Bean : 9:00 - 15:28
(Open to the public from 12:00 midday onwards)

Martin O'Brien: 16:00 - 22:00
(Please note prior to 16:00 Martin will be travelling to Grace Exhibition Space from Manhattan Island. Martin's journey will be available to view via iaround digital platform, further details to follow).

Martin O’Brien’s practice focuses on physical endurance and excess in relation to the fact he suffers from Cystic Fibrosis; a severe chronic disease in which the body produces excess mucus that, amongst other things, works to restrict and prevent breathing though clogging up of the airways and lungs.

O’Brien’s practice includes a daily regime designed from imposed medical treatments and preparatory exercises for his work, investigating the convergence between the condition of his body and his body based performance practice.

Martin O’Brien has performed in venues in Britain, Poland, Germany, Spain and Norway and his work has been described in Real Time Australia as ‘Utterly compelling… a real tour de force’. He has recently run a Live Art Development Agency DIY 7 project entitled: Altered States at Colchester Arts Centre. He was a contributor to ‘Victim Art: Plague, Performance and Metaphor’ as part of Ron Athey’s residency at the Centre for the History of Emotions (2010), Queen Mary University, London and artist in residence at Gallery Art Claims Impulse, Berlin in 2008. He is currently engaged in a practice based AHRC funded PhD at the University of Reading on endurance based performance.

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.

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.