2016 · The Whitworth, Manchester

Precarious Assembly — Gathering 2

Twelve commissioned, site-responsive works assembled across the Whitworth through performance, installation, video and movement.

WE REFUSE TO BE UNSEEN by Sexcentenary at Precarious Assembly

About the project

Precarious Assembly placed twelve commissioned works throughout and around the Whitworth. Each artist created or adapted a work for a specific location, engaging with lineages of women artists, activists and family histories.

The gathering moved across live performance, installation, video and body-based practice. Audiences travelled through the building as participants in a temporary assembly shaped by attention, proximity and social relation.

Artists

Commissioned work

Artists and works

The Weather is Very Mixed

Amy Buckley

Work

Angela Kennedy

I Made Everything (with Caro)

Anna Macdonald and Caroline Dubois

Ply

Dual Works

Restfulness

Funmi Adewole

Not at Home

Gillian Dyson

Feed

Holly Victoria Matthews

Put into the Movement of Things: Navigations and Positions for the Whitworth

Jane Frances Dunlop and Mira Loew

Coming Home

Karen Lawrence

Between Earth and Sky

Rachel Dean

Braiding…brushing…being

Rosa Cisneros

WE REFUSE TO BE UNSEEN

Sexcentenary

Further background

The thinking around Precarious Assembly — Gathering 2

The title and conceptual driver came from Judith Butler’s writing on bodies assembling in public and on precarity as a shared, if unevenly distributed, condition. The project asked what the gathering of specifically marked bodies might express beyond literal or representational language.

We approached the event as an embodied and spatial footnote to these ideas. The relation between spectators, artists and the immediate environment mattered most: how might performance outside theatrical structures become a moment of precarious assembly, particularly when the work is liminal, durational and process-led?

Across the Whitworth, the twelve projects challenged fixed categories of performance and conventional ways of looking. Visitors became active agents, moving through overlapping histories of gendered cultural production and encountering outcomes that could not be fully known in advance.

The project proposed performance as an interactive social space. Rather than maintaining a simple separation between performer and spectator, it invited multiple exchanges in which responsibility, attention and power could be dispersed, rehearsed and experienced together.

Project archive

Images from Precarious Assembly — Gathering 2

Precarious Assembly project documentation, photograph 1 — 01

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