Performativa VI.
This autumn, Performativa returns to Cukrarna Gallery’s programme featuring three internationally recognised cross-generational artists: Vlasta Delimar, Jade Blackstock, and Martin O’Brien. On November 18, their more recent works – in which they explore the body as a site of vulnerability, memory, and the questioning of social norms – will be presented in the gallery’s basement and the lobby.
In the year she celebrates her 70th birthday, Vlasta Delimar, one of the pioneers of performance art in the region, is preparing a series of events taking place in the cities that have shaped her artistic career. As part of the project, which the artist has been carrying out for many years to mark her anniversaries, she will present her new performance which addresses the stigmatisation of ageing as well as social norms relating to sexuality, pleasure, and intimacy in later life. Delimar’s performance affirms the dignity and vitality of the ageing female body, contrasting it with the norms of youth and beauty imposed on us by modern consumer culture and the broader mechanisms of social control.
In her performative practice, Jade Blackstock, a British-Jamaican artist, explores the relationships between the body, materiality, memory, ancestry, and the legacy of colonialism. Working with culturally charged organic materials such as molasses, indigo, earth, and water, the artist examines how bodies and substances carry personal and collective histories, while simultaneously highlighting these materials as vehicles of resistance against mechanisms of exploitation and oppression. Her works raise questions about Afro-Caribbean identities and experiences of the diaspora, feminism, and the body as a site of memory, transformation, and the restoration of belonging.
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. In his performances, O’Brien explores the body as a site of experience, vulnerability, and resistance. Drawing on his own experience of living with cystic fibrosis, he uses illness not as a limitation but as a way to reflect on mortality, survival, care, pleasure, and societal conceptions of the body. His performances probe the limits of the body, revealing illness and vulnerability as sources of knowledge, creativity, and autonomy.
PROGRAMME
18.00–21.00
Curated by Mara Anjoli Vujić.
Tickets
Free entry.
Jade Blackstock: Untitled
Performance
Martin O’Brien: This Unending
Performance
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.
