Ron Athey on Gifts of the Spirit
Seminal live artist Ron Athey talks about his recent work Gifts of the Spirit, a performance installation which used his memoirs as a starting point from which to create a collective-unconsciousness automatic writing machine featuring glossolalic chorus.
Ron will read extracts from his memoirs, which focus on his Pentecostal upbringing and early religious experiences, and will discuss the practice of channelling through automatic writing and the process behind Gifts of the Spirit which utilised the hypnotic trance as a device.
Born in 1961, Ron Athey is a London-based artist from Los Angeles. In 1981 he began performing with Rozz Williams as Premature Ejaculation, a performance and sound based duo. By the early 90s, Athey’s work within the site of body itself, in the time of AIDS, was presented in the UK, US, Europe, and Mexico, works commissioned by centres such as Kampnagel Hamburg, ICA London and CCA Glasgow. His visual art works are represented by Western-Projects Los Angeles, Invisible Exports NYC. Pleading In The Blood, a monograph of his work, will be released in 2013.
Image by Roshana Rubin-Mayhew, Gifts of the Spirit, Whitworth Hall, Manchester, 2011
Please note: unfortunately there is no wheelchair access to the Attic Space.