IN THE SHADOW OF…

Kris Canavan
Feat. Stuart Brisley

01 Nov – 20 Nov
(coinciding with Blackpool Film Festival 01 – 03 Nov)

CLOSING EVENT: WED 20TH NOV, 5pm Arrival. An in conversation with Kris Canavan, led by Garth Gratrix. As well as a last chance to see the exhibition and network. Refreshments provided. Event runs until 7pm.

All welcome

In The Shadow Of… is an exhibition by performance artist Kris Canavan. Commissioned by Abingdon Studios; supported by Aunty Social and Blackpool Film Festival.

This exhibition explores the body as both site and subject through film archive, photography, and mixed media, drawing on Canavan’s visceral performance work and its self-expressive, experimental and profound social and political implications.

Performance and live art have long been crucial platforms for exploring body politics, queer activism, and social commentary. From the 1960s onwards, artists have used their bodies as vehicles for challenging societal norms, reclaiming autonomy, and resisting oppression. This lineage of radical art is essential in addressing issues of power, desire, deviance, and marginalisation—particularly within the realms of kink and fetish culture, where the body becomes a medium for confronting taboos and redefining boundaries of identity and expression.

Kris Canavan’s work pushes these themes to their rawest extremes. With performances that straddle pain, endurance, and vulnerability, Canavan exposes the body’s limits and its potential as a site for queer resistance and transformation. Their interventions engage with both personal and political struggle, echoing the works of other groundbreaking artists in the canon of performance art.

This exhibition features a significant loan from the artist Stuart Brisley, a seminal figure in British performance art. Brisley’s Arbeit Macht Frei (1972) is a powerful meditation on labour, violence, and the body as a site of protest. Like Canavan’s practice, Brisley’s work explores themes of endurance, suffering, and the politics of survival. The presence of this iconic piece alongside Canavan’s work creates a compelling dialogue between two generations of artists committed to pushing the boundaries of bodily expression and its capacity to confront authority.

Film and archive footage play a vital role in capturing the fleeting, temporal nature of performance art. By preserving these interventions, we’re reminded of the transient power of live art and the importance of documenting the body in motion, particularly when it is pushed beyond comfort or convention. In the Shadow Of…, becomes not just a record but a witness and mediation to these transformative, sometimes extreme, acts, allowing them to resonate long after the moment has passed.

Abingdon Studios is celebrating 10 years of flagship studio, workspace and project space provision in Blackpool. Our programme of exhibitions and events are supported through Arts Council England project grant funding 2024/25.

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Background

Kris Canavan (b. 1980, Bangor, Northern Ireland. Lives in Blackpool, northwest, England, UK).

Selected Group Exhibitions/Film Screenings
‘Gay Propaganda’ Tom of Finland Foundation Festival, London and Los Angeles,
2022
‘Meet Me In Brussels’ Hypercorps, Brussels, 2017
‘A Shot To The Arse’, Cape Town, South Africa, 2012
‘Encounters’ Arnolfini, Bristol, 2007

Performances
‘Transmission’ Videokabine, 2020
‘All Roads Lead to Shit’, Emergency StopGap, Manchester, 2020
‘Back to Basics’ Hazard, Manchester, 2019
‘Mass Distraction’ Wasteland, Amsterdam, 2018
‘In The Shadow of The Sun’ Wasteland, Amsterdam, 2018
‘In The Shadow of The Sun’ TG London, 2018
‘In The Shadow of The Sun’ TG Edinburgh, 2018
‘Eye of Horus’ Hypercorps, Brussels, 2017
‘Urolagnia’ ACTUS V, Brussels, 2017
‘Yes, it’s Fucking Political’ Assembly of Disturbance, London, 2017

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Stuart Brisley (b.1933, Surrey, England, UK)

Arbeit Macht Frei (1972). On loan courtesy of Stuart Brisley and LUX, London.

image courtesy of The Artist, Stuart Brisley, and LUX, London.

Arbeit Macht Frei 16 mm Film 20 minutes colour & black & white 1972/3

The film Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free) was conceived after the performance And For Today Nothing ,which took place at Gallery House Goethe Institute in London in 1972. The words Arbeit Macht Frei were wrought in iron and placed on or above the entrance gates to some if not all Nazi Concentration Camps in the period of Nazi rule in Germany and its conquered territories between 1933 and 1945.

The film is conceived as an analogous representation of the objection to genocide. It begins with a long sequence of vomiting shot in a formal frontal manner, as a bodily rejection of the idea, Graphic imagery of a head being immersed in water are followed by black and white sequences of the same head appearing and disappearing emerging and sinking from sight in black water. In the final sequence, the stark white image of the head breaks down into abstraction.

It is an expression of what is known, namely that Arbeit Macht Frei in Nazi terms is the harbinger of death known as the Holocaust where six million Jews, between 200,000 and 1.500,000 Roma, political, and sexually deviant prisoners and other minorities were gassed, hung, shot, starved or otherwise put to death.

In 1972 the revelation of such an overwhelming atrocity did not appear to have fully penetrated the vocabulary concerning human behaviour. Maybe it can never be truly absorbed. The depth and range of such terrifying criminality still continues to resonate as more recent actrocities are piled one on another. `This work touches on the theme by addressing the words Arbeit Macht Frei behind which lies an indescribable inhumanity.