Performativa VI.

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.