Emily Perry - Seventeen

You’re On Mute
8th – 10th July 2022

Performances:
Friday 8th July 6-8pm
Saturday 9th July 12-5pm
Sunday 10th July 12-5pm

You’re On Mute is a new work by Emily Perry for a single female performer, made in response to the lockdowns of 2021/22. Occupying a gallery space containing domestic objects and large beanbags upholstered in that hard-wearing, distinctly-patterned fabric found exclusively on public transport, the performer discusses the ‘gender-blind lockdown’ in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic. She interrupts herself to welcome and offer coffee to audience members, keen to be a good host. She engages individual audience members with phrases heard often on online video calls during the pandemic, before beginning to speak about the disproportionate effect of lockdown on womxn. Around the presentation, she neurotically performs being normal at home. Viewers may catch the performer blow drying her hair and putting make-up on, or her performative post-presentation yoga sessions.

You’re On Mute is performed by Roberta Bernadelli.

Woman with Salad was first exhibited in Berlin in 2016 and has continued to be developed by Perry. It is a work for a lone or group of female performers who each concurrently enact a gesture, repeated continuously for an hour. The endless looping format of the GIF, from which Perry has sourced the movements enacted by the performer, echo the repetitive actions of female labour. These GIFs have been taken from stock image libraries, the performer mimicking the reductive images designed to be distributed and consumed by patriarchal capitalism.

This new realisation of Woman with Salad is performed by one woman, mirroring the one woman in the adjacent room. It is an adaptation for a post-lockdown context, the figure trapped in a room, going from task to task, locked in a relentless cycle.

Woman With Salad is performed by Emily Kenneally.

These works are shown as part of Performance Exchange, a dispersed platform for performance art in commercial galleries.