Name: Jay Bernard: The Last Seven Years
Start: 2023-09-01T19:30:00+01:00
End: 2023-09-01T20:30:00+01:00
Location: Bold Tendencies

For one night only **Jay Bernard** presents an experimental performance informed by the voices of people across the UK who opened up to the artist about the last seven years.

In collaboration with **Musarc**, one of the UK’s foremost experimental choirs and multi-instrumentalist **Petero Kalulé (petals)**, a performance has been devised that presents memories of people across the UK from the post-Brexit landscape, and thoughts on how they and the country have changed.

Bernard’s work spans poetry, audio-visual media, graphic illustration, theatre-making, archiving, and film programming. Their work brings together inner truth with grand political narratives presenting themes of injustice, queerness, family relationships and state surveillance, in critical and unexpected ways.

The Last Seven Years, presented in collaboration with Bold tendencies, is a prelude to a forthcoming digital commission by Artangel.

The performance will take place in the Straw Auditorium, designed and built by Practice Architecture from straw bales with seating in the round; it is a warm intimate space and was a piece of early punctuation in the otherwise long wide concrete expanses of the original car park covered spaces at Bold Tendencies.

**Jay Bernard (FRSL)** is a multidisciplinary writer and artist from London whose work is rooted in social histories. Jay was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2020 and winner of the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for their first collection Surge, a queer exploration of the archives surrounding the 1981 New Cross Fire. Recent work includes Joint, a poetic-play about the history of joint enterprise, Crystals of this Social Substance, a sound installation at the Serpentine pavilion in which eight young people explore the concept of money, Complicity, a pamphlet that explores the changing face of London via the Tate collection, and ‘You Are Invited Back to the Land’, a graphic intervention displayed in Tate Britain’s 1980s gallery. Jay received a 2022-23 DAAD literature fellowship in Berlin and a 2023-24 fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

**Musarc** is one of the UK’s foremost experimental choirs. Founded by Joseph Kohlmaier at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University in 2008, the ensemble has developed a distinct reputation for its interdisciplinary and research-led approach to music and performance, and the space it affords artists and singers to experiment with new ideas.

Since its inception, the choir has collaborated with more than one hundred artists and composers, including Jennifer Walshe, Lin Chiwei, Laure Provost, Ed Atkins, Jenny Moore, Lina Lapelytė, Sam Belinfante, Fritz Hauser, Neil Luck and many others; and numerous festivals and arts organisations in the UK and abroad – including the BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Post Disaster Rooftops EP03 (Taranto, Italy), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Royal Academy, CCA Goldsmiths, Museum of London, Extra City (Antwerp), Serpentine Gallery, MK Gallery, Wysing Polyphonic, STUK (Leuwen) Cafe OTO, Bold Tendencies and Whitechapel Gallery.

**Petero Kalulé (petals)** -she/they- is a composer, poet, and multi-instrumentalist living on the hidden river Effra in London; she is the author of Kalimba (Guillemot Press), Marsh-River-Raft-Feather ( Guillemot Press co-authored with Clarissa Álvarez), and forthcoming new manuscript & glee & bless.

All ages

Presented by Bold Tendencies.

No Covid-19 entry requirements

Bold Tendencies

Jay Bernard: The Last Seven Years

Jay Bernard

Musarc

talks

Talk

London

Jay Bernard: The Last Seven Years

About

Lineup

Venue

Bold Tendencies

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