Sam Cottington is an artist, writer and theatre/performance maker living between London and Frankfurt. Through interdisciplinary experiments in collage he often presents “reality” as contradictory and mutable; the product of specific historical and social economies.
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- Writers Body
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The artists cousins name in red vinyl on bookstore window. The ongoing project only includes the names of women on his fathers side of the family.
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Boom town @ etta, Düsseldorf
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Spray
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Spray is a new poetic play by Sam Cottington. The action is set outside the house of a man who is standing at his bedroom window. Passing by at street level, a woman falls in love with him. The communicative act, the weight of language and the possibility of concurrence and adjustment are all part of the “made reality of the theater”, a theater that is treated in a material and plastic way, proposing “sculptural realism against theatrical melodrama”.
Being a love story without melodrama, Spray relies precisely on contextual and spatial elements -which in turn can bring attention to politics, geography, sociology-, and unfolds at different heights and in spaces separated by frames and thresholds. Cottington’s new work questions the assumption that plays should build cohesive characters that are comfortably absorbed, developed and fulfilled within the narrative they are located in. Instead, the love story is approached through alienation –a distance and a feeling of not belonging with respect to what surrounds us, what we love or produce. The physicality of looks, words and attraction are the ones to bridge or reinforce that distance.
-Beatriz Ortega Botas & Alberto Vallejo
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September Sessions @ Bio Skandia, Stockholm
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-BLANKS
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’’London Performance Studios is pleased to present BLANKS, a major new commission by Associate Artist Sam Cottington, in which the languages of sculpture and performance are brought into counterpoint with the apparatus of the exhibition and the theatre. BLANKS can be understood as an exhibition in a series of acts—a series of actions, or sleights of hand by the artist—as well as a piece of theatre, in which objects and staging act as stand-ins for various modes of discursive production and the publics that such discourse might bring to life.
First, Cottington seems to present the viewer with an enumeration of readymades. However, as the viewer approaches these found objects for a second look one, and then another, of a series of found telephones begins to ring. The suite of assemblages is now an environment-cum-scenography for four plays written by the artist, and performed by actors somewhere on the other end of the line.’’
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BLANKS @ London Performance Studios, London
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-Gaunt Star
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-Play starring Skjold Rambow, Hassan Khan and Rolf Birkholz. Made in Collaboration with Antonio Lopez, Lulu Leika, Sarah Schneider, Chaeheun Park and Christina Vargas
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Gaunt Star unfolds the relationship between a young soldier and a car with the power of speech
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Städelschule rundgang, Frankfurt
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Cell 16
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TV monitor on artist’s plinth, 6 hours. Video’s duration matches the opening hours of the space its shown in. 15 minutes after the gallery opens a 47 secondclip plays. For the remaining duration the screen remains black
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Coffee @ Torbay, London
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Writers Body
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The artists cousins name in red vinyl on gallery window. The ongoing project only includes the names of women on his fathers side of the family.
![]()
Civil twilight @ Ginny on Frederick, London
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People Person
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Novella published by JOAN publishing
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https://joanpublishing.org/Sam-Cottington
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‘’Sam Cottington’s prose is keen and conspiratorial, ‘the metropolitan equivalent of curtain twitching’, and his cast of characters elbow each other under it like flies banging on glass. ‘In the opening between lives and personalities there are no words’ he writes. Only there are words: they are in this savage, shimmering book, and its pages flare with how skilfully Cottington has caught them. Scintillatingly quick. I loved it.’’
-Hannah Regel
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A helper
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Play starring Alison Harris and Chloe Orrock
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Two mothers meet in a living room to act out a conversation between a man they once knew and his anonymous interviewer.
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Pennies from heaven @ London Performance Studios, London
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The Factory (the hoist) 1
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Cardboard, paper, tape, spray paint, oil, acrylic, glue, card, wire, found images, found text, photographs, twigs, felt tip pen, paper plate, plastic mesh, toys, cement paper straws, plastic bag, artists plinth
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Sneckdown @ EACC, Castellón
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Untitled (The keys on the piano). Speaker and text on artists plinth.
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ink-jet printed text reads:
“The keys on the piano
I can’t wait to watch- And when my mum asks me
what are you drawing
I always tell her
a pretty girl”
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Coffee @ Torbay, London
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Phone Plays
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Collection of plays published by Montez press.
https://montezpress.com/catalogue/scores/phone-plays/
‘’Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays achieve an unusual balance between poetry and directness. By way of their formal constraints, they read as works of abstraction, and nonetheless have that messed-up, very human quality so characteristic of Cottington’s writing—a certain nerve that infuses the language and tells you: you’re still a person.’’
– Kristian Vistrup Madsen
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I have always depended on the kindness of strangers I, II & III
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Cardboard, laminated found images, laminated artists images, artists text, metal rack, glue, tape, card, string, acryllic
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Deadhead Perfora @ Yaby, Madrid
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The Factory (the hoist) 5 & 6
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Cardboard, paper, card, corrugated card, paper straws, acryllic, oil, spray paint, pen, glue, tape, artists image, found image
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Sneckdown @ EACC, Castellón
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19811882
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Oil and text on canvas
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For Mummy @ Zaza, Milan
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Bowl and The Go-Between
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Video installation across 2 monitors, made in collaboration with Alejandro Villabona
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r250xBHxYKw
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Bowl & The Go-Between @ London Performance Studios, London
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Air
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Oil & pencil on canvas
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Gossips @ Nir Altman, Munich
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stopthe
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Cardboard, fabric, dress, inkjet print, glue, oil, newspaper
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Ef @ Louche Ops, Berlin
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Oil and graphite on canvas
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Ef @ Louche Ops, Berlin
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Saw
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Cardboard, fabric, ink jet print, oil, glue
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Ef @ Louche Ops, Berlin
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Lets get married
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The professions of exhibiting artists fathers are painted on the gallaery’s wall in colours taken from New York construction sites
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Monicker @ Hamlet, Zürich
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On
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One act play starring Sean Burns.
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The ghost of a deliveroo driver wanders on stage.
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‘In so much of the literature where they are present, the voices of ghosts function as a device to move the plot, under an assumption that their primary compulsion is to communicate with the living. Cottington imagines their motivation to language differently, as an echoic loop of displaced interiorities. These voices converge as something other than a will to return or to communicate with the living. Instead it's more like necromantic futurism, an erotic friction of flickering non-being, continuity without reproduction. When one attempts to consider the immeasurable bodies of time that precede birth and follow death, it becomes apparent that life is only a brief spasm of activity, a cameo on a wave. The living are but tourists in a universe of latent passage.’
-James Krone
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On @ Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester
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0000
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Video installation in collaboration with Alejandro Villabona
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‘Together their work condenses vocal fragments from an omnipresent cloud of popular media, internet phenomena, and personal communication into new monologues marked by ambivalent relations between speaker and receiver. Skirting context (and often clear content) in favor of sonic texture, their texts capture a particular unsettled subjectivity and expressive range in the language of our time, rapidly driving the tone of address from self-consciously performative, to callous, to menacing and manipulative.’
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0000 @ Sculpture Centre, New York
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50
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Dance performance in collaboration with Alejandro Villabona starring Blanca Antonia and Molly Ross
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFdKIxMokyM
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50, Sculpture Centre, New York
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Well
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Play performed over the phone.
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Four outdoor scenes, Kunstverein Braunchweig, Braunchweig
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Monicka
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Play starring Alex Thake
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Overture, Stadel Museum, Frankfurt
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Pig (100 years)
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Taxidermy pigeon with eyes closed and one wing slightly outstretched.
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FW PT.2 @ High Art Paris, Paris
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- Writers Body
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The artists cousins name in red vinyl on bookstore window. The ongoing project only includes the names of women on his fathers side of the family.
Boom town @ etta, Düsseldorf
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Spray
-
Spray is a new poetic play by Sam Cottington. The action is set outside the house of a man who is standing at his bedroom window. Passing by at street level, a woman falls in love with him. The communicative act, the weight of language and the possibility of concurrence and adjustment are all part of the “made reality of the theater”, a theater that is treated in a material and plastic way, proposing “sculptural realism against theatrical melodrama”.
Being a love story without melodrama, Spray relies precisely on contextual and spatial elements -which in turn can bring attention to politics, geography, sociology-, and unfolds at different heights and in spaces separated by frames and thresholds. Cottington’s new work questions the assumption that plays should build cohesive characters that are comfortably absorbed, developed and fulfilled within the narrative they are located in. Instead, the love story is approached through alienation –a distance and a feeling of not belonging with respect to what surrounds us, what we love or produce. The physicality of looks, words and attraction are the ones to bridge or reinforce that distance.
-Beatriz Ortega Botas & Alberto Vallejo
September Sessions @ Bio Skandia, Stockholm
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
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-
-
-BLANKS
-
’’London Performance Studios is pleased to present BLANKS, a major new commission by Associate Artist Sam Cottington, in which the languages of sculpture and performance are brought into counterpoint with the apparatus of the exhibition and the theatre. BLANKS can be understood as an exhibition in a series of acts—a series of actions, or sleights of hand by the artist—as well as a piece of theatre, in which objects and staging act as stand-ins for various modes of discursive production and the publics that such discourse might bring to life.
First, Cottington seems to present the viewer with an enumeration of readymades. However, as the viewer approaches these found objects for a second look one, and then another, of a series of found telephones begins to ring. The suite of assemblages is now an environment-cum-scenography for four plays written by the artist, and performed by actors somewhere on the other end of the line.’’
BLANKS @ London Performance Studios, London
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-
-
-Gaunt Star
-
-Play starring Skjold Rambow, Hassan Khan and Rolf Birkholz. Made in Collaboration with Antonio Lopez, Lulu Leika, Sarah Schneider, Chaeheun Park and Christina Vargas
-
Gaunt Star unfolds the relationship between a young soldier and a car with the power of speech
Städelschule rundgang, Frankfurt
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-
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Cell 16
-
TV monitor on artist’s plinth, 6 hours. Video’s duration matches the opening hours of the space its shown in. 15 minutes after the gallery opens a 47 secondclip plays. For the remaining duration the screen remains black
Coffee @ Torbay, London
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Writers Body
-
The artists cousins name in red vinyl on gallery window. The ongoing project only includes the names of women on his fathers side of the family.
Civil twilight @ Ginny on Frederick, London
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
People Person
-
Novella published by JOAN publishing
-
https://joanpublishing.org/Sam-Cottington
-
‘’Sam Cottington’s prose is keen and conspiratorial, ‘the metropolitan equivalent of curtain twitching’, and his cast of characters elbow each other under it like flies banging on glass. ‘In the opening between lives and personalities there are no words’ he writes. Only there are words: they are in this savage, shimmering book, and its pages flare with how skilfully Cottington has caught them. Scintillatingly quick. I loved it.’’
-Hannah Regel
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
A helper
-
Play starring Alison Harris and Chloe Orrock
-
Two mothers meet in a living room to act out a conversation between a man they once knew and his anonymous interviewer.
Pennies from heaven @ London Performance Studios, London
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The Factory (the hoist) 1
-
Cardboard, paper, tape, spray paint, oil, acrylic, glue, card, wire, found images, found text, photographs, twigs, felt tip pen, paper plate, plastic mesh, toys, cement paper straws, plastic bag, artists plinth
Sneckdown @ EACC, Castellón
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Untitled (The keys on the piano). Speaker and text on artists plinth.
-
ink-jet printed text reads:
“The keys on the piano
I can’t wait to watch- And when my mum asks me
what are you drawing
I always tell her
a pretty girl”
Coffee @ Torbay, London
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Phone Plays
-
Collection of plays published by Montez press.
https://montezpress.com/catalogue/scores/phone-plays/
‘’Sam Cottington’s Phone Plays achieve an unusual balance between poetry and directness. By way of their formal constraints, they read as works of abstraction, and nonetheless have that messed-up, very human quality so characteristic of Cottington’s writing—a certain nerve that infuses the language and tells you: you’re still a person.’’
– Kristian Vistrup Madsen
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers I, II & III
-
Cardboard, laminated found images, laminated artists images, artists text, metal rack, glue, tape, card, string, acryllic
Deadhead Perfora @ Yaby, Madrid
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
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The Factory (the hoist) 5 & 6
-
Cardboard, paper, card, corrugated card, paper straws, acryllic, oil, spray paint, pen, glue, tape, artists image, found image
Sneckdown @ EACC, Castellón
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
19811882
-
Oil and text on canvas
For Mummy @ Zaza, Milan
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Bowl and The Go-Between
-
Video installation across 2 monitors, made in collaboration with Alejandro Villabona
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r250xBHxYKw
Bowl & The Go-Between @ London Performance Studios, London
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Air
-
Oil & pencil on canvas
Gossips @ Nir Altman, Munich
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-
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-
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-
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stopthe
-
Cardboard, fabric, dress, inkjet print, glue, oil, newspaper
Ef @ Louche Ops, Berlin
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S
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Oil and graphite on canvas
Ef @ Louche Ops, Berlin
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Saw
-
Cardboard, fabric, ink jet print, oil, glue
Ef @ Louche Ops, Berlin
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-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Lets get married
-
The professions of exhibiting artists fathers are painted on the gallaery’s wall in colours taken from New York construction sites
Monicker @ Hamlet, Zürich
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
On
-
One act play starring Sean Burns.
-
The ghost of a deliveroo driver wanders on stage.
-
‘In so much of the literature where they are present, the voices of ghosts function as a device to move the plot, under an assumption that their primary compulsion is to communicate with the living. Cottington imagines their motivation to language differently, as an echoic loop of displaced interiorities. These voices converge as something other than a will to return or to communicate with the living. Instead it's more like necromantic futurism, an erotic friction of flickering non-being, continuity without reproduction. When one attempts to consider the immeasurable bodies of time that precede birth and follow death, it becomes apparent that life is only a brief spasm of activity, a cameo on a wave. The living are but tourists in a universe of latent passage.’
-James Krone
On @ Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
0000
-
Video installation in collaboration with Alejandro Villabona
-
‘Together their work condenses vocal fragments from an omnipresent cloud of popular media, internet phenomena, and personal communication into new monologues marked by ambivalent relations between speaker and receiver. Skirting context (and often clear content) in favor of sonic texture, their texts capture a particular unsettled subjectivity and expressive range in the language of our time, rapidly driving the tone of address from self-consciously performative, to callous, to menacing and manipulative.’
0000 @ Sculpture Centre, New York
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
50
-
Dance performance in collaboration with Alejandro Villabona starring Blanca Antonia and Molly Ross
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFdKIxMokyM
50, Sculpture Centre, New York
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Well
-
Play performed over the phone.
Four outdoor scenes, Kunstverein Braunchweig, Braunchweig
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Monicka
-
Play starring Alex Thake
Overture, Stadel Museum, Frankfurt
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Pig (100 years)
-
Taxidermy pigeon with eyes closed and one wing slightly outstretched.
FW PT.2 @ High Art Paris, Paris