ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE is a transdisciplinary programme exploring queer and trans imaginaries of world-building in response to apocalypse(s). Grounded in ongoing research, the programme critically reinterprets the idea of apocalypse through queer and trans lenses, actively resisting capitalist and colonial narratives that frame apocalypse as a singular or final event.

Drawing inspiration from Oxana Timofeeva’s concept of apocalypse as a cyclical and continuous condition, this project engages with apocalypse as an ongoing transformative process that shapes collective memory and artistic practices.

Programme

The programme invites audiences to collectively engage with post-apocalyptic thinking, queer world-building, and trans-led imaginaries that centre care, pleasure, hybridity, and embodied knowledge.

Information on participating artist and upcoming events is available HERE - with more artists and contributors to be announced soon...

Credits

ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE is co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton. The programme is made possible with public funding from the National Lottery and Arts Council England. 

Part absurdist ritual attempting control, part elemental exorcism, WORMHOLE OF OUR FORMATION is a vertiginous road trip through collapse – mental, environmental, economic – driven by unyielding text through warped music and howling storms.  

A raw, hallucinatory performance that tears through the psychic wreckage of Breakdown Britain. This is a ride into the fragmentation of the self as Tetley tea bags pile up and scrambled eggs congeal. In debt and displaced, Hoffmann charts a personal odyssey across red-alert storm zones, B&Bs, motorway shutdowns, and the disorienting landscapes of austerity and ageing.

Armed with a wind machine, searing text, sonic chaos and ritual tremors, Hoffmann conjures a storm from the inside out.

No solace. No resolve.

Just ridiculous and  horrifying monotony until a fissure – shuddering open –  towards possible release.

A fizzing, visceral embodiment of crisis and catharsis, Wormhole persists. It shakes you. Bleeds. Trembles. Collapses. Re-forms.

Booking Information

Saturday12th  July, 15.00, 17.00 & 19.30 at VSSL Studio
during the opening weekend of Deptford X.

︎︎︎ RSVPs essential - Book tickets HERE

"No sweeteners offered. This is how it is. No relief." - Diarmuid Hester

Buy Artworks

As compliment to the live iteration of WORMHOLE OF OUR FORMATION, Hoffmann has produced a series of six limited edition, A5 prints - available for purchase throughout the ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE programme.

Prints 1 to 6 (pictured above) are priced at £130 ea. For all sales enquiries please contact the artist directly HERE

About Catherine Hoffmann

Described as an elemental weather system Catherine takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work using text, music, choreography, video and participation - sitting in between live art, cabaret and performance. In a DIY approach and usually with absurdism she tackles personal, autobiographical material to shine a light on social issues. 

Most of her work could be seen as some kind of humiliating act, revealing aspects such as shame, guilt, poverty, loss, gynaecological and mental health. She ventures into vulnerable terrain using humour and irreverence as a tool, to open up dialogue, embracing the desire for collective healing in our challenging contemporary lives.

Mainly creating solo shows as well as interactive intimate works, she also collaborates with Florence Peake and has shown in festivals, theatres, art galleries, cabaret events, on night buses, in bars and clubs throughout the UK and Europe.

In 2023 she created an immersive version of ‘Wormhole of our Formation’ using VR 360 film at UCA in Canterbury supported by ACE, the Hi3 Network, Wysing Arts centre and Cambridge Junction. In 2022 she toured ‘Cyst-er Act’ to Germany,  to Summerhall at the Edinburgh fringe festival and the Southbank centre. In 2017/18 she toured the UK with ‘Free Lunch with the Stench Wench’ – a solo exploring shame in relation to class and poverty. Her texts ‘Whatever happened to the Glory Days’? And ‘Ten tips on being Feckless and Poor..’ are printed by LADA and Unbound books.

www.cathoffmann.com

Credits

WORMHOLE OF OUR FORMATION has been made possible with support from Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge Junction, Arts Council England, Battersea Arts Centre, and Hi3 Network with Screen South. In collaboration with VSSL Studio and Deptford X.

Created by: Catherine Hoffmann
Dramaturg: Eirini Kartsaki
Pearled neck brace and dress by: Lara Buffard
Choreographic Support: Florence Peake
Additional Sound Support: Lottie Poulet, Geoffrey Chambers
Lights: Marty Langthorne
Production Assistants: Ash McNaughton, Mine Kaplangi
Looking for the Rain written by: James Gabriel Leo Lavelle, Jack Leonard, Mark Lanegan, Matthew Puffet
Vocals: Catherine Hoffmann

Thanks to: Tink Flaherty, Katy Baird, Daniel Oliver, Eve Stainton, Gavin Roberts, Jules Deering, Ella Gamble, Sahara Huang, Tim Spooner, Benjamin Sebastian

In Thomas's new solo project  - COME HELL OR HIGH FEMMES: THE DOLLS RISE - a three part film and multimedia performance, Thomas charts a post-apocalyptic geography.

Her world is lush and verdant; the artist, bathed in a sky blue dress of tulle, wanders across babbling brooks, oceans, and atop hills of fertile land.

Thomas imagines a time where the dolls — a word that, loosely, means a trans femmes so flawless and unbound they are no longer considered real — have survived a mass extinction.

Why are dolls the only ones left? Perhaps, it is because trans femmes (often, but not always) are forged in nocturnality, where beauty and intelligence must learn to supersede time and space. Thomas reclaims what it means to be black in nature, forging new ways to exist in peace, joy, and healing in relation to the American landscape.

The work moves through sound, light, poetry, dance, and music as forms of resistance and healing. The choreography is based on queering landscapes, camouflage, and metamorphosis as modes of survival and transcendence for queer and trans people.

Booking Information

Wednesday 13th August, 7pm at the Horse Hospital 

︎︎︎ RSVPs essential - Book tickets HERE

Set in the year 2666, following a mass extinction of most human life, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise explores - in Thomas’ words - a “postapocalyptic world where black transfemmes have survived and are building a new universe.” - Joshua Chambers

About Keioui Keijaun Thomas

Keioui Keijaun Thomas (b.1989) is a New York-based artist. She creates live performance and multimedia installations that address  the multifaceted realms of Black identity formation, encompassing affective, material and economic dimensions. Through a captivating fusion of sculpture and performance,  the work explores the transient nature of the “doll”— a trans femme  so flawless and unbound she is no longer considered real—as both a work in progress and a formidable force of nature.

Utilizing an array of materials such as paper, hair, sugar, rubber, tape, acrylic, water, enamel and skin to create tableaus that are intricately intertwined with her own body. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, slipping between various modes of address, to explore the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. By centering self and communal care in real-time, Thomas’ practice aims to build bridges of understanding and community.

Thomas has presented work both nationally and internationally. She earned her Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York. 

See more of her recent work HERE 

Credits

COME HELL OR HIGH FEMMES: THE DOLLS RISE  as part of ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE is co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton. The programme is made possible with public funding from the National Lottery and Arts Council England.

As part of Entanglements Of The Apocalypse, VSSL Studio will host a private gathering with the current cohort of the Rose Choreographic School.

This curated roundtable brings together a diverse array of creative/artistic-researchers - to share practices, knowledges, and speculations at the intersection of apocalyptic thinking, artistic enquiry, and experimental pedagogy.

Leading into and during the gathering, Dreaming Alternative Ways of Education While Witnessing Apocalypses will serve as both a prompt and invitation - asking how we might learn jotherwise, in other ways, while the world continues through ongoing cycles of collapse and renewal.

Through conversation, listening, and imaginative exchange, the session foregrounds practices of embodied research, communal dreaming, and the weaving of counter-narratives.

Together, the VSSL team and Rose Choreographic School cohort will consider how education might transform under pressure: beyond institutions, beyond certainty, and within the entangled temporalities of multiple apocalypses.

This gathering is not open to the public, but its resonances will inform future ways in which both VSSL Studio and the Rose Choreographic School cohort continue to think, make, and share in uncertain times.

Booking Information

Thursday the 25th of September at VSSL Studio 

︎︎︎ This is a private event - no RSVP

"...the focus is on coming together as a community of artist researchers to discover the conditions we need for speculation and articulation" - Rose Choreographic School

About Rose Choreographic School

Rose Choreographic School is an experimental research and pedagogy project. We support a cohort of 13 artists to explore their singular choreographic enquiries and to collectively imagine a school through which knowledges and practices can be developed and shared. There is no set curriculum or syllabus, and no predetermined outcome; the focus is on coming together as a community of artist researchers to discover the conditions we need for speculation and articulation. Each cycle of the School lasts two years, during which we offer access to studio spaces, mentoring and a research budget. The Artistic Faculty for this first cycle are Alesandra Seutin, Trajal Harrell and William Forsythe and they will invite engagement with their own research concerns and practices. The current cohort have collectively written a statement in solidarity with Palestine. It can be read in English or Arabic on our Publications page.

www.rosechoreographicschool.com

Credits

DREAMING ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF EDUCATION WHILE WITNESSING APOCALYPSES (A GATHERING)  as part of ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE is co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton. The programme is made possible with public funding from the National Lottery and Arts Council England. 

Opening Hours

12 - 5pm, 6th to 30th of November
Thurs to Sat (Closed Sun to Weds)
at VSSL Studio  

About Bassam Issa Al-Sabah

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is an artist working with digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles. his installations interrogate the intersection of fantasy and trauma, employing speculative worlds as a lens through which to explore the mechanisms of memory and identity formation. Frequently drawing on the visual lexicon of video games, anime, and popular culture, constructing alternative realities that function as both a means of escape and critical commentary. These Surrealistic spaces are often juxtaposed with stark depictions of violence and destruction, their landscapes and fragmented narratives mirroring the dissonant nature of recollection and the complex processes of self-reconstruction.

At the core of his practice is an investigation into how digital culture and virtual environments mediate experiences of trauma, displacement, and loss. These constructed worlds provide a framework for reimagining personal and collective histories, where the fantastical serves not only as a refuge but as a site of confrontation

Recent solo exhibitions include Uncensored Lilac, in collaboration with Jennifer Mehigan at Silent Green, Transmediale, Berlin (2024), IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE TAKE THIS!, The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Dublin (2022), I AM ERROR, Gasworks, London (2021), and De La Warr Pavilion, Sussex (2022).

www.bassamissa.xyz

About Jennifer Mehigan

Jennifer Mehigan's prints and paintings fuse diverse media and sources, including 3D scans of her garden, images of plants growing on the graves of strange Irish women, the archive of Victorian portrait photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden, the four-dimensional drawings by the Cork-born mathematician Alicia Boole, and an encrypted codex known as the Voynich manuscript. Using paint, inkjet, graphics cards, neural networks, pearl powder and gel, her works blend new and old methods of making and processing the world – a relationship the artist views as a ‘strained mother-daughter bond’. Mehigan’s wider practice also incorporates CGI, sculpture, filmmaking, perfumery, writing, parties, artificial intelligence and horticulture, deploying sensory experience to explore queerness and femininity.

Mehigan regularly creates work in collaboration with artist Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and and is a former member of Temporary Pleasure, a rave architecture collective. Her PhD research at Belfast School of Art speculates about Ireland’s 'abstract' and anorexic women after the Famine, revisiting isolation, illegibility and ‘image hunger’ in the age of techno-surveillance.

Recent exhibitions include Uncensored Lilac, with Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, transmediale studio, Berlin (2024); 4D MOUND NETWORK, An Chultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, Belfast; HERE COMES LOVE, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (both 2023); Nightbloom Chokehold at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2022) and Creamatorium 2 at transmediale, Berlin (2021). She is based in Limerick

www.default.garden

Credits

BASSAM ISSA AL-SABAH AND JENNIFER MEHIGAN: BIOLYTIC DAUGHTER as part of ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE APOCALYPSE is co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton. The programme is made possible with public funding from the National Lottery and Arts Council England.