Bbeyond is a Belfast based performance Art Collective, which, among other things has monthly group performance meetings in various indoor and outdoor locations in Belfast and elsewhere . Core values of the ‘Monthlies’ include group interaction, spontaneity , site specificity and public relevance.

https://www.bbeyond.live

BBDB : Bbeyond Derry Branch shares these values. BBDB members have group performance meetings every week, and are normally in the same location. Ie.Fridays 12.00pm. Society Street Derry

Léann Herlihy (they/them) is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin.

Their practice is informed by trans*, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks which deploys alternative modalities of expression through an array of mediums including live performance, video, billboards, sculpture, text, workshops and radical pedagogies.

Rigorously and creatively critiquing the positioning of Otherness in a heteronormative society, Léann actively transgresses beyond 'Other' as another tick-box option to choose from and moves to explore the generative capacity of collective engagement and resistance when we abolish colonial and capitalist prescriptions of personhood, the body and gender.

The Gender of Sound (2023)

by Léann Herlihy

The Gender of Sound (2023) is an oral response to Anne Carson’s chapter under the same moniker from her book Glass, Irony and God (1995). Utilising the autobiographical capacity of vocal cords and their transitionary pitches, Herlihy will question how presumptions about gender affect the way we hear sound. Acting as a precursor to this performance, an asterisk [*] marks Herlihy’s vocal cords. A diacritical character, the * poses a question to its prefix, signalling towards a politics based on instability which is orientated towards social transformation, rather than political accommodation.

Lili Murphy-Johnson is an artist who works between Performance and Jewellery. Her practice is driven by questioning power that exists within objectification and playing with the dominance that can result from submissiveness. She is interested in value; how it is measured and changeable. There is a focus on the way the meaning or value of an object can disappear or alter, depending on the viewer. Lili’s work pokes at the meaning of being ‘correct’ in our behaviour and interactions. She uses humour and subversion to work through her ideas, drawn to where humour can become awkward and tense.

In her performance Doorstop, Lili makes herself of use to her audience by turning herself into a functioning doorstop, holding doors open. This work is a continuation from a series of performances where Lili objectifies herself by transforming herself into everyday objects, in order to research where power and control can arise through being submissive. Doorstop explores the idea of self-sacrificing and questioning where it is for the benefit of the receiver and where it is unconsciously alleviating anxiety and fears in the giver. This performance exposes the contradiction of how it can become uncomfortable for someone to provide.

E.M. Parry is a trans*-disciplinary artist, award-winning theatre designer, and doctoral researcher in queer history and performance,

working across scenography, performance, drag and visual art. Bringing diverse and disparate platforms and communities into

conversation and entanglement, their work has been staged in the West End, international opera houses, pubs, clubs, ships,

museums, lecture halls and leaky basements. Their practice flickers between durational performance, kinetic sculpture, drag act and

ritual, blurring process and product, artefact and event. They work with, through and for the queer body, squinting at history, flirting

with ghosts and the things that go bump in the margins.

Pricklings (2023)

Pricklings is a durational performance, staging the artist as trans saint, queer icon, fetish object, witch’s poppet, a luck charm, a ritual, a process, a test, a game. Originally performed in queer club spaces, Pricklings centres trans embodiment and bodily autonomy, tracking edges, slippages and entanglements across bodies, practices and communities. In a moment of contact, connection and exchange, as pin penetrates surrogate flesh, religious, historical, medical and magical iconography are remixed and repurposed to create new rituals of becoming.

Matthew Wilson (b. 1997) is a visual artist living and working in Mid-Ulster, N.I. Wilson’s work has been exhibited throughout Ireland and the UK including Golden Thread Gallery, Douglas Hyde Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts. He has been fortunate to facilitate a number of commissioned projects within the community and also within institutions, such as Queens University. With a practice distinctly rooted in place; Wilson combines site specificity with technical skills to explore works across sculpture, drawing, performance and writing.

‘My hands, still freezing now’

In this new work for FIX23, Wilson attempts to condense the transient nature of time into a physical form; utilising the body as both material and catalyst. Recording and bearing witness to its own destruction, the work considers our perception of memory, time and the things we hold dear. Balancing personal contexts and speaking to wider cultural associations, the audience will be guided through an intimate process of transition.

Based in Dublin Olivia Hassett is a visual artist who regularly works collaboratively and interdisciplinary across the interfaces of science, medicine, and art. Using brightly coloured man-made materials alongside reappropriated medical elements the live works and immersive installations she creates are regular sites of contestation. Pushing and pulling across shifting boundaries her art works seek to repair and rebuild a new provisional whole, one that recognises the complicated beauty of the lived experience of the visceral female body.

Since graduating with a Master’s in fine art Sculpture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2012, Olivia Hassett has developed six solo exhibitions, fifteen solo performances and taken part in numerous collaborative group performances. Various art projects developed by Hassett have been funded by Trinity College Dublin, The Meath Foundation, and the Adelaide Health Foundation. Olivia Hassett has also completed residencies in deAppendix, Live Art Ireland, and the Leitrim Sculpture Centre.

Trace - mark or other indication of the existence or passing of something.

+

Residue - something that remains after the completion of a process.

Human skin is a fascinating liminal space constantly morphing as it sheds dead cells, creates new ones, responds to threats, and heals. Consisting of numerous layers of dedicated cell structures, all naked to the human eye, it is in the unique position of being at the boundary separating the external public space from the internal private body. Trace+Residue – is a dialogue between the artist’s performing body and a once off audience body in a specific space and time. Traces have been etched onto the fabrics layered on top of my skin. Colour has been spread, seeping into the marks, making them visible. During the performance I will engage with these extensions of my skin, recognising and celebrating the complicated reality of not only my lived bodily experience but those of the middle-aged female body. The audience’s engagement is vital in this performance. The visceral process of adding new layers to the pre-existing traces not only represents a physiological convergence of cells but also offers opportunities for connections to be created on a variety of levels between a group of human beings.

Sandra Johnston has been active internationally since 1992 as an artist, researcher and educator working predominantly through performance art, video installations and drawing. Johnston’s practice is rooted in processes of improvisation and typically actions involve a sparsity of materials and attentiveness to the particularity of context. The installations fuse fragments of historical archival material into intricate relationships with performed gestures, which enable a speculative opening up of personal narratives around trauma, memory, and implication. Additionally, she has been committed long-term to exploring collaborative performance interactions as embodied research and engaging with the growth of creative networks.

In Among it All

This performance will be a personal reflection on how life was like for me living in East Belfast in 1993 when Catalyst first emerged. Exploring memories good and bad through found materials.

Sinéad O'Donnell (*1975,Tallaght, Dublin, Ireland). Her performance practice is contexual and she has made works across the globe, integrating her learning of new cultures with personal experience. Sinead uses her body to create works that reference the challenging experiences that women face across the world: she gives a voice to those that have been silenced. Previous works have addressed: violence; grief; being neuro-diverse in a neuro-typical world; inclusion; and exclusion. Her work explores identity, borders and barriers through encounters with territory and the territorial. She sets up actions or situations that demonstrate complexities, contradictions or commonality between medium and discipline, timing and spontaneity, intuition and methodology, artist and audience.

She/Her

Wild/er Heart/s

About Performance:

heart/s

blow/ing

wild/er

miss/ing

You/r

lim/in/al/ity

to/get/her

a/part

be/ing

with/in

be/ing

with/out

Belfast-based experimental electronic composer-producer Liam McCartan, aka Son Zept, began his project in 2018 combining his influences from the rich history of the hardcore continuum. His intricate genre-exploding club constructions transport the listener so far past his IDM, techno, and electroacoustic touchstones into a new mutated rave aesthetic. His work has since evolved into a beatless expansive exploration of sonic possibilities fusing sound art, drone, power-ambient, minimalism and maximalism.

Son Zept Performance (2023)

Son Zept's performance will be a dense audio-visual experience focusing on immersion and texture. A sonic tour ranging from beautiful minimalist ambient to bass-heavy spectralist intensity that engages with the role of memory in sound and image. These compositions and their visuals are focused on journeying to a different way of perceiving sight and sound as each begs to effect one another. Drawing from his solo work and collaborations with traditional Irish singers, contemporary violinists, and spoken word artists, Son Zept will be fusing his own concepts with his influences of power-ambient, death-ambient, electroacoustic music, hauntology, drone metal, contemporary classical, and Celtic music.

Tara McGinn (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based between Belfast, NI and Enniscorthy, ROI. McGinn is currently part of the fourth and final Belfast cohort of the Freelands Artist Programme 2022 -2024, culminating in an upcoming group exhibition in London at Mimosa House Gallery in the new year. She is a former Catalyst Arts director and is a studio resident at Flax Art Studios in Belfast. Recent shows include: An Intimate Public solo exhibition at PS2 curated by Cecelia Graham and Grace Jackson, An Gintlíocht featuring new commissioned work for the Ulster Folk Museum, and was selected to be an artist in residence at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris in 2024 with support from the Wexford County Council and Wexford Art Centre. McGinn’s practice combines sculptural (re)productions, image-based assemblage and reflex/ctive writing. She develops studio processes and research that connect, contrast, and translate subjects of trauma, memory, identity, and space, mapping the links of an emotional interiority with the narrative material of her object-based work. This approach transforms the meaning of the objects’ textures and surfaces as sites for cultural practices and political narratives to be re-examined as playful fictions through language. Responding to the spaces her work inhabits as installations; these interventions shape the continuation of her research and thinking around domesticity, bodily labour and time. Her recent work draws particular attention to the queer and quiet work of architect Eileen Gray, revisiting understandings of sapphic modernity through the privacy and safety of gendered personal spaces. This research has influenced McGinn’s practice in the past year, expanding their sculptural repertoire and material portfolio for her solo show An Intimate Public at PS2 Belfast. Her ongoing work is attempting to reintroduce the body as a fundamental antagonist of architectural forms through its erasure and re-birth as an art object/form. This develops through her emerging writing practice and activates as new performative possibilities.

Venus Patel is transfemme artist of colour working in performance and film. Her art practice stems from her lived experience as an “other”, thus navigating the sociological roles of conformity within a white cisheteronormative society. She utilises a unique blend of humour, absurdity, and abjection to create multi-faceted works that speak on subject matters such as hate crimes, religious guilt, and queer/poc bodily suppression. Her first solo exhibition “Monsters of the Apocalypse'' opened earlier this year in April at Pallas Projects. Her previous work has been shown in the Complex, Butler Gallery, and the Crawford Art Gallery

“The Preacher’s Monster” is part of an ongoing project that envisions a queer reimagining of the end of the world. Patel investigates the current structures of the social order through apocalyptic street preachers and gender-bending monsters. Inspired by the extravagant imagery from the Book of Revelations, monsters become a tool to propose a future of boundary crossing expression. She incorporates traditional religious tactics of indoctrination and insists on the need for a new world, one in which Queer POC shine and internal “monstrosity” is allowed to unfurl.