The sick/ crip/ resting/ lazy/ interdependent body

Moving around day to day in a hyper-capitalist hellscape, we are programmed to forget our bodies and ignore our minds. How often do we consider our limitations and give ourselves time to rest? With performances exploring the nature of rest and laziness from Bare Minimum Collective and Jamila Prowse and readings around sickness and the body from Eve Esfandiari-Denney and Clay AD; we ask you to step outside of time for a moment, and resist the white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist culture which is making us all sick.

Bare Minimum Collective present Scenes From A Marriage, an AV reading, an accessible form that is no less live than when we are able to stand in front of you in person. It is not a 'remote reading', a 'recording', or a 'video work'. The performance piece Sorry for any inconvenience caused. Warmest, Jamila was originally intended to be live, but reimagined after Jamila was signed off on sick leave. Instead, she performs from her sick bed, sharing her private emails cancelling and postponing work, in an attempt to release the shame of pulling out of jobs and commissions.

Eve Esfandiari Denney Live Reading

To read the text from Eve Esfandiari Denney Live Reading please click here

SomersetHouse · Clay AD - Holy Bodies

Bare Minimum Collective - Scenes from a Marriage

Jamila Prowse - Sorry for any inconvenience caused Warmest, Jamila

Listen back to ‘Cripping The Art World Panel Discussion’ with curator and artist Jamila Prowse, curator and writer Iarlaith Ni Fheorais, artist filmmaker, producer and writer Jameisha Prescod and artist and writer Marie Smith. This is a live recording of the panel discussion which took place on 28 February 2023 in the Lancaster Room at Somerset House. Part of Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy 2023.

SomersetHouse · Cripping The Art World Panel Discussion 28th Feb 2023

About the artists

Bare Minimum Collective

Bare Minimum is a six-person interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective. We hate working, hustling, neoliberal self-improvement, wage labour and surplus value, private property, how work eats into our time, our love, our ability to make things in earnest. We are a group of friends who needed a formal structure to give ourselves the permission to make things. We are lazy, queer and many of us are disabled. Members include Diamond Abdulrahim, Vera Chapiro, Christie Costello, Lola Olufemi, Christine Pungong and Leo Woods. Our film MANIFESTO is currently on show in Kunsthalle Wien’s 2022-3 winter exhibition In the Meantime, Winter Comes Around; and we are the current the collective-in-residence at the ICA.

Clay AD

Clay AD is a north node Capricorn who is a student of the body, spirituality and sub-cultures whose studies weave art, writing, facilitating workshops and offering somatic bodywork 1-on-1. His book of poetry Holy Bodies was published in 2022 by Pilot Press.

Eve Esfandiari-Denney

Eve Esfandiari-Denney is a British-born, Persian/Roma poet from south London who took her BA at Goldsmiths, University of London before joining the UEA MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) in 2021 as the recipient of the Birch Family Scholarship. She was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize in 2020, and published My Bodies This Morning This Evening, her debut with Bad Betty Press in 2022.

Jamila Prowse

Jamila Prowse is an artist, writer and researcher who works across moving image and textiles to consider methodologies for visualising mixed-race identity and the lived experience of disability. She is drawn to stitch making and patchwork as a tactile form of processing complex family histories and mapping disability journeys, and moving image as a site of self-archiving and auto-ethnography. Presently, Jamila is an artist on UAL Decolonising Institute's 20/20 programme, where she will be in residence in the National Disability Art Collection and Archive, making a responsive work to their collection exploring the lived experience of disabled artists. This marks her ongoing exploration into ways of processing and expressing disability through art making. Previous exhibitions and screenings include Studio Voltaire (London), Hordaland Kunstsenter (Bergen), Obsidian Coast (Bradford) and South London Gallery.