Slap - an exhibition

'This was stunning work. What could have been cheap sensationalism in lesser hands was made profound, uncomfortable and uncompromising here. The actuality of pain as a felt experience that is incontrovertibly 'real', is perhaps an over-familiar calling card of modes of performance that wish to distinguish themselves from acting. Here, it was strange, alienated and all the more unsettling for that. Odd, jarring...[an] experience beyond the sensational...'
- Martin O'Brien

June 2016, Queen Mary University of London.
Part of Peopling the Palace Festival.

Slap explores the art of slapping in a non-acting form. Derived from a desire to understand the skin as a colour, as a changing surface and as a point of contact, the performers (Martha Pailing, Vimbai Gavure, Sojourner Hazelwood-Connell) contextualise the action.

The exhibition moves through four stages. The first is self-inflicted, the second tests projection, the third creates a percussion and the final stage is the final stage. Throughout the facilitator is continuously changing with the performers taking it in turns to control the piece, the music, the lighting and the narrative.

Slap was developed with theatre-maker Daniela Hirshova.