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Private view: Visions Programme 1 led by Rosie Gibbens
Friday 3rd October 2025 , 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Join us for a specially curated evening of performances by Rosie Gibbens to celebrate the opening of this year’s Visions in the Nunnery Programme 1
Our biennial celebration of international moving image Visions returns for its 14th edition this October, split across two exciting programmes. Join us to celebrate the launch of Programme 1, featuring a new set of ‘micro-performance’ films by lead artist Rosie Gibbens with an installation of 38 artists’ works from across the world
Drawing on her interest in the absurd, the Gallery will be a smorgasbord of recorded performing bodies. Bodies pushing against their limits, becoming technologically augmented, morphing into the more-than-human or embracing the bizarre.
Presenting work by: Nicholas Blaidd, Johanna Bolton, Greig Burgoyne, Jemima Burrill, Karen Byrne, Adam Cole, Colette Copeland, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Annie Edwards, Iuliia Fedorova, Beth Fox, Rosie Gibbens, Eleanor Green, Katy Howe, Bryan Konefsky, Richie Moment, Seona Myerscough, Daniel Oliver, Savvas Papasavva, Rozina Pátkai, Alex Pearl, Gregor Petrikovič, Blue Phoenix, Alicia Radage, Nik Ramage, Tammy Reynolds, Emily Sarten, Korallia Stergides, Alexis Zelda Stevens, Xinyue Tao, Julieta Tetelbaum, Mariia Timoshenko, Mariya Vasilyeva, Ivy Vo, Frances Willoughby, Jake Wood, Iris Lingyu Zhang and Yanzi Zou.
The evening will feature four weird and wonderful live performances:
Performance Schedule
7:00pm – Jennet Thomas, IT IS WANTING (2024) at Bow Arts Courtyard
A defiant, weird, DIY lament on not keeping calm in toxic times. A 60-year-old woman (the Filmmaker) confronts over consumption and AI-fuelled misogynistic ageism with deadpan slapstick, a sculptural costume and an intricate, animated collage of bar-codes. A frenetic performance of striped, coded beings enmeshed in a system that’s of their own making, yet out of their control. Ambiguities and interference patterns are embraced, as is the contradiction of the toxic and the sublime, the comic and apocalyptic. Originally conceived as a live performance, this is a collaboration with composer Matt Rogers and The Something Puffs.
7:30pm – Chuting Lee, …BLOW… (2024) at Nunnery Café
Each life is indeed a gift
no matter how short
no matter how fragile
Each life is indeed a gift
to be held
in our hearts
for ever.
An art performance by Chuting Lee, this performance explores the themes of motherhood, ambitions, and inheritance after the loss of a loved one.
8:00pm – Laura Dee Milnes, Corporate Séance (2025) at Bow Arts Courtyard
During the Corporate Séance, Claire Voyant opens the portal to the omnipresent Senior Management Team, during which she calls upon the spirits of colleagues and questions the faith of her devotees (the audience). After some preparation exercises, including gargling with green juice, producing ectoplasm and aligning psychic wavelengths, Claire will perform a series of actions to commune with her Corporate Guides and scare employees into subservience to the master, The Man. This Line Manager has a direct line to the spirit world, and she isn’t afraid to choke you with it. The portal opens for only 10 minutes, after which Claire, quite rightly, will pass the baton to someone much more senior and eternally more male.
8:30pm Tallulah Haddon, I Left My Vibrator In A Cave (2025) at Bow Arts Courtyard
I Left My Vibrator In A Cave is based around an ancient male cult who carried out a sacrifice which involved slaughtering a bull and baptising themselves in its blood, this symbolised new growth and the beginning of the concept of time. I have spent a year nursing the remains of heartbreak and so initiation back into the cult feels like a metaphor for returning to ones friends and support system after heartbreak and alienation. In the making of I Left My Vibrator In A Cave we have looked at the blood baptism as a metaphoric journey back into the collective. The work has been radical in making and execution. I Left My Vibrator In A Cave is made in collaboration with and performed by Mirabelle Haddon, Kit Marshall, Joana Nastari, Claudia Palazzo and Dre Spisto. Sound design is by Alina Maldonado.
This event will take place across Bow Arts Bow Road site, 181-183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ. Doors of the Nunnery Gallery will open at 6pm, with the Visions in the Nunnery exhibition opening and performances at Bow Arts Courtyard and the Nunnery Café running from 7pm to 9pm. The Nunnery Café will be open from 6-9pm, selling their usual fare of delicious drinks and snacks.
More about Rosie Gibbens
Rosie Gibbens makes performances, videos, sculptures and photographs that feature her body. Using absurd humour, she explores the slippery overlaps between identity, labour and consumer desire. She often makes sculptures that combine household gadgets with sewn body parts. These are brought to life through low-tech chain reactions in the performances/ films. Rosie playfully blends bodies with objects to unpack and question the prospective future body as it becomes increasingly ‘optimised’ by technological augmentation. The mindset behind her work is of a nonsensical product demonstration combined with a perverse children’s TV show.
Solo exhibitions include Muta at Pippy Holdsworth Gallery, 2025 and Parabiosis at the Bomb Factory in 2024. In 2022 Gibbens was winner of the Ingram Prize, ‘Founders Choice’ award and undertook a Sarabande Residency funded by the Alexander McQueen Foundation.
More about Tallulah Haddon
Tallulah Haddon is a multidisciplinary artist. Haddon draws on their experience in the film industry, deconstructing the boundaries between performance, installation and film. They are a recent MFA graduate of Bard College. Their work includes playing with liveness and deconstructing the nature of film. Their work is invested in creating provocative queer futures, through magical, often comical worlds. They focus on creating containers which are responsive to performative actions and bodies.
More about the company:
Kit Marshall is a non-binary performance artist. They have recently graduated with a Masters In Interdisciplinary Performance from The Northern School of Contemporary Dance.
Claudia Palazzo is an artist working at the intersections and contradictions of dance, performance art, alternative cabaret and installation. They have presented work internationally in a wide variety of contexts.
Mirabelle Haddon is a dance artist based in London. She works within a wide range of practices including, dance, performance art, choreography and curation. In addition to her performance practice Mirabelle works as part of the Candoco Dance Company Teaching Artist community, where she engages with Crip approaches to dance and facilitation.
Joana Nastari is a performer, writer and intimacy coordinator. Her work is glittery, gritty and slimey. She is currently touring her live art clown show; 50 Ways To Kill A Slug.
Jen Smethurst is a Practices of Care & Wellbeing Consultant, Show Parent, Access Support Person, and General Vibes Manager. They specialize in working with intersectionally marginalized people in creative & performance industries. For more information about what this means, visit their website: jensmethurst.com or send them an email on verybusy.veryimportant@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you x
Alina Maldonado is a musician and performer whose work intertwines electroacoustic composition, performance, and sound installations. Her work pursues a nomadic aesthetic where improvisation has a relevant role.
More about Chuting Lee
Chuting is a London-based Taiwanese artist specializing in sculpture and performance. She channels her thoughts and feelings into her art, capturing moments of intensity through the fluidity and plasticity of materials. She often creates autoethnographic works that reflect her sensory experiences and emotional expressions through numerous repetitive actions in her creative process.
Chuting considers the UK her creative paradise, drawing inspiration from her cultural background to find a stage for artistic expression. As part of her practice, she creates performances that reflect and explore her state of mind and personal experiences. In a recent performance piece titled ‘…BLOW…’, she heated a crayon crown while wearing it, evoking a ritualistic narrative that explores themes of motherhood, ambition, and inheritance—an experience that is both beautiful and painful.
More about Laura Dee Milnes
Laura Dee Milnes is an artist, facilitator and educator working with performance, sculpture, writing, image, music and facilitation. While she often makes visual artworks in the form of performances, drawings and ‘things’, she also enables others to be creative through participatory performances, immersive environments and artistic workshops for all ages.
As an artist, Laura frequently asks for – but doesn’t expect – participation, and she has encountered a spectrum of responses and interactions through this approach. Her interests are broad, however, humour, silliness, community, voice, and feminism are recurring themes that crop up, whether she likes it or not. She has previously presented work in the UK and Europe, in galleries, theatres, toilets, fields, and beyond but her favourite spaces and events are usually DIY and artist-led.
More about Jennet Thomas
Jennet Thomas makes films, performances and installations. She creates absurdist worlds that confound straightforward readings, in the form of sci-fi folk tales, musicals and unreliable lectures.
She mines the connections between fantasy, ideology and the everyday with a DIY, absurdist spirit – a kind of resistance to capitalist aesthetics. Her work is darkly comic, often exploring struggle with a sense of impending doom.
She is currently re-engaging with a hybrid performance practice- combining intricate video with a live presence involving sound, song, and actions. Collapses occur between registers, narrative and abstract elements moving between video and the live space of the audience.
Access information
The Nunnery Gallery and Café have step-free access throughout from street level, including to the accessible toilet, and is service animal friendly. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site but blue badge parking can be found 500m away on Fairfield Road.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email nunnery@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
Transport Information
Address: Bow Arts Trust, 183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
Nearest station(s): Bow Road (District and Hammersmith and City lines) is a 6-minute walk away, and Bow Church (DLR) is a 3-minute walk away.
Bus: 205, 25, 425, A8, D8, 108, 276, 488 and 8 all service the surrounding area.
Bike: Bicycle parking is located at Bow Church Station. The nearest Santander Cycles docking station is at Bow Church Station.
