On the 8th of January, Art historian Amelia Jones will be joined by artist and Sang Bleu friend Ron Athey to discuss the relevance of sexuality in contemporary art, from expression to repression, exploring how the term has shifted in tandem with artistic and theoretical debates.

These photographs were taken by Devin Blair of Ron Athey for the 6th issue of Sang Bleu and we have shared a selection of them with you today in light of this sure to be fascinating and insightful conversation taking place in the new year.

Ron Athey is a London-based performance artist from Los Angeles. He has been performed body and sound-based works since 1981, starting with PE, a collaboration with Rozz Williams. Through the ’90s in the heat of the AIDS pandemic, “Ron Athey and Company” toured the so-called ‘torture’ trilogy, performing at PS122, New York; ICA, London; Festival Atlantico, Lisbon; x’teresa, Mexico d.f.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; CCA, Glasgow; Cankjarev Dom, Ljulbjana; among others. Starting in 1999, Athey explored solo work, notably with Solar Anuswhich was shown at such venues as Hayward Gallery, London; Luciano Inga-Pen Gallery, Milan; NGBK, Berlin; and the Self-Obliteration cycle at Hebbel und Ufer, Berlin and participant inc., New York. Athey has also worked and collaborated with Juliana Snapper (The Judas Cradle), Lawrence Steger (Incorruptible Flesh), and Julie Tolentino (90s company work and Tolentino’s archival project The Sky Remains The Same). A monograph edited by Dominic Johnson, entitled Pleading in the Blood, was published by Intellect press last year.

Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Chair in Fine Arts at the Roski School of Art and Design at University of Southern California and Vice-Dean of Critical Studies; she was previously (2010-14) Grierson Chair in Visual Culture in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University. Her recent publications include Perform Repeat Record: Live Art in History (2012), co-edited with Adrian Heathfield and a single authored book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (2012). Her exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art took place in 2013 in Montreal.

She edited Sexuality, the latest in the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT press Documents of Contemporary Art series of publications, which this event launches.

Whitechapel Gallery,

London

E1 7QX

£8.50

7pm – 9pm