Cannibal O

Eight women, alongside performance artist Liv Fontaine and host Catalina Barroso-Luque, are invited to sit together, drink red wine and consume female authored art. In keeping with the decor, guests wear burgundy, pink or mauve toned attire.

The event consists of four courses: a starter of Catalina’s written barf (published by PSS), followed by a screening of Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses and a digitalised version of Hot Readings by Erica Scourti. For dessert, a newly commissioned live performance I’m the People Pleaser, by Liv Fontaine, is served.

The work presented makes use of appropriation and digestion as performative acts of self-construction, while investigating the eroticised female body. The event explores acts of hosting in the gap between art institution and domestic spaces, and the complicit agencies subtending female relationships.

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A round cabaret table is positioned inside a 4m diameter O formed out of mauve, satincurtains. This enormous textile O hangs in the middle of a darkened gallery with overhanging profiles lighting its interior, creating a theatrical setting for all activities to desenvolved within. This staging places audience, artist and host within a shared enclosed space, making performers of everyone, while emphasising the corporeality of the objects and bodies contained within.

On the periphery of the curtain, a CUBE TV on a plinth (to play Fuses), and a flat-screen monitor on a K Stand (to play Hot Readings), are placed at 90 degrees from each other. Before each screening, the host unveils the respective monitor, pushes it inside the O, then presses play. Once the film has ended, she pushes the monitor out of the circle and closes the curtains.

Throughout the evening photographer Isobel Lutz-Smith moves around the outside the circle, softly pulling curtains aside at different points and inserting her camera’s lens in, in order to document the performances taking place.

Biographies follow the 28 images below.

Biographies

Catalina Barroso-Luque is a Mexican artist and curator based in Glasgow. She constructs narratives, often collaboratively, inhabited by surrogate female bodies and voices, which foil how she relates to others and herself. Cannibal O is part of a series of works focused on performing letters and character types. Other pieces include: Ñ (MAP Magazine,2019); Just My Typo (The Persistance of Type III, Glasgow International 2018) and eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (GSS Fellowship presentation, The Pipefactory Glasgow 2017).

Isobel Lutz-Smith is an artist based in Glasgow who uses multiple screens and sculpture as a means to explore the position of bodies inside man-made systems of production, translation and consumption. She originally studied architecture and worked for a number of years in this field. Recently she was selected to show work for Edinburgh Art Festival Platform:2018.

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was a multidisciplinary artist who transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterised by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. Painting, photography, performance art and installation works shown at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and most recently in a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York entitled Up To And Including Her Limits. Film and video retrospectives Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Film Theatre, London; Whitney Museum, NY; San Francisco Cinematheque; Anthology Film Archives, NYC.

Erica Scourti is an Athens born artist and writer, based in London. Her work explores biographical writing and bodily inscription in the performance and representation of subjectivity. Recent solo shows include Chief Complaint at Almanac, London and Spill Sections at Studio RCA (both 2018); group shows include the High Line, New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Hayward Gallery. Her writing has been published in Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press, 2018) and Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017) amongst others. Scourti is guest editor of the Happy Hypocrite journal (forthcoming 2019). She is currently undertaking a practice-based AHRC-funded PhD in Goldsmiths’ Art Department.

Liv Fontaine is an artist, writer and performer born in Southampton and based in Glasgow. Her work focus on ideas of hysteria, desperation, rage, intense pleasure and salacious gossip. Recent shows include: Performance Club TV, Raven Row, London; Eat Me at Preach, District, Liverpool; The Great David Dale Dionysia, David Dale, Glasgow; Vision and Signs, Sluice, London; The Musical, Bloc Projects, Sheffield; Rupture, part of ART NIGHT 18, The Garden Museum, London; Flare, Caustic Coastal, Salford. Her writings have been published in Accent magazine, The interjection calendar (Montez Press) and Polyester Online amongst others. She recently completed an MLITT in Performance Art at Glasgow School of Art and was a member alternative art school, School of Damed 17-18.