Edward works with trained and untrained performers to make videos and plays that explore how performance is used to navigate personal, interpersonal and occupational problems.
Edward Thomasson makes performances, videos, paintings and photographs. His performance work uses song, dance and enactment to describe the ways people try and fail to encounter each other. He writes poems and lyrics that are brought to life through collaborations with composers, performers, musicians and friends. He also uses makes works on paper that explore longing, support and burden. He lives and works in London.
Thomasson has presented performances at KW Institute of Contemporary Art and Bonner Kunstverein, Germany (2024); Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich (2019); Studio Voltaire, London (2019); West Space, Melbourne (2018); and DRAF Studio, London (2016), among others. Solo exhibitions include The Present Tense, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2014), and Inside, South London Gallery (2011). Selected group exhibitions include United by AIDS, Migros Museum, Zurich (2019). Thomasson has collaborated with Lucy Beech on performances since 2007, exhibiting together at Tate Britain (2017), Maureen Paley (2016) and Barbican Theatre (2011). He lives and works in London.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Expertise
Gallery
More information
Research interests
His research takes on the body and its experiences as a starting point. He explores how performance can be used as a way to gather, exchange experiences, transgress, and rehearse new ways of being together. In his research and teaching, group performance is a lens through which to investigate the practice and politics of making things public, and the vulnerability that comes with this publicness.
Practice
Edward works with groups of trained and untrained performers to make videos and plays that explore how performance is used to navigate personal, interpersonal and occupational problems. Specifically looking at how the act of storytelling is used as a way to understand environments and exchange experiences, Edward's work draws on the language of musical theatre and its affective engagement with the audience to navigate the space between interior experience and exterior presentations of the self within social contexts.
He also works collaboratively with Lucy Beech on live works. The making of these performances punctuate his independent projects. These choreographed group activities refer to therapeutic games and often involve the live collective construction of sound.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Recent selected solo presentations
The Present Tense at Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2014
Inside, South London Gallery, 2012
Just About Managing, Southard Reid, London, 2012
Recent selected presentations with Lucy Beech
Site Gallery, Sheffield, 2016
Frieze Live, Frieze London, 2015
Camden Arts Centre, London, 2014
Yepi Kredi Culture Centre, Istanbul, 2013
OUTPOST, Norwich and 2nd Biennale de Belleville, Paris
South London Gallery, 2012
Barbican Theatre, London, 2011
Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 2011
Modern Art Oxford, 2010
Plays
Escape Routes, Indian YMCA, London, 2015
Between You And Me, The Glass House Community Centre, London, 2013