LIVE X Platform Graduate Award

Hear from Platform artists Sofia Pantsjoha, Ella Soni, and Brontè Wyse for a series of Q&As throughout the evening in the Ground Floor Gallery. 

Jarad Jackson debuts a new performance in tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950), the star of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In FINALE, Jackson rewrites Nijinsky’s iconic role as the ‘rose’ in Le Spectre de la rose to commemorate a legendary dancer whose spellbinding talent ended with tragedy. 

Join Jackson as he performs unfiltered meditations on queerness, sensitivity and sexuality through his personal history as a ballet dancer and the spirit of Nijinsky. 

Jarad Jackson is interested in how materials might define choreography, futility or reiterative fantasies. He finds the artist’s statement precarious but will suggest his practice is agile and works tend to remain in a mode of ongoing rehearsal.

Biba Klico works across performance, sculpture, and installation to explore the juxtapositions between everyday domesticity and spiritual rituals, often drawing on absurdity, irony, and humor to engage with complex themes of identity, nostalgia, and cultural belonging.

In this interactive performance Klico invites the audience to reflect on the sacredness hidden in the seams of domestic life by partaking in a shared service where the familiar becomes uncanny, biscuits take on new forms, cups of tea become vessels of blessings and the day to day rhythms of the home are elevated into a collective rite. 

Lara Beasley is a multidisciplinary performance artist creature, whose work attempts kinship and empathy with a merging natureculture binary. Their practice uses camp, surreal humour as a means of coping with eco-panic, choosing to relish and find intrigue in the excrement left behind by the capitalist digestive system, and to try and forge a weird hope among the horrors of the Anthropocene. LARA SAY EATPLASTIC!!!

Lara Beasley will present a new live performance as part of LIVE x Platform. 

Animal Dreams (est. 2023) is the joint practice of Ella Soni and Martha Lowres. Using the conceptual structure of a band – one built on the collaborative foundations of shared labor and friendship – the duo work together to produce drawings, sculpture, costume, writing, sound, performance and film. The work is informed by moments captured and reworked from popular or underground culture, manifesting as ephemeral objects like merchandise, props, leftovers. Animal Dreams could be a performative archive; a dream object; a broadcast to be encountered, interpreted and reimagined. 

Worldstar Dream Club is a performance of imitation. To imitate the band, to mime its lyrics. Taking further their relationship with films as source material, Animal Dreams will deliver a live event at Modern Art Oxford based in music, choreographed movement and play. The concept of mimesis and an interest in its relation to (panto)mime provides a framework for the performance to exist within.

Join Brontè Wyse for a drop-in sculpture workshop exploring the themes and ideas in her installation Where Humans Live, Rates Live in the ground floor gallery. Examining identity and human behaviour in relation to surveillance and privacy, Wyse invites us to consider the implications of sharing our personal data and the potential anxieties and behaviours encouraged by surveillance technologies.  

The radicle is the part of a seed that cracks to produce the first root. This workshop offers a different kind of radicle; a moment of re-connection to the materials we use and their roots.

“Sapling, tree, snag, become wood, paper, product.” It’s easy to live day-to-day without pausing to consider where the materials around us come from, where they began and their journey to now. This drop-in workshop will explore tree materials, creating a communal zine that maps our relations to trees and their relations to us.

MISSNOMA are a collective made up of Womxn DJs based in Oxford. Born out of a shared passion for dance music and a mission to build a more inclusive and diverse music scene in the city, the collective is committed to making spaces for all to enjoy! Expect a diverse array of genres from house, disco, baile and electronic to breaks n’ bass—we guarantee to keep everyone moving on the dance floor.