Marvin Gaye Chetwynd To Premiere Work For Arts Council Collection’s 70th Anniversary Commissions

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd To

The Turner Prize nominated artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd will present the premiere of her new work ‘Here She Comes’, as one of the Arts Council Collection’s 70th Anniversary Commissions.

Here She Comes is part sculpture, part performance, and tells the stories of women from different moments in history, from Boudicca to Montessori, alongside narratives from seminal feminist texts including Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. The performance is free and open to all.

Chetwynd is known for her performances, sculptures and paintings celebrating iconic moments in cultural history in spontaneous and anarchic ways. The works often incorporate handmade props, costumes and sets. She is influenced by performing traditions such as medieval plays, carnivals, communes, drag acts and political demonstrations.

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd was born Alalia  Chetwynd in 1973. In 2006, she changed it to Spartacus. “I was working as a kind of actors’ manager with my performance group in London, and I needed a name that was more robust, to use as a nom de guerre or a kind of shield. It occurred to me that the idea of solidarity evoked by the name Spartacus really worked with the theatre group I ran”. Now known as Marvin Gaye Chetwynd she told the Guardian;” Marvin Gaye was very much a free spirit all his life, but his father, Marvin Sr, was a preacher, cross-dresser and disciplinarian who used to beat him with a belt. At a time when Marvin Jr was very paranoid, he went back to live with his parents. He bought a gun to protect himself and gave it to his father – really putting his head into the lion’s mouth. Later, they had an argument, and his father shot him dead”. Chetwynd was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012 and has created performances and exhibitions across the world in contexts including Studio Voltaire, London; Nottingham Contemporary; CRICOTEKA, Kraków; the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art; and the New Museum, New York. 

An Arts Council Collection 70th Anniversary Commission Performance Thursday 10 March 7–8pm at Southbank Centre’s WOW – Women of the World Festival Free and open to all

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