
Smith/Stewart
Smith/Stewart
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Smith/Stewart set up allegorical situations over which they often have little to no control, but which instigate explorations of dependence and trust, the body, sex and death.
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
A sung-through Nubian musical ballet. A darkly humorous take on sexual trauma and what magical and ancestral tools might heal it.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
A new interpretation of Kosugi’s Catch-Wave, producing a cloud of fluctuating, hypnotic drones, in front of a backdrop of projected waves.
A performed reflection on Malin’s previous re-enacting of a super influential landmark of performance art from the French feminist and artist Gina Pane.
A testimony to poverty from Chris’s own experiences, and an invitation to engage with an all too typical situation and context through a kind of imaginary listening.
A speculative narrative film informed by poetry and theories of quantum entanglement across diasporic distance. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed.
An improvised film about our worlds at the brink, on the edge, in front of a crisis. To stand on the side of life, by seeing the resistance to genocide in Palestine as a turning point to overcome.
Includes: tamed TV snow, video feedback of racing particles, a remake of a polish photogram film destroyed in WWII, a visual and aural representation of Gestalt theory, hole-punched film and Guy Sherwin’s Cycles 3 double-projection.
Is there a link between the ways we’re caged and exiled by the prison-industrial complex and the ways people’s bodies are violently categorised and segregated by race, class, gender or ability?
Four intimate 45 minute sessions, readings of your political questions – using Tarot, Palmistry, Reiki, Astrology, and Philosophy, and the invented methods of Fake and Political Therapy.