This is a series of duets between with ‘ Broken Bodies of Furniture’.  Artists Priya Mistry and Lewys Holt physically explore and improvise with a series of ‘incomplete’ household furniture pieces, tables with missing legs, head boards without a bed, draws without a case, ladders without steps.

This work is a commentary and explores the social model of dis-ability. What happens when a part is missing? Is it still functional? Maybe we need to change the way we function for it to work? Maybe we’re looking at it all wrong and it’s the world that needs to change not the bodies in it.

Exploring the Functional Body, the Broken Body, and the intimate Relationships between Bodies and archives and expressions held in the body and in the time before we learnt words. Mistry together with dance artist Lewys Holt explores Bodies, Orifices, Furniture and Erotic Shelves and whatever else comes up.

Born out of lengthy improvisations, a series of duets with pieces of furniture, provoking conversations about their inner workings, mechanics, textures, amenability and flexibility, building relationships with temperament, the noises bodies make and the way they move. This ‘in process’ work evokes enquiries of function, form, value and perceived states of the bodies and the way we label them.

This event was part of whatsthebigmistry’s Gallery  TAKEOVER  #Destressfess. For  2 weeks artist whatsthebigmistry (aka Priya Mistry) occupied the very new and large main Gallery 1 at the Attenborough Arts Centre. During the TAKEOVER Mistry  invited a variety of artist collaborators from visual, dance, socially engaged and performance arts practices to work in a live, experimentally and immediate fashion. All collaborations formed ‘Working In Process’’ which are then shared over social media and presented live and installed as ideas in their first ever iterations. Forming 2 weeks of firsts.

whatsthebigmistry is artist Priya Mistry, who works across disciplines straddling performance, live art, visual arts and dance. Mistry’s practice adds to discourse around topics explored in the work, particularly mental health, equality and feminine politics, identity, race, sex, gender and queerness, whilst making experimental, playful explorations around the all the possible choreographies and relationships between bodies, objects and spaces.

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