E.M. Parry, Fag Engs // Fag Breaks, 2021. Photos by Henri T.


Fag Ends // Fag Breaks


E.M. Parry

Thursday 20th - Saturday 22nd May, 2021


Fag Ends // Fag Breaks is a durational installation created and inhabited by E.M. Parry.

Kinetic sculpture, durational installation, performance anti-lecture, or queerly embodied archive, Fag Ends // Fag Breaks plays with liveness, deadness, presence, absence, and the frayed edges of the knowable, staging the queer body as a site of un-remembering. Originally conceived during lockdown, for and in collaboration with a room-full of ghosts, now I’m inviting the living in. This multi-stranded work uses centuries-old tobacco-pipe stems mudlarked along the Thames banks, interwoven with traces of human physicality and interaction across history, marking out a map of queer time, traced in the surrogate bones of the unknowable dead.

E.M. Parry is a transgender, trans-disciplinary artist, working with, through and for the queer body, squinting at history, flirting with ghosts & the things that go bump in the margins. Drawing on their background in theatre-making, and interest in the social and material history of marginalised lives, they use vocabularies of theatre and drag in intimate interactions with costumes, objects, spaces and other bodies to track queer and trans embodiments in the negative spaces of the historical archive, staging playful dialogues with queer communities and bodies of the past, present and future. Transient and ephemeral, their work flickers between durational performance, kinetic sculpture, drag act and ritual, blurring the lines between artefact & event.

www.emparry.com
In the negative spaces of the archive
Nestle the outcast dead
Prick your ears, peel your eyes, keep your nose to the ground
Tune your sensory antennae to the white noise
Stretch out your hands, fingers twitching like dowsing rods
Search for the traces
Of a history written by the losers
A dropped stitch in time…




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