial wires that keep the Parasound members in collective balance, accompanied by a meditative soundscape of electronic frequencies and collected field recordings in collaboration with Max Frimout. The performance delves into ideals of connectivity—both physical and theoretical—posing questions about nature, behaviour and technology. Blending fantasy with function, Parasound invites audiences into a suspended realm where physical tension, sonic texture and group cohesion converge in a shared, immersive simulation.

Aaron Williamson Slangon (2025) 2 & 3 August, 12-5pm each day

Slangon is an open invitation to The London Open Live visitors to co-create a non-verbal artificial sign language. Artificial languages have a rich history from Klingon in Star Trek and the curious whistling in the children’s TV programme The Clangers to Martha Rosler’s 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, to the constructed Dothraki language in The Game of Thrones. Yet despite this, there isn’t a non-verbal equivalent. Artist Aaron Williamson is a deaf bilingual signer/speaker and will work one-to-one with visitors to translate a single ‘word’ of their choice into Slangon. Abstract gestures, whistling, stamping, anything that is non-verbal is encouraged. Having physically invented their ‘word’, participants are invited to record it direct to camera for inclusion in the ‘Slangon Introductory Vocabulary Video’ that will form a legacy artwork.

A BSL interpreter will be present.

Mahsa Salali THE CALL – MUBĀH مباح (2024) 7 August, 7pm

THE CALL is a durational performance exploring resilience, identity, and the politics of the body. The work poses the central question ‘Is the body an enabler or an entrapment? ’Rooted in ritual and endurance, Mahsa Salali stands motionless, bearing 20 kilograms of chain, connected to seven double bassists. This sculptural stillness pays tribute to the radical Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya and the mythological force of Medusa. The performance confronts and dismantles societal and religious expectations, reclaiming the female-presenting body as a site of agency and resistance. Vulnerability becomes power. Stillness becomes protest. THE CALL invites the audience into a space of collective witnessing, ritual, and reckoning.

Joshua Woolford with Lie Ning, Sippin’ T and Yodea Marquel Dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor (2024) 9 August, 2-5pm

In this performance, Joshua Woolford expands Dancing with the devil / a symphony of organs scattered over the floor, which was originally performed for New Contemporaries at Camden Arts Centre in 2024. The artist will be joined by DJ and space maker Sippin’ T; sonic and visual artist Lie Ning; and fashion and installation designer Yodea Marquel for a three-hour durational performance exploring the potential for collective healing and transformation. Throughout the performance, simple interactions with external, natural and technological ‘organs’ are amplified through repetition, audio loops and electronic processing. In these tangled and fractured moments, Woolford tries to imagine a new liberation for those that are marginalised and oppressed in these unsettling global times.

Shaun Caton with Weeks & Whitford Tales From a London Grotto (2025)16 August, 4-5 pm

Tales From a London Grotto is a collaboration between Shaun Caton and Weeks & Whitford. This new performance installation will create an immersive space of visual alchemy and enchantment. The performers will interpret and perform folkloric historical narratives, in relation to local London tributaries, and their associated histories, narratives and spirits. This occult knowledge will be uncovered through a collective mediumistic research process borrowing from psychogeography, séance, dowsing, scrying, psychometry, hypnosis and electronic voice phenomenon. The resultant performance will incorporate a grotto comprised of artefacts, sound scores, and a choreography of interrelated actions.

William Mackrell Breaking a dance (2025) 28 August, 7pm

Breaking a dance is a new live work by William Mackrell in which he attempts to jump and move under the colossal weight of penny coins glued onto his overalls. The coppery outfit glistens in a visual overload reminiscent of the sparkling embroidered suits of the Pearly Kings and Queens of London’s East End. Surrounded by fluorescent light bulbs, flickering in a natural state of breakdown, the performance is flooded with the sounds of spilling coins. Sourced from artist studio associations across London, the obsolete bulbs echo the precarious temporality of London as an environment to live and work in. As the performance unravels, these all-consuming desires and illusions of capitalism drive Mackrell’s body into inescapable exhaustion.

Tim Etchells with Aisha Orazbayeva By Word of Mouth (2025) 28 August, 7pm

By Word of Mouth is a new improvised work of 40 minutes, arising from Tim Etchells’ interest in the poetics of the commonplace, the discarded and the overlooked. After conducting research walks around Whitechapel, noting down fragments of overheard conversation, mobile phone calls, graffiti sentences, signs and slogans, the artist will animate the materials he’s gathered, tuning in to the desires, narratives and unconscious mutterings of the city. In the performance diverse language materials are placed side by side, mixing distinct impulses and reflections, in an improvised dialogue with Etchells’ collaborator, violinist Aisha Orazbayeva.

Plastique Fantastique The Hares, The Trolls, Dragon and Tooth Cruise (2025) 4 September, 7pm

London-based collaboration Plastique Fantastique is produced by Ana Benlloch, David Burrows, Arianne Churchman, Tom Clark, Benedict Drew, Marie Marshall, Alex Marzeta, Vanessa Page, Frankie Roberts and Simon O’Sullivan. For London Open Live, they will present a new performance-fiction about humans and their technologies, and other animals. The group will use songs, improvisation, enaction of scenarios and storytelling, as well as masks, objects and projections, to present a communiqué addressing meme cultures and their political and social effects. The group draw upon Hollywood cinema, science fiction and folk traditions – fictions of the near and far future and from the past – to speculate on human-technological-animal relations and community.

The London Open Live 4 June – 7 September 2024 Gallery 2

General Gallery Admission: Free Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm; Thursdays, 11am – 9pm Whitechapel Gallery, 77 – 82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX whitechapelgallery.org Main photo: Nando Messias, Shoot the Sissy, 2016. Photo: Holly Revell. Courtesy of the artist