Thursday 20 November 2025 - Sunday 23 November 2025
10:30 am - 4:30 pm
Trwy garedigrwydd yr artists / Courtesy the artists
In conjunction with the exhibition Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Swansea-based artists Vivian Ross-Smith and Holly Slingsby are co-curating a weekend of live performance and video works in the gallery.
Commencing on 20 November and running until 23 November, the programme will include live works by SGÔR, John Walter, Vivian Ross-Smith + Esyllt Lewis and Holly Slingsby. Performative moving image works will also be shown throughout the weekend, comprising works from invited artists and an open call.
Video Artists: Adele Vye, Aled Simons, Alex Hetherington, Bhebhe & Davies, Jenny Baines, Jessa Mockridge, Rebecca Moss, Sophie Lindsey, Quilla Constance and Zia Torta.
The programme expands and brings alive themes from Linder: Danger Came Smiling including consumption, domesticity, gender performativity, mass media, bodies, archetypal figures, and pleasure.
Thursday 20.11.25, Live Performances – Glynn Vivian at Night
5.30 – 8pm
SGÔR
Tracing how bodies flow, collide, and eddy within shared space, SGÔR continue their exploration of the unseen currents that shape social and spatial dynamics. Following a summer residency with G39 and Ffotogallery, the group now turn their attention to the gallery opening as an experiment in tension and permeability.
Performers will test how disparate bodies can sonically and gesturally influence a collective encounter. Like rogue particles in a cultural collider, SGÔR circulates through the crowd, observing how gestures ripple, how atmospheres shift, and how formality might spill over into play. The collective embraces the cut-and-paste sensibility as a method for exploring and subverting received notions of good behavior.
John Walter: Tanuki’s Beaujolais Bar
Building on Walter’s longstanding interest in hospitality as a relational device for engaging audiences in painting he presents a new bar for Swansea: Tanuki’s Beaujolais Bar resurrects Walter’s jestered persona, celebrating death and rebirth through a series of five archetypes: JESTER, PHOENIX, LAZARUS, CICACA, and TANUKI. Tanuki is a mythological, shapeshifting Japanese racoon dog, seen frequently in ceramic form around Kyoto holding money and drinking sake. Swansea’s fondness for Beaujolais Day is the setting for a playful and surreal spectacle toasting dormancy and revival, rebirth, renewal, change, and trickster transformation.
Saturday 22.11.25, Live Performances
1-4pm, Holly Slingsby
Inspired by Linder’s iconic meat dress and a shared interest in archetypal figures, Holly Slingsby reinvents her performance Too Many Marys for the exhibition context. Dozens of printed images of the Virgin Mary from across art history are gradually attached to her clothing with safety pins, in an accumulating live collage. These images could be considered as standards to live up to, or conversely, amulets which protect the wearer.
2-3pm, Vivian Ross-Smith + Esyllt Lewis
Vivian and Esyllt gather around a portable wooden trolley acting as a dining table on wheels. Through movement, consumption and conversation they will explore their individual connection to Swansea as either their chosen or birth home. Exploring friendship as a family dynamic, and the rituals associated with ‘home / gatre’, they will celebrate and grieve the city as a place of discovery and loss, a place of birth and rebirth across different histories and experiences.
Video Showreel
Thursday 20 November 2025, 5.30 – 8pm
Friday 21 – Sunday 23 November, 10.00am – 4.30pm
Video Artists: Adele Vye, Aled Simons, Alex Hetherington, Bhebhe & Davies, Jenny Baines, Jessa Mockridge, Rebecca Moss, Sophie Lindsey, Quilla Constance and Zia Torta.
Adele Vye
At the doorway (Time) and At the doorway (Tide), 2020
In At the doorway (Tide) and At the doorway (Time), Vye repurposes the washing machine to poetically explore the conflict between domestic and environmental responsibility. The everyday act of laundry is disrupted and turned ritual, as torches signal for help, water rises, and we witness the engulfment, disappearance, transportation and transformation of the artist from inside the confines of the machine.
Aled Simons
Legend Extension II, 2023
What if our memories and collective knowledge were recorded, rewound, then re-recorded on to mouldy VHS tape? Legend Extension II offers space to consider contagious non-conscious mimicry, slanted personal history, misinterpretation and to excavate anecdotal facts – skewed as they are repeated time and time again. With crude 3D animation and archival footage featuring the artist’s aunty, at times we find ourselves inside the dark recesses of a video tape cassette, as if exploring the corners of a pixelated 64-bit computer game.
Alex Hetherington
Sister Films, 2022
Sister Films, a 16mm recording of a rehearsal for a live performance, takes as its starting point the complex Greek mythological figure of Tiresias, a blind prophet of Apollo who is transformed into a woman by the goddess Hera: the notion of Tiresias, queerness, trans-ness and premonition, blindness and sight, these complex liminal states is something mirrored in 16mm and its properties, materiality, technologies and multiple temporalities.
Bhebhe&Davies
A Navigation, 2017
A Navigation investigates personal journeys and perceptions of age, sexual identity, anxiety and desire, exploring the role and place of intimacy in all its manifestations; non physical, social, intellectual and emotional. To develop this work, Bhebhe&Davies collaborated with female performers over 50, to explore how women’s bodies negotiate histories, disrupt power structures and build solidarity. The film reflects on ageist assumptions through movement, considering how individuals occupy space, assert presence and shift perceptions. With vocal artist Randolph Matthews and sound designer Joseph Bond, the soundtrack draws on primal human sounds as expressions of the emotional self, reinforcing the work’s focus on embodied experience and the evolving relationship between identity and power.
Jenny Baines
Inflated (double) struggle, 2018
Inflated (double) struggle shows the artist wrestling with a person of similar strength in an attempt to burst an oversized balloon held between their bodies. As the balloon stretches and morphs under the pressure between them, the repeated movements appear sometimes violent and at other times tender.
Jessa Mockridge
Spivak_rub, 2024, 15 minutes
A library worker on night shift is rubbing out the pencil markings in a heavily fingered and annotated book by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She re-traces the circles and crosses and annotations and brackets, re-performing the gestures that made these marks. Librarians erase pencil in order to digitise important chapters for anyone who can’t access the library physically or who relies on screen readers. The film documents a fantasy through the choreography of her hands.
Quilla Constance
Happy Christmas Mom & Dad, 2006
“Predictably, the mother is outraged at the inappropriate display of her daughter’s sexuality while the father becomes problematically seduced by the spectacle of his daughter’s refusal of the incest taboo – the Oedipal. Quilla Constance aka Jennifer Allen’s unabashed exploration of her own erotic potential, which might take place in the girl’s bedroom, is now taken into the living room as a shocking gift for her parents. The dutiful daughter, in a celebratory display of her sexuality, refuses the role of the hysteric prescribed to women through familial prohibition, in a performance which is liberational” – Dr Mo Throp (Writer/Artist)
Rebecca Moss
Home Improvement, 2021
Home Improvement is a work made during the covid lockdown, a home-made smile machine devised out of improvised everyday objects. Rebecca Moss is an artist based in Essex. Her work explores notions of absurdity and precarity, and takes a variety of forms across sculpture, video, performance, installation, and participatory practice. Through humorous ideas, her work explores existential themes. A sense of movement recurs across the work, that things are in a state of change and flux. She is especially inspired by slapstick performance: for its emotional expression of feelings of instability, its lowbrow humorous associations, its sense of reciprocity between body and surroundings, and for its potential to challenge power.
Sophie Lindsey
Al Plein Fresco Air, 2019
Al Plein Fresco Air is a performance to camera that forms part of the artistic research project Jam-scape. By adopting the stance of a landscape painter, Sophie makes and eats a jam sandwich in an attempt to imbue the sandwich with romantic associations of countryside. This investigates how our collective imagination of rural spaces exists within food, food packaging, and supermarkets.
Zia Torta
Why Do You Keep Making the Same Mistakes?, 2025
Why Do You Keep Making the Same Mistakes? poses an open question to our shared human experience. inviting a critical reflection on the habits, thoughts and cycles we fall into, urging mindfulness, presence and compassion toward ourselves and others.
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