A night to feel, witness and rediscover connections — featuring live performances Body Talks (2025) by Joanna Penso, Why don’t you remember? (2025) by Frankie Fathers, and Water Ripple Swan Gate (2025) by Vibin n Marblin.

This special evening will start with Joanna’s Body Talks (2025), which explores a ‘tuning in’ to oneself and those around us via live body amplification. An absurd amount of cables are wrapped around the body, meeting at a central 'umbilical cord', the length of which denotes the performance area. The piece comes to a crescendo when the performer attempts to dance to the sound of her own heartbeat; the more she dances, the quicker her pulse races.

We will then witness Frankie to activate her installation about her father Michael who has Alzheimer’s disease, with Why don’t you remember? (2025), a performance that explores the emotional complexities of being a caregiver. She repeats the same question, reflecting on how her father asks her the same questions over and over again due to his lack of short-term memory. Her emotions veer from annoyance to sadness, to love, to guilt.

Lastly, Vibin n Marblin will present Water Ripple Swan Gate (2025), a live audiovisual performance inspired by footage of water rippling in the waterways of Thamesmead. They bring live marbling, drawn animation and pre-recorded footage into dialogue with live vibraphone-playing, electronic and aquatic sounds. This is improvisation as structure in motion - an unfolding exchange where moments coalesce, dissolve, and reconfigure.

This event will take place in the Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ. Doors will open at 6pm, with the performances running from 7pm to 8:30pm. The Nunnery Café will be open from 6-9pm, selling their usual fare of delicious drinks and snacks.

More about Joanna Penso

Joanna Penson is an artist working with sound-led experiments to explore our relationship to ourselves, to one another and to our environment using methods of body amplification. Her work aims to challenge the barriers to human connection through tools of absurdity and relational gestures, focusing on the powerful employment of bodily sounds as artistic material. Everyone has a heart that beats, a gut that rumbles and joints that click; this point of commonality is important to her practice, a reminder of our humanity. She works with live performances, sonic films, workshops, sound installations and radio programmes.

More about Frankie Fathers

Frankie Fathers is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, sculpture, and film, exploring themes of identity, myth, and loss. She primarily uses textiles to engage with these ideas, offering a feminist and absurdist perspective. Her practice is both playful and profound, flippant and forceful, creating a visual language that balances the familiar with the fantastical. These dualities invite reflection on gender, power, and myth. Recently, however, her art has become deeply personal as she navigates the emotional complexities of caring for her father, Michael, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2021.

This transition into caregiving has significantly shaped the artist’s practice, forcing her to grapple with the emotions tied to caring for a loved one whose memory and identity are fading. It has challenged her understanding of memory, loss, and care, prompting her to explore these themes through her work. The act of making has become a way for the artist to articulate the frustration and helplessness she experiences as a caregiver.

More about Vibin n Marblin

Vibin n Marblin are visual artist Chloe Cooper and composer Jackie Walduck. Jackie creates mesmeric soundscapes in real time using her vibraphone and live electronics. Chloe drops inks onto a watery surface creating patterns that she mixes live with drawn animations. Together they’ve created an improvisation-based practice where Chloe’s marbling responds to Jackie’s music and vice versa, resulting in immersive video projections and mesmeric vibraphone soundscapes. This dialogical approach sparks fresh associations between visual and audio perceptions and inspires the emotions connected with present-centred consciousness.