On The Edge And Out Of Control: The Making Of A Tragedy with Tai Shani And Florence Peake

CAMP is a residential arts facility in the French Pyrenees. It's a place where great art is made, new movements are formed, new ideas are explored and groundbreaking people are nurtured. CAMP is located in Aulus les Bains, the last village before the France/Spain Pyrenean frontier chain. The location is spectacular - we are nestled at 750m above sea level, surrounded by snowcapped peaks over 3000m high, ancient forests and cascading waterfalls. There are eagles, lammergeiers, vultures, ibex and bears. Walk out of the residency, and within ten minutes you are completely alone in one of the most beautiful mountain landscapes in Europe. Aulus les Bains is also a spa village - there are hot water springs, and a thermal spa in the village to take advantage of the healing and relaxing properties of the water.
    
Workshop dates: 19/04/2022 - 23/04/2022
    
This multidisciplinary arts workshop will explore strategies revolving around inhibition, control, coherence and disorder, culminating in the devising of a performance. Expect elements of performance, installation, sculpture and visual arts.

Tai Shani's practice encompasses performance, film, photography and sculptural installations, frequently structured around experimental texts. Taking inspiration from disparate histories, narratives and characters mined from forgotten sources, Shani creates dark, fantastical worlds, brimming with utopian potential. These deeply affective works often combine rich and complex monologues with arresting, saturated installations, manifesting equally disturbing and divine images in the mind of the viewer. Last year, Tai's work "DC: SEMIRAMIS" commissioned by Glasgow International and The Tetley (Leeds, UK) and her participation in "Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance", was nominated for the Turner Prize. She won, along with Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, after jointly requesting from the jury that all four artists win "in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity". 

Recent exhibitions and commissions include work at Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); RADAR commission, Loughborough University, (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); and ICA, London (2011).

Florence Peake is a London-based artist who has been making work since 1995. She makes solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and outdoors, she is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate. Her performance practice uses drawing, painting and sculpture combined with found and fabricated objects placed in relation to the moving body. Her work explores notions of materiality and physicality; the body as site and vehicle of protest, and political concerns around freedom, the anthropocene and the commodification of art. By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, she creates radical and outlandish performances, creating temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Following on from performances she often creates sculpture and painting; these artworks serve as documentation but also as ways of processing the experience of the performance itself, relationships with dancers, audiences and sites.

Florence's work has been presented at CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), MDT Stockholm, Sweden (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), Bosse & Baum, London, UK (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017), Studio Leigh, London UK (2017); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Frieze, London UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012), and Venice Biennale 2019. As a performer, Florence has worked with filmmakers, artists and choreographers including Joe Moran, Gaby Agis, Tai Shani, Jonathan Baldock, Serena Korda, Nicola Conibere, Gary Stevens,  Station House Opera and Theatre of Mistakes.

Reserve your place at https://www.campfr.com/taishani No payment is required to reserve a place.