Martin O'Brien and zack mennell (2024)

Footsteps are heard on the stairs, but no one is seen descending. Glasses fall in the kitchen and smash over the floor as if they had jumped themselves. The word ‘fading’ is written on the walls in blood or red paint. The wails of the dead can be heard by the living, and the horrors of life are visible to those who no longer endure it. People once walked these halls. Unholy sounds ring out into the night.

WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS is an exhibition of collaborative photographic works by zack mennell and Martin O'Brien. Shot on 35mm Cinestill 800T, the images document a series of performance actions which haunt the wind-swept skeletal remains of religious sites, including St Peter’s Seminary, a derelict brutalist college for priests in Cardross, Scotland. The exhibiton opens Thursday 31st October (6pm ~ 9pm ~ RSV).

For these new photographs, which extend from their performance making and documentary practices, the pair exhumed strange actions from O'Brien's body of work, situating them inside the concrete ruin, performing for ghosts and searching for more-than-human presences through mennell's photochemical process.

For many years, artists working in time-based media expressed anxieties about photographic documentation, fearing that it codified ephemeral live art into a final, essential shape - an afterlife, a tomb. In seeking the witness of the lost, the forgotten, the quick and the dead, these works by mennell and O’Brien present an alternative perspective on memory, loss and finitude.

WHISTLING AS THE NIGHT CALLS marks a decade of collaboration and shared practice between mennell and O’Brien, wherein mennell has witnessed, documented, facilitated and performed in many of O'Brien's live works. This show is the first exhibition of their collaborative photographs.

Key Info

1st November ~ 1st December 2024

Open Thursdays by appointment & Fridays through Sundays, 12pm to 6pm.

VSSL Studio, Resolution Way, Deptford (London), SE8 4AL

Activations

Opening ~ Thursday 31st October, 6pm ~ 9pm ~ RSVP

Closing ~ Sunday 1st December, 1pm ~ 5pm

Info

Exhibition enquiries: producing@futureritual.co.uk

Press enquiries: Anna Goodman (abstrakt@abstraktpublicity.co.uk)

Martin O’Brien

Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada, and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2020, and the ICA (London) in 2021. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. He was writer in residence at Whitechapel Gallery throughout 2023. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency. His work has been featured on BBC radio and Sky Arts television. He is currently Head of Drama, teaching on Live Art practices at Queen Mary University of London.

zack mennell

zack mennell is an emerging, self-taught artist whose practice is informed by their experiences of being queer, working-class, neurodivergent, and disabled. zack uses writing, photography and performance to imagine different ways of inhabiting the world beyond the mode of daily survival. Their work often has an uncanny quality, unsettling the familiar and making visible some of the strange aspects and tensions embedded in ‘normality’.

zack often works in documenting performance and live events through photography and writing - their photographic practice is strictly analogue, using 35mm film. zack has collaborated on and frequently documented works by performance artist Martin O’Brien. zack is part of the 2024/25 cohort of The Other MA (TOMA), is a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, and is a member of the Bethlem Artist Collective.

zack is part of the 2024/25 cohort of The Other MA (TOMA), is a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, and is a member of the Bethlem Artist Collective.

www.zackmennell.com

Future Ritual

The exhibition is offered as part of CEREMONY, a year long programming cycle curated by Future Ritual, exploring how performance and art making can function as modes of gathering, communion and ceremony amidst the fragmentation of contemporary life.

Future Ritual works to support the emergence of new and more attuned cultures, collaborating with artists to create contemporary expressions of ritual.

> about Future Ritual: Ceremony

Credits

The exhibition is presented by Future Ritual in partnership with VSSL Studio and supported with public funds by Arts Council England.