The Lives of Women

A site-responsive adaptation of Alexis Teplin’s performance The Lives of Women, presented in front of Portrait of Eva Gonzalès by Édouard Manet at the National Gallery, London. Two costumed actors delivered an abstracted dialogue on protest, translation and the possibility of enacting political change. Midway through the work, the performers exchanged roles, re-performing each other’s parts and shifting the relation between voice, body and authorship.

The performance draws together multiple sources: gestures and fragments from surrounding paintings by Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, protest materials from MayDay Rooms relating to 1968 political movements, letters from the Iris Murdoch Archives on the nature of translation, and original writing produced in response to contemporary women’s marches. Through these layered references, the work forms a fragmented portrait of visibility, audibility and collective speech.

The event was presented alongside an in-conversation with curator Pryiesh Mistry on Hillside in Provence by Paul Cézanne. The discussion considered Cézanne’s repeated use of the mountain motif as a way of working through perception and abstraction, alongside Journey to Mount Tamalpais by Etel Adnan, where landscape becomes a site for thinking through painting, politics and place.