Whistling as the Night Calls marks a decade of collaboration and shared practice between zack mennell and Martin O’Brien. mennell has witnessed, documented, facilitated and performed in much of O’Brien’s substantial body of live works. This show is the first exhibition of their collaborative photographs.
The exhibition is presented by Future Ritual, a curatorial and producing organisation working to support the emergence of new and more attuned cultures and working with artists to create contemporary expressions of ritual.
The artists spoke to QX about their practice and collaboration ahead of the exhibition which runs at VSSL Studio in Deptford from 31 October – 1 December 2024.
First of all, tell us about Whistling As The Night Calls.
zack: Whistling As The Night Calls marks nearly a decade of collaboration between Martin and me. The idea came about from thinking about making a performance for an audience no longer with us. The images are re-stagings of actions from Martin’s body of work in haunted settings: Dungeness Beach, historic churches in Romney Marsh and St Peter’s Seminary, a derelict brutalist college for priests in Cardross, Scotland. These are places we’d love to perform in that an audience can’t access, but we also recognise that photography offers different idiosyncrasies than live performance.
Martin: It’s an exciting concept because there has always been some contention around artists working in time-based media and photographic documentation. There is a concern that live ephemeral moments can be finalised into a single image. These works present an alternative perspective on memory, loss and finitude.
Let’s talk about what led to this collaboration. Can you tell us how you first became aware of each other and your respective practices?
zack: We met through friends who work in art and performance. We gradually kept seeing each other at different events. We share similar interests and tastes. After a few years, we ran around the entire programme of the last SPILL festival (a renowned live art festival) in London together. Martin had a performance at ArtsAdmin, Toynbee Studios and kept saying that he needed another performer. At this time, I had only worked on theatre bits as a student. I turned to him and said, “If you need someone, I could do it…” And he replied, “Oh, really?!” as if he hadn’t been planting the idea for the last two weeks!
How do you connect when you’re performing together?
zack: It’s interesting because we’ve never really discussed this beforehand as a formal approach. Still, we have developed language over the years—a sort of visual and physical way of communicating with each other.
Martin: Sometimes, even just a look in their eyes, they know what I’m asking for. We have all these hand gestures we never prepared; they started to develop out of the work, and we use them to communicate. It always feels important to me to have that person that I really know and trust in the work with me, especially for those long-duration performances. It’s just so important to have that person inside the work that you can communicate with as a sort ofsupport structure, and it just makes things feel safer for me.
zack: It ends up being in the same headspace, like when Martin has got the rebreathe hood on. Quite often, I found myself breathing in rhythm with him. Not consciously, but because I’m so focused and zoned in on him, trying to be ready for everything. It looks very passive, where I’m standing still at the side of the room, but it’s actually very physical. Sharing that language and thought also means I know what Martin wants from me. It’s also about trying not to draw the eye because Martin is the focal point but also understanding that I am very visible and negotiating that.
How has this relationship shifted for this work?
zack: People sometimes see my role in Martin’s performances as a Dom because Martin’s body is the material. I step forward to do things to him, so that dom-sub relationship is definitely part of it. But I think the actual characteristic of it is that Martin is the one in control. It’s the purpose of the work. It’s sort of what the work needs, what the work calls for and what Martin wants the work to be.
Martin: It does move between a sort of dominant, a submissive, and a carer and also a sort of mourner.
zack: This time, I was very much directing Martin, a dynamic we have had little of before in performances. The process involved me bossing Martin about a bit but also caring for him because many locations, like St. Peter’s, were pretty dangerous. So, the dynamics were quite similar to what they are in performances.
Martin: I felt that I was coming into zack’s art form, I don’t usually work with photography. It became about taking actions from my performance and then placing them into a landscape. We were constructing the image and translating it into this new form.
Whistling As The Night Calls by Martin O’Brien and zack mennell is open from 31 October to 1 December 2024 at VSSL Studio, Deptford, SE8 4AL, United Kingdom.
Opens 31 st Oct (6 – 9 pm) then 1 November ~ 1 December 2024
Open Thursdays by appointment & Fridays to Sundays, 12 pm to 6 pm
All images supplied
