TALKER X FTHo:
A Performance by Clifford Owens
Saturday 12 October 3pm
FTHo is pleased to host a live performance by US artist Clifford Owens as part of a collaboration with TALKER, an interview zine about performance art, published by artist Giles Bailey since 2016.
Clifford Owens' work brings the significance of liveness and presence into dialogue with the photograph. It acknowledges the complexities that come with a compulsion to record events and asks questions about the existential anxieties that accompany the camera. His own body is a crucial player in this. His practice takes the legacies of emergent performance art making from the ‘60s and ‘70s in which we see the artist’s body as the site of the work and pulls it into a conceptual dynamic with themes of race, masculinity, class and the fragility of social structures.
His project Anthology features performances scores—written or graphical instructions for actions—that Owens solicited from a multigenerational group of African-American artists. Twenty-six major artists have contributed scores — including Pope.L, Kara Walker and Senga Nengudi — nearly all of whom composed new works specifically for Owens and his project.
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Photo: Emmie America
Clifford Owens is a visual artist. His solo museum exhibitions include Anthology at MoMA PS1 (2011) Better the Rebel You Know at the former Cornerhouse in Manchester, England (2014), and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011). His performance-based projects have been featured at the Museum of Modern Art (2017), Baltimore Museum of Art (2019), Brooklyn Academy of Music (2014). Owens’ art is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1971, and he lives and works between New York City and Jersey City.
TALKER is a self-published interview zine about performance. Each issue features a long-form interview with an artist who works in an innovative way with live practice. The first issue with Ian White was made in 2016, since then it has profiled the artists Kate Valk, Richard Maxwell, Sue Tompkins, Dora García, Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Jo Fong, Paul Maheke, Clifford Owens, Gustav Metzger, Barby Asante, Miranda July and Agus Nur Amal PMTOH.
This event has been supported by the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University
Photography: Giles Bailey