Open Call for Submissions of Losses

Your loss will be performed as part of a Florence Peake dance piece.
 
You are invited to submit a personal loss you have experienced from within cultural life including but not limited to: visual art, architecture, performing arts, music, writing, film, entertainment and leisure. The loss can be small or large; something personal you feel has been taken over by the corporate world through commodification and/or used solely for the agenda of capitalism.

It doesn’t need to be a generally accepted ‘truth’, like the well know symbol of Che Guevara as politically empty, but can be an issue debatable from many sides, such as Beyoncé as a symbol for feminism. Your submitted loss will be embodied by a group of dancers who together will enact every single submission throughout the course of the daylong performance on Sat 19 September at London Fields, Hackney.
 
Details for your submission:
Please submit the essence of what you feel you have personally lost.
Including what the loss is, what it symbolises or stands for, how you have lost it and where it has gone. Please note that all submissions will remain anonymous.
 
For example:
Instead of submitting: ‘Iggy Pop does the advertisement for Swift Cover Insurance’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cvrz-Ynor4)
 
You could instead submit:
‘I feel a great loss for my musical icon, a figure of cutting-edge music who stood for me as a symbol of outrageousness and fearlessness. This musician did an advertisement for an insurance company and this saddens me because I feel he is betraying the sense of invincibility he stands for. I want to celebrate ridiculousness, regardless of age and security.
 
Please submit your loss to SPACE by Friday 11 September 2015 by email: keeners@spacestudios.org.uk
 
Or by post:
 
The Keeners
c/o SPACE
129–131 Mare Street, Hackney 
London, E8 3RH
United Kingdom
 
Questions are welcome: keeners@spacestudios.org.uk or 020 8525 4330
 
Further information about the commission, the project and the artist:
 
Florence Peake is the inaugural artist to launch SPACE's new Artist Commissions Programme. The programme champions emerging practice and experimental artist-led initiatives that move beyond the traditional expectations of the gallery walls. This commissioned project, comprising an ambitious daylong public performance and an exhibition at SPACE as well as a series of public talks and events, commences September 2015.
 
The Keeners takes its title from the notion of ‘keening’, where mourners in Irish and Celtic traditions support and aid the grief of others on their behalf. Peake's work will abstract this tradition and present a collective sorrow in the form of a public dance performance to mourn the commodification of culture by the corporate world. This will be enacted by a chorus of dancers on a glossy mirrored floor in London Fields.
 
The performance will be both a real grieving process and a tongue-in-cheek and playful comment on the hypocrisy that we are all faced with in daily life as we try to go about being clean-living citizens: how and where do we consume, how do we travel, where do we experience, perform or present art and to what extent is the role of the artist seen to be a leader in these ethical decisions?
 
Florence Peake (b. 1973) is a London-based artist and choreographer trained in performance, teaching and dance. Her interdisciplinary work, made both independently and collaboratively, has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Prague, Sweden and Latvia. Her work has also been commissioned and shown at prestigious venues such as National Portrait Gallery (2008), National Review of Live Art (2009), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2013) and Hayward Gallery (2014). Peake has received numerous residencies, awards and scholarships, including Arts Council funding.