REHEARSING BODIES
Guest Curated by Lucy Grubb
LAUNCH: Saturday 5 October 2024, 6–8pm
REHEARSING BODIES is an exhibition curated by Lucy Grubb taking over CCA’s bathroom with artworks by Lucie McLaughlin, Ebun Sodipo and Francis Whorrall-Campbell. The exhibition reimagines the WC as a space for remaking, practising and rehearsing. Bringing together collage, drawing, and writing, this exhibition interrogates ideas of spatial justice while exploring how we continuously practise existing through rehearsing movement, reclaiming autonomy, and navigating the politics of visibility.
The starting point for REHEARSING BODIES draws from José Esteban Muñoz's concept of the stage as a “space of potentiality”, considering how we can rehearse, fail, and practise our future selves. In the context of social and political change, this exhibition aims to highlight how systems have historically denied affordable housing, jobs, and pleasure to marginalised bodies while suggesting ways we might remake ourselves in response.
The works by the artists inhabit the bathroom in fragmented, layered forms, echoing the disjointed, nonlinear experience of queer life and navigating how we approach the city. By drawing parallels between the hidden, transient nature of queer bodies in urban spaces, the works occupy and reimagine the toilet as a site of both visibility and resistance. This space becomes a site where queerness can be pieced together, claimed, and reimagined.
Lucie McLaughlin's work, 'quite distant, flat, but surging' combines fragments of text and drawing gathered in response to exhibitions visited during one calendar month. Exploring the atmosphere of art spaces and the resonances felt when encountering art, the work questions what comes to the surface during the performance of ‘looking’. Amplifying a sense of observation, lines of writing contribute to the unfolding sounds, dissonances and silences reciprocated between viewer, art, and the site in which they are found.
Ebun Sodipo's work reveals how queerness and the 'angry Black woman' stereotype intersect across generations through linking work that spans over two decades. The artist links Goldie Williams, a 19th-century American arrested for sex work, with Amanda Seal in 21-st century America. In doing so, Ebun captures defiant expressions between two public-rehearsing bodies that resist and perform disgust, and reveals how a persistent trope can become a powerful act of resistance, binding their strength through repeated performances of defiance.
In 'Promise of a Better Perversion,' Francis Whorrall-Campbell engages with transmasc aesthetic theory through the precise imagery of a dart flight. Hand-drawn stills from a 1990s top surgery gif, explores the tradition of representing the human body, using the nude as a 'ground zero' subject. The dart’s trajectory embodies the tension between fixed paths and the fluidity of transmasculine expression, reflecting both the resilience and vulnerability in asserting one’s identity - marking a new point of departure in self-representation.
By reframing the toilet as a space of futurity, desire, and bodily resistance, this exhibition challenges the erasure of our rehearsing bodies - walking, running, and remaining unseen. Acknowledging the harsh reality that even today, queer, trans, and marginalised people continue to live in secrecy, continually rehearsing their existence for survival and pursuit of peace.
This project has been supported by Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Lononderry, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Derry City & Strabane District Council and Jerwood Foundation.
Lucie McLaughlin is a Belfast born artist, writer and researcher. Her practice focuses on expanded forms of writing, where language can be made unfamiliar by a collapse in distance between the ‘ordinary’ and the imaginative, investigating how certain political atmospheres and socio-psychological states that in themselves cannot be easily articulated, emerge through practice. She is a recipient of the Yellow Paper Prize for New Writing, 2022. Her writing has recently been published by Mirror Lamp Press, Paper Visual Art Journal, The Yellow Paper and Catalyst Arts Belfast.
Ebun Sodipo makes work for black trans people of the future. Guided by black feminist study, with a methodology of collage and fabulation, her work locates and produces real and imaginable narratives of black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present, and future. In doing this, Ebun Sodipo fills in historical gaps to create moments of archival pleasure for black trans people. This work takes place across multiple spaces: galleries, festivals, theatre, digital, and print; in varied forms such as sound, performance, text, installation, video, and sculpture.
Her work has been shown, read, watched, and performed at Frieze London, Cubitt, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Goldsmiths CCA, V.O. Curation, Hauser & Wirth, SHOWStudio, South London Gallery, Arcadia Missa’s How To Sleep Faster, Auto Italia, ICA, Tate Britain, Text zur Kunst, Bergen Kunsthall, Wasafiri, Hannah Barry Gallery, Camden Arts Centre. She has undertaken residencies at Gasworks, Porthmeor Studios, Rhubaba Gallery, V.O. Curations, and Villa Lena.
Francis Whorrall-Campbell is an artist, researcher, writer and sometimes art critic from the UK. Working across text, sculpture, and the digital, their work undertakes a materialist investigation of sexual subjectivity. Guided by research into the pasts and presents of gender transition, a relationship between making an artwork and making a (gendered) self emerges as a method of thinking critically about how identities and desires are formed in interaction with the world and narratives around them.
His work has been exhibited at Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2024); Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón (2023); National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2023); Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (2022); and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2021). In 2025, The87Press will publish their first full-length monograph, a cover version of Dante’s Inferno as a t4t romance and pilgrimage to the titular London queer party. He is also the author of THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAVE BEEN DOWNLOADED: [in progress] A non-fiction-novel about Kurt Cobain, Twink Death and the History of the Trans Internet. From September – November 2024, they will be a Laureate of the Principal Residency Programme at La Becque, Switzerland.
This exhibition has been curated by Lucy Grubb, a CCA Derry~Londonderry Research Associate 2023–25.
Lucy is an Artist-Curator based in Coventry, UK. Her research focuses on "rehearsal" in curatorial practices, through José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of the stage as a space of potentiality, where we can experiment with our future selves and practise new ways of being. She is developing "rehearsal" as a curatorial method involving drawing, architecture, and imagination.
Lucy is also developing research around Claude Cahun's photography archive of stones, as thought-objects and prototypes, using them to reimagine and create alternative existences within evolving public and social infrastructures.
Download a sensory map for REHEARSING BODIES here.
