Gray Wielebinski, Manuka Honey, and agustine zegers collaborate on ¡We’ve Got Spirit!, a new performance which interrogates how cheerleading, a symbol of hyper-femininity and American patriotic ritual, might be made subcultural. Evoking the haunting Texas landscape from Wielebinski and Manuka Honey’s childhoods, the work reflects on the twilight of the American empire, queering mainstream culture and tradition. Permeating the Deadhouse, a 17th century crypt beneath the Somerset House courtyard, will be an olfactive environment composed by zegers, commissioned by Dean’s Bottom, in collaboration with Somerset House Studios.
Gray Wielebinski (b. 1991, Dallas) is an artist whose practice is interested in the role that power plays in historical and contemporary forms of myth-making and narratives and how this intrinsic power dynamic affects how we conceive of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Gray works in a variety of mediums, incorporating video, performance, collage, installation, sculpture, conceptual research and more. The process of collaging runs through his practice in many forms – reconfiguring and transforming iconography and visual codes that interrogate dominant frameworks and belief systems and propose alternatives. He is also continuously attentive to the fraught status of American and UK self-mythology and landscape, and recent work has focused on surveillance, strategy, and secrecy, particularly as these intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, and the social.
Manuka Honey
Bringing chaos, sensuality and ecstatic motion to her productions and selections, Manuka Honey circles club music's most compelling fringes. In just a few short years, she's cultivated an idiosyncratic sound that's shuttled her from continent to continent, assembling a tight catalog of EPs, remixes and singles that harness the energy of Latin-American and Caribbean dance sounds, infusing it into radical new structures. A DJ, producer, multi-disciplinary artist and professional astrologer, Marissa Malik was born and raised in the US before she relocated to London, bringing her hot, humid aura to rainy England. She's animated by the complex alchemy of the dancefloor, and as likely to reference experimental sounds as she is cumbia or dembow.
agustine zegers
agustine zegers (b. 1994, Santiago) is an olfactory artist and student of atmospheric biopolitics. Their work attends to the nourishing and noxious transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering forms of communion with ecological collapse at the scale of the molecule and breath. Their work has scented and been exhibited at venues such as the Venice Biennale, 52 Walker, Center for Performance Research, Prairie, and Sharjah Art Foundation. They are currently based in Chicago.