London, NYC, 2023, Milan, 2024

Video (NYC) by Katya Ustinova

Performance attendant: Jordan Xona (London, Milan), Cemiyon Barber (NYC)

THE SHORT GAP is a new live series that engages the local live art scene through a dialogue with a guest artist, and responds to an audience’s approach to interconnecting two bodies, creating a temporary living sculpture for them. It lives only until the next audience member arrives and adjusts it to suit them.

This work is a tribute to both 1980s Robert Mapplethorpe’s black-and-white series, which depict a Black body and a white body, interconnected, and Os Bichos, a series of sculptures by legendary Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, which has inspired many generations of artists, some of whom reinterpret the canonical work through the medium of performance art.

What would you do out of these two bodies?