Group Action with Bean, Benjamin Sebastian & Poppy Jackson

The term Group Action refers to a methodology in which materials, place, time and the relationship between bodies are interrogated through performance action(s). This approach is, at once, both time based art object & practice as research. Multiple artists create work simultaneously, most often (but not always or necessarily) in a shared space, for a durational timeframe.

This process of making and investigation quite often involves various measures of predetermined actions, or performance objectives, along with intuitive or spontaneous decision making processes.

Some contemporary examples of group action(s) would be the work of Black Market International, Bbeyond and work from the ]performance s p a c e [ opening event; ]ps[ +++ ArtEvict. See links & video below...

Bean is an artist of nomadic nature. Currently based in London she is founder of ]performance s p a c e [ a newly established studio and project space in Hackney Wick.

]performance s p a c e [ aims to cultivate live work that critically and physically pushes the boundaries of body and space. It is a place where work can unfold without restraints of curation, duration or space; committed to supporting challenging and difficult work that embraces performance art as an ever-evolving medium.

Bean’s artistic practice stems from obsessive, paranoid, scientific and anthropological research. Her work has been described as deliberately “accidental, scattered, scuffed, blurry and incomplete”. Oscillating the poles of violence/meditation, power/control, movement/home; it revels in the feral actions, inscriptions and fringe existence of the nomadic body.

Currently focused on the inscription of her flesh, as an act of both reclaiming and disowning her body as material. The marking of the tattoo acts as the work and its documentation; questioning notions of performance as a bracketed event, the lines between art and life, the durational and the temporary.

She has presented work in Europe, Australia and Asia.

Benjamin Sebastian was born in Australia and has studied art and performance practices in Germany, Australia and the UK. He is a founding member of The Greestone Group, tension/intervention/restraint and ArtEvict. Currently, Benjamin is Assistant Director at ]performance s p a c e [ where he also holds a studio.

Sebastian's practice is interdisciplinary. His processes and work actively interrogate various dialectic relationships; intimacy and solitude, security and vulnerability, logic and the irrational.

He works primarily with the material of his body, paper, fire, found or reclaimed objects, to create assemblage and time based works that often reference components of continental and existential philosophy along with identity politics.

This practice is a refusal of classification via style or medium, continuously attempting to find reason in the irrational and the profound in the mundane through strategies of repetition, appropriation and duration."

The artist’s Live practice accentuates a process of Becoming and is greatly influenced by queer theory, collaboration, autobiography and emotional experience. Imagery of risk, threat, discomfort and transformation are utilized throughout his work to evoke a sense of displacement in the viewer.

Benjamin has exhibited throughout greater Europe, Australia and America. He is based out of London, UK.

"I see everything I do as a process of assemblage/becoming." - B.S.

Jackson makes action-based works exploring transition and the crossing of thresholds. Boundaries of ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ self are often blurred by the use of fluid mediums, such as paint, blood, medicine or river water, in conjunction with the female body.

She is an Associate Artist of ]performance s p a c e [ in London, founding member of BLUD ZER0 Collective and Project Director of international network of nomadic artists LIMINAL BODIES.

Jackson studied Visual Performance at Dartington College of Arts, and is currently completing a Masters in Performance Making at Goldsmiths, London.

Her work has been shown at Project Arts Centre (Dublin), 18th Street Art Centre (Los Angeles), The Detroit Museum of New Art, FEM Festival (Girona), CREATurE Live Art Festival (Lithuania), Black Box (Belfast), Arnolfini (Bristol), and The Barbican and Whitechapel Galleries (London).

"The sensory seduction of Poppy Jackson’s Untitled stuns. Amid birdsong, smells of melting wax and poster paint, a woman with red bunting wrapped round wrists balances on a birthday cake in the yellowy light of a summer’s day" Realtime Australia

Following their successful application to the Artists' International Development Fund, a joint three-year programme between the British Council and Arts Council England, London based artist/curators Bean & Benjamin Sebastian will be undertaking an intensive residency at Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn NY throughout August & the first two weeks of September 2012.

During the artists' residency in New York, Bean & Benjamin will develop new performance based work as well as curate platforms of international live/time based artists. The platform will feature the works of ]performance s p a c e [ Assocaite Artists; Poppy Jackson, Anna Martinou & Martin O'Brien, as well as American artists from within the tri-state area.