Join us for a workshop with artist Rhiannon Armstrong, and see Pushkin House as never before. We will explore the building as an organism. We will look carefully at elements of damage: cracks, tears, and weaknesses. We will listen to them. They will ventriloquise. We will pay attention to points of resonance and tension between our attitude to the delicacy in our environment, and in ourselves.
Using audio interviews about fragility and damage conducted with museum conservators as a starting point, we will spend some time exploring Pushkin House and its contents, examining what different forms of insight are offered to us by various frames and lenses (a camera, a microscope, a person).
This workshop will share and build on Rhiannon’s audio-centred making process for Monstrous Delicacy, a short film commissioned by the Wellcome Collection, that explores what it’s like to access Wellcome Collection holdings on psychiatry as a person with lived experience of long-term mental distress.
Heartbeat Lullaby. Image credit: Graeme Braidwood
Image credit: Ben Gregory
About the Artist
Rhiannon Armstrong is a transdisciplinary artist making work under the lifelong series title Instructions for Empathetic Living. Working across relational performance and interventionist digital practice, their recent project The Slow GIF Movement has been touring the UK since 2019 and has a global reach of over 45 million through the project’s Giphy channel. In 2020 she received a BBC Culture in Quarantine commission for The Soothing Presence of Strangers, broadcast on Radio 3. Rhiannon is an Another Route International Fellow (2022–23) and was awarded the Adrian Howells Award for Intimate Performance (2019).