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Staff Profile

Giles Bailey

Senior Lecturer

Background

Since 2005 I have been working with performance as a central element of my practice and engaging with the international development of work in this field. Although I have produced work to be performed myself (often as a solo), increasingly, I work with others and shape projects around an interest in the way material or experience is shared performatively through social and personal relationships. Via this approach, I have put emphasis on performance as a cooperative tool to navigate and present ideas with groups of individuals. This is informed by looking to collaborative structures used in other performance disciplines such as experimental theatre, dance and musical composition.

 

I also self-publish TALKER, an interview zine about performance. Each issue features a long-form interview with a performance-maker and is produced as an extension of my own work with the aim of opening up discourse around live practices. I have produced 13 issues since 2016. These have featured interviews with the artists Ian White, Kate Valk, Richard Maxwell, Sue Tompkins, Dora García, Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Jo Fong, Paul Maheke, Clifford Owens, Gustav Metzger, Barby Asante, Miranda July and Agus Nur Amal PMTOH. I conduct the interviews myself (with the exception of one issue which publishes a transcript of an in-conversation event from 1987) and also design and distribute the publication. TALKER is stocked by retailers of artists’ printed matter in Auckland, Paris, New York, Marfa, Berlin, London, Glasgow, Vilnius and Lisbon. It is also held in the collections of the Tate and British Libraries.


A further extension of this research explores how performance’s social character could be used to rethink conventional approaches to assembling and recounting history. Working with texts, video fragments and choreographies, either composed myself or strategically appropriated from elsewhere, these works aim to propose a historiographic model that critically acknowledges doubt, and subjectivity as inevitable factors when making sense of past events that shape contemporary understanding. Sceptical of the idea of any ‘authentic’ account, I look to the fractured, incomplete and multilayered nature of mediations of information (via a web browser for example) as a tool to structure performances and inform the collage of their composition.

Research

Solo Exhibitions and Performances:


2023 

• Tea Universe, ArtHouses, Whitely Bay


2022 

• How to see into the future (a beginner’s guide), Kunsthochschule Mainz


2019 

• Islanders The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art


2018 

• Islanders (work in progress) Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick upon Tweed. (With Sophie Soobramanien, Jamie Hammill, Nellie Saunby)

 

2017

• Take the Credits! Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick upon Tweed.

• Festival is Sudden, Shipley Museum, Gateshead.

• Studio is Sudden, (ongoing programme) The Northern Charter, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

 

2016

• World is Sudden Part II, TUSK Experimental Music Festival, Newcastle upon Tyne

• Friend You Stand on Sacred Ground… This is Printing Office, International Print Biennale, Newcastle upon Tyne

• World is Sudden Part I. Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick upon Tweed.

 

2015

• Giles Bailey (with Jeremiah Day), CCA Glasgow

 

2013

• I Bought a Little City, The Northern Charter, Newcastle. • I Bought a Little City, Leeds City Town Hall (as part of Recon Festival).

• A Performative Minute, Kunst Werke, Berlin.

• Bought a Little City, OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich.

 

2012

• The only thing I don't like about it is that it seems a little imaginative, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow.

• A Performance of Donald Barthelme's 'I Bought a Little City' in Marfa, TX, Presidio County Courthouse Marfa, Texas.

• Two Works, CAGE, New York.

• The Guests, At the Brittania Hotel for Seven Sites, Manchester.

 

2011

• Talker Catalogue, Van Horbourg, Basel.

• Tom/Lutz: Two Scenes in 1983, Leeds University, Leeds.

• The Nineteen Sixties, Unit 4, London.

 

2010

• Exit THE AZTEC, (for Achim Lengerer’s Scriptings), Fake or Feint, Berlin.

• 21st Century, Chisenhale Gallery, London.

 

2009

• Coming Soon, (with Jens Strandberg), Dais, Glasgow.

 

2006

• Sound Examples for Average Performance Experiments, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow.

 

Group Exhibitions:

 

2023

• Vessels & Catastrophes, Mélange, Cologne

• Vom Spielen, Ludwig Museum, Koblenz


2022

• Arcade Promenade, MiB, Bad Ems


2018

• Maquettes, The Block, London

• Akademie (Arbeitstitel), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

 

2017

• The Living Sculpture, Flat Time House, London

 

2016

• World is Sudden Part 2, The Old Police House, Gateshead (Curated with CIRCA Projects)

• Films From Nowhere, Leeds Film Festival

• World is Sudden Part 1, Berwick Film Festival, Berwick upon Tweed (Curated with CIRCA Projects)

• 2001, Leeds College of Art & Design

 

2015

• Notes From Technotopia, Gallery II, Bradford University

• Follies of Youth, The Hepworth, Wakefield

 

2014

• On the occasion of the festival, Kunsthalle Basel

• Het Mooiste, Public Project, Rotterdam

• Virtual Orangery, Beam, Wakefield

 

2013

• Time to Recollect, Stadthausgalerie (c/o Kunsthalle Münster)

• Artists Moving Image Festival, Tramway, Glasgow

• Upside Down, Museum Cultuur Strombeek, Gent

• Cally Calls, 309 Caledonian Road, London

• Things You Think in Order, Tenderpixel, London

• Contour - 6th Biennial of Moving Image, Mechelen.

• Home Theatre, Baro Galeria, Sao Paulo Version Control, Arnolfini, Bristol.

• One Night Stand, Spike Island Bristol.

 

2012

• Performances at SUNDAY ART FAIR, London.

• Title, public project currated by Corinne Isabell Rinaldis, Zurich.

 

2011

• NEU/NOW, Tallinn.

• Text Me Faster, Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels.

• Life of an Artist, Live in Your Head, Geneva.

• Sync(s) & Shred(s), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

• Serpentine Cinema: CINACT, Serpentine Gallery, London

 

Selected Writing and Bibliography:


2016-present

• TALKER issues 1 - 12, Self Published. Featuring: Ian White, Kate Valk, Richard Maxwell, Sue Tompkins, Spalding Gray & Kathy Acker, Dora Garciá, Paul Maheke, Jo Fong, Clifford Owens, Gustav Metzger, Barby Asante, Miranda July.


2021

• Fieldwork Marfa, Beaux-Arts Nantes/HEAD–Geneva/ Editions Jannink, Paris


2018

• Artists in the Archive – Creative and Curatorial Engagements with Documents of Art and Performance, edited by Paul Clarke, Simon Jones, Nick Kaye, Johanna Linsley, published by Routledge.

 

2017

• TALKER Issue #2, Interview with Kate Valk of the Wooster Group, self-published and launched at Tender Books, London and Good Press, Glasgow.

 

2016

• TALKER Issue #1, interview with Ian White, self-published and launched at the Showroom Gallery.

• This Massive Power, (with Serena Lee) published by Lightning Books.

 

2014

• Brief notes on a reading event in a desert, in Art Licks Weekend publication Being Without Walls 2012

• Ed Atkins and a phone call from a mentally ill friend and Peter Wächtler and boring performances in which artists read texts from sheets of paper in The Burning Sand Journal.

• Elementary Morality in the post, Arvo Leo Monograph, Western Front, Vancouver.

• Thinking Through the Eyes, KUB Arena Publication, Kunsthaus Bregenz.

• Record work - Accounts of writing, reading, moving and speaking performanceʼs documentary history in ‘Not a day without a line - Understanding artists' writings’ Manchester University Press.

 

2011

• Artist’s pages with Tris Vonna-Michell for OEI Magazine.

• Fat Chance Arthur, for DAUERWELLE edited by Jacob Blandy and Camilla Wills.

• Six Ws and the H, (with Louise Shelley) for Gnommero journal.

 

2010

• Sexual Encouter with a Dog for Vulnerability Liz Glynn and Caleb Waldorf ed. • The Lorem Ipsum, Charming the Snake of Reason for Enjoy Gallery NZ.

• Scriptings Issue 12 published by Achim Lengerer.

• No Call for Brilliant Colour, for Stealing One Thought out of the Other by Matthias Meyer.

• Exit THE AZTEC Version 2 (a choreography) for Gnommero journal.

 

2009

• Text for Swamp Thing by Alex Gross, Transmission Gallery.

 

 




Publications