Wild Gift

26 May – 1 June 2006

Wild Gift was a festival of performance and performative art curated by Rosie Cooper and David Lillington, featuring new work by eight international artists. Their signature was theatricality, spectacle, artifice – and serious content.

Wild Gift then, was a show about a style, a style epitomized by performance-based work, and representative of what was happening in the art world more generally.

Our intention with this show was to identify (1) an aesthetic tendency in art, and (2) a connection between art and performance art, as well as between performance art and traditional live arts (circus, burlesque, etc.)

With regard to ‘art’, including painting, installation art, video and sculpture, it seemed to us that a new artificiality had come into vogue in the previous ten years – and that this was significant, showing the influence of the live arts (including music, dance, popular live arts and so on) on art in general. It was a case of the surface and the deeper content being separate, and this being evident and significant.

We were not interested in work which espoused transgression for its own sake, nor subversion, provocation or the breaking down of borders, for their own sakes. We felt that a different approach to serious issues had taken hold.

Wild Gift (2006)

was curated by
Rosie Cooper – 
www.rosiecooper.info
David Lillington
and produced by
Ann Lawlor
without whom none of it would have happened
photography by
Angus Leadley-Brown
 – 
www.albphoto.com
video by
Alex Chappel and ACX
for other credits see artists’ pages

arts council england austrian cultural forum moose foundation for the arts awards for all Bundeskanzleramt:Kunst