The Bodies of Knowledge book, edited by Laura Purseglove, is now available. Click here for more information and to purchase.

Bodies of Knowledge ran from 2019-2021 and was a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary project exploring the human body as a site for the production, retention and transformation of knowledge. 

At the heart of the project were three groups of artist-facilitated workshops, each of which brought together people with embodied expertise, arts practitioners and academics. Tara Fatehi Irani, Julia Giese and Kesha Raithatha used Kathak dance and movement as a means of sharing individual, collective and familial memories of Partition, migration; and to explore negotiations of gender. Raju Rage worked with Isaac Scott Briggs and Nat Thorne, using analog black and white photography as a means to rethink photographic representation of trans people away from the cis gaze. Joe Moran worked with Claire Warden and Thomas Dawkins (aka Cara Noir) to explore relations of care, violence and the performance of gender in wrestling and contemporary dance.

Rather than commission a photographer to document the workshops, project producer Laura Purseglove sought alternative forms of documentation which went beyond the straightforwardly representative. Kathak dance was transcribed into annotated Laban notation; the film-maker Sam Williams used video footage of Moran, Warden and Dawkins' workshop to create a new film work; and participants in Rage, Briggs and Marchock's workshops themselves took their own photographs in response to issues discussed. These creative forms of documentation formed the basis of two exhibitions: one bringing the whole project together at Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester in 2019; and a second consisting solely of works from Rage, Briggs and Marchock's workshops at Loughborough University's Martin Hall Gallery in 2021. 

The project has been explored in a book edited by Laura Purseglove, co-published by Radar and the Live Art Development Agency. This features aspects of the documentation alongside conversations with participants and a newly commissioned essay from the interdisciplinary artist-scholar and choreographer Adesola Akinleye.