Performance Anxiety — Part II
- Presented by
- Kate Neave
- Artists
- Ellie Pritts
- Kika Nicolela
- Saeko Ehara
- Aun Helden
- BYMA
Verse is pleased to host Performance Anxiety, curated by Kate Neave. Working with external curators, Verse aims to present works by the digital artists shaping culture today. We can only go so deep ourselves, and so were thrilled when Kate reached out to us with an exhibition that digs deep into conceptually and historically groundbreaking artworks by artists that deserve more of a spotlight.nnnKate is an independent curator of contemporary art and art writer contributing to magazines such as Twin, Heroine, Epoch, Public Offerings and Dazed. She is the founder and curator of Ellipsis Prints, commissioning prints from talented women and non-binary artists in the UK. She has curated for Soho House, Manifesta and recently commissioned new music x digital art collaborations for OpenLab. Kate holds an MA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute in London.nnnIn Performance Anxiety, Kate pursues her long term commitment to championing underrepresented artists with an exhibition that investigates how women and non-binary artists are harnessing the digital space to create a new disruptive dialogue around the body.nnnPerformance Anxiety is a two part exhibition that includes the artists Alfacenttauri, Aun Helden, Auriea Harvey, Hardmetacore, Kika Nicolela, Martina Menegon, Saeko Ehara, Ellie Pritts and Tabitha Swanson.nnExplore Performace Anxiety Part I.n
"How can we come together in solidarity?" asks Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, "It is our responsibility collectively to infect...to make impossible pathways viable as all else circuits towards a triggered collapse."n nDigital space offers the potential for a recalibration. In digital, many rules are suspended and others are easily broken. This presents an opportunity to challenge the restrictive social, political and cultural discourses associated with the body and to step outside the tidy boxes we are expected to fill. It’s a space in which we can assert our presence, reclaiming the body to distort tired narratives.nPerformance Anxiety features women and non-binary artists whose progressive work is connected to the body and to identity. The artists reassess our expectations of the human figure and of gender and consider the permeable boundary that exists between ourselves and technology. They embrace the liberation to be found in digital space. They harness the opportunity to subvert the mainstream and create a new disruptive dialogue with the body as their battleground.n n“If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different …then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place.” ― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.n