7-8pm: Radio Free Pocha Bus Tour #1
8pm: Brian Catling Performance
8:30-9:30pm: Radio Free Pocha Bus Tour #2
Join us this Friday, April 24th as we infect our current exhibition A Journal of the Plague Year with the first West Coast performance by celebrated UK artist Brian Catling and a roving bus tour featuring the radio archive of SF performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
"Bringing Brian Catling…is like importing a high-grade virus. The city will never recover." (Iain Sinclair)
"Brian Catling's performances, writings and curations offer sardonic poignancy, vivid melodrama and shocking discomforts. He is straight-faced, enigmatic and twinkling, projecting a presence somewhere between hilarity, menace and madness.” (Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound)
Since the 1970’s, Brian Catling has crafted a fierce oeuvre of black comedy, fantasy, and visceral performance that, in the words of the critic Ian Hunt, mount a collective "tirade against the ossification of practices and actions into roles and careers." Alan Moore, author of Watchmen and V For Vendetta, hailed Catling's recently published novel The Vorrh as a "phosphorescent masterpiece."
Students from the San Francisco Art Institute bring us Mexican Bus 2.0. The radio-archive of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña will be broadcast in the spirit of the original Mexican Bus Tour, El Corazon de la Mission. All tours will begin and end at The Lab. Please RSVP here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/mexican-bus-audio-tour-20-tickets-16603525592
Brian Catling (b.1948, London) is Professor of Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford. In 2001 he founded the international performance group The Wolf In The Winter. Recent solo performances include Cyclops at the Liverpool Biennial 2010, The Art of the Living Experiment, Liverpool & Grand Rapids 2015, and the alarming Mr. Rapehead at the ICA, London, 2010, which toured to Germany, Holland and Spain. Recent larger solo shows include Antix, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2006, and Brian Catling & the head of ‘Bobby Awl’, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 2008, and Quill Two at Dilston Grove, London, 2011.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (b. 1978, Mexico City) resides in San Francisco where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. His pioneering work in performance, video, installation, poetry, journalism, photography, cultural theory and radical pedagogy, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, the politics of the body, “extreme culture” and new technologies. A MacArthur Fellow and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to National Public Ratio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe and a contributing editor to The Drama Review (NYU-MIT). For twenty-five years, Gómez-Peña has contributed to the cultural debates of our times staging legendary performance pieces such as, “Border Brujo” (1998), “The Couple in the Cage” (1992), “The Crucifiction Project” (1994), “Temple of Confessions” (1995), “The Mexterminator Project” (1994), The Living Museum of Fetishized Identities (1999-2002) and the Mapa/Corpo series (2004-2007).
