Martin O’Brien is one of the most significant contemporary British artists, working at the intersection of live art, disability art, endurance performance, and queer body politics.
The dead perform a séance for the living, but no one dares answer. Strange apparitions whisper to those who have taken their place. A hideous voice can be half heard calling out through the darkness. It sounds like nothing from this world. All those who hear it are frozen in terror. Does it speak to them? Again. Again.
This Unending throws the audience into a strange otherworldly séance. O’Brien creates images of purgatory and strange uncanny afterlives to explore the conditions of human mortality, and the ways in which our lives are lived under the shadow of death. Using a mix of text and intense physical action, This Unending is a meditation on death, grief, and belief. It is a playful and profound staging of the impossibility of living forever, imagining a never ending process.
Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada, and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2025, The Southbank Centre in 2024, the ICA (London) in 2021, and as Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery in 2023. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency. His work has been featured on BBC radio and Sky Arts television, and as a double page spread in The Guardian. He is Reader in Live Art at Queen Mary University of London.
