Catalogue > At random
Joe Moran
Materiality Will Be Rethought
Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 29:26 | Royaume-Uni | 2020
Materiality Will Be Rethought by British-Irish artist and choreographer Joe Moran was developed as a site-specific live performance before being reimagined as a film work. The work navigates dance’s potential to animate and disrupt architectural space, the physicality of the dancer’s voice and the moving body as a site of political unrest and complex subjectivities. Materiality Will Be Rethought was commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, London, in dialogue with the exhibition Carlos Bunga: Something Necessary and Useful (on display at the gallery 21 Jan – 6 Sep 2020). It is performed by dancers Temi Ajose-Cutting, Thomas Heyes (Blackhaine), Sean Murray and Eve Stainton, and created in collaboration with editor Sue Giovanni and cinematographer Alana Mejía González.
Joe Moran is a British-Irish artist and choreographer based in London with a wide-ranging practice incorporating theatre and gallery performance works, critical writing, curatorial projects and drawing. His work centres the body and embodied presence as a site of complex subjectivities and political unrest, with queering frequently deployed as its principal critical strategy. His work is informed by a background in improvisation and experimentation, and a fascination with the problems and opportunities of formal choreographic composition and notions of expanded choreography. Joe is Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation through which his performance and curatorial work is produced and has worked internationally as a dancer with choreographers Deborah Hay (USA), Stina Nyberg (Sweden) and Siobhan Davies (UK) amongst others. Recent commissions and performances include Whitechapel Gallery (2020), Sadler’s Wells (2019), Nottingham Contemporary (NottDance, 2019), The Lowry Galleries (2019), London Contemporary Dance School (2019), Wysing Arts Centre (2018), Bluecoat (2018) coinciding with the Liverpool Biennial, Kettle’s Yard (2018), Sadler’s Wells (2017), Delfina Foundation (2016), ICA (Block Universe/ fig-2, 2015) in collaboration with Eva Rothschild and David Roberts Art Foundation (Frieze Art Fair, 2014). Notable collaborations include with composer Kaffe Matthews, editor Sue Giovanni, visual artists Eva Rothschild, Carlos Bunga and Magali Reus, and dancers Temitope Ajose-Cutting and Andrew Hardwidge. Joe contributed a chapter to the publication?Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum, wrote Materiality Will Be Rethought, an essay on dance and the exhibition space for the Whitechapel Gallery Carlos Bunga exhibition catalogue and Nothing About Us Without Us, a commissioned article on artist advocacy published by Siobhan Davies Dance in its inaugural Material journal.