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.
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.
Categories
