Biography

Adrian Heathfield (b. 1968) writes on, curates and creates performance. He is the author of Out of Now, a monograph on the artist Tehching Hsieh, editor of Ally and Live: Art and Performance and co-editor of Perform, Repeat, Record. His numerous essays have been translated into ten languages.

He conducted the three year European Union funded creative research project Curating the Ephemeral (2014–2016) on immaterial art and museal practices. He was co-director of Performance Matters, a four-year AHRC funded research project on the cultural value of performance (2009–2013).

He co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern, London (2003) and a number of other performance and durational events in European cities over the last eighteen years. He was curator of Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), a curatorial adviser and attaché for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016) and an artistic director with the collective freethought of the 2016 Bergen Assembly, Norway.

Heathfield has worked with many artists and thinkers on critical and creative collaborations including film dialogues, performance-lectures, dramaturgy, writing and workshop projects. He was President of Performance Studies international (2004–2007) and is Emeritus Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London.

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All images appear courtesy of their authors or copyright holders and should not be reproduced without permission.

ghost telephone

A month long chain performance
Curated by Adrian Heathfield

Premiere: 20th Biennale of Sydney
Art Gallery of New South Wales, 15 March – 15 April 2016
With Philipp Gehmacher, Benoît Lachambre, Chrysa Parkinson and Hahn Rowe

ghost telephone is a daily chain performance, comprised of new interlinked works from a set of internationally renowned artists. Working in situ in the museum the commissioned artists channel and transform the spirits of existing works in the collection and displays of the gallery. Each artist spends a week in residence with a selected artwork, attuning to its resonances and mutating its immaterial affects through their creative actions and words. The residency of each artist overlaps for several days with another artist, generating new correspondences and reverberations between the artists and their work.

ghost telephone is a slow-time serial improvisation made in the vibrant space of relations between people, spirits and things. It mines the art institution as a site, using its environment and its works as the impetus for original performances that morph over time and make a new kind of unending performance work. Performances take place at different times of day and move across the galleries throughout ghost telephone’s long duration.

Following its premiere at the 20th Biennale of Sydney, ghost telephone is now available to tour to other museums.

Adrian Heathfield was a curatorial adviser and one of 13 attachés working alongside Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal to shape the 20th Biennale of Sydney.

ghost telephone was realised in collaboration with Anneke Jaspers (Curator, Contemporary Art) and Andrew Yip (iGLAM Research Fellow) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and was made possible with generous assistance from The Keir Foundation. Hahn Rowe’s sound procession was enacted by art handlers: Jemima Flett, Tim Dale and Julia Bayka.

20th Biennale of Sydney

ghost telephone Chrysa Parkinson with Cymon and Iphigenia (Lord Frederic Leighton, 1884). Photo courtesy of the artist and © Zan Wimberley.
ghost telephone Philipp Gehmacher with Material from Another Medium (Daniel von Sturmer, 2001). Photo courtesy of the artist and © Zan Wimberley.
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ghost telephone Hahn Rowe with The Galaxy (Sidney Nolan, 1957-8). Photo courtesy of the artist and © Zan Wimberley.
ghost telephone Hahn Rowe with The Galaxy (Sidney Nolan, 1957-8). Photo courtesy of the artist and © Zan Wimberley.
ghost telephone Benoît Lachambre with Atrabiliarios (1992-1997) and Untitled (2007) by Doris Salcedo. Photo courtesy of the artist and © Zan Wimberley.
ghost telephone Benoît Lachambre with Atrabiliarios (1992-1997) and Untitled (2007) by Doris Salcedo. Photo courtesy of the artist and © Zan Wimberley.