Natasha Davis is a performance and visual artist with over 40 solo and collaborative projects in a range of media including live performance, installation, film and publication. Her work has been shown across five continents in venues such as Tate Modern, National Theatre Studio London, Power Station of Arts Shanghai, Project Arts Centre Dublin, Point Centre for Contemporary Art Nicosia Cyprus, Luella Massey Toronto, Theatre Works Melbourne etc). Her performance Internal Terrains heads the British Library’s online digital performance collection and is used as its banner and twitter icon.
Natasha’s work is featured in Traces, a public project about migrant artists significantly contributing to UK arts. Natasha’s work has been funded by Arts Council England, British Council, Tower Hamlets, Humanities Research Fund, Hosking Houses Trust, Transatlantic Fellowship and numerous commissions and residencies. She holds a doctorate from the Warwick University and delivers lectures, talks and workshops across the world, from Buffalo to Tokyo to Grenoble to New Delhi.
Floor Plans (journeys from there to here) is a collaborative participatory installation by Natasha Davis, Sara de Jong and Siobhan Campbell focusing on floor plans of homes relating to personal migratory histories, the architecture of memory and the body as a site of memory. What does the loss of material traces of a personal existence on migratory journeys tell us about the spaces and places we occupy, however fleetingly? How do these spaces reflect current political changes in Europe (and beyond) and the unprecedented movement and migration of people? What kind of cartography of personal and political memory can be traced via floor plans of spaces once occupied and then abandoned or lost?
This mix of episodic material is a visual, poetic and theoretical exploration of mapping and writing, an interplay between an image, word, memory and gesture, used as a provocation for exchanges with audience, and drawing on a creative writing workshop by Siobhan that takes place on the 22nd of May as part of the programme of events; Sara’s research into the claims to protection and rights by Afghan and Iraqi interpreters and other locally employed civilians who had to flee their countries because of their work with Western states and organisations; and Natasha’s original iterations of Floor Plans at the Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz Berlin, a solo exhibition at Rich Mix London and the pages in the Artist’s Borderpanic Compendium curated publication. The installation welcomes reflections on our distinct journeys and shared longing to make ourselves at home somewhere in this world.
