Vulnerability

 Chen Zhen

Working with children from the favelas of Salvador, he used candles which in China symbolise the life of an individual and in Brazil are used in Candomblé religious ceremonies, to construct houses based on different local styles of architecture.

Art of Change: News Directions from China

Opera Magic Avec le Diable

"Heaven, inspire me!"

But devil in disguise is much more inspiring in this Faustian Gothic horror tale of the battle between good and evil.

Meyerbeer: Robert le Diable

libretto

A Night in the Opera

Royal Opera House

Poetic Clarity in Babylon

Mount Tamalpais, California

"You trust colours and your shapes, your gestures. You trust that something beyond that will come through even if you don't know exactly what."

Etel Adnan

Etel Adnan & Gavin Bryars

Festive Flowers

Life Tale

We are in Life's prison but we dream of Heaven...

Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim's Progress

ENO

Wild Things

"Max the king of all wild things was lonely

and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all."

Where the Wild Things Are

Say out loud your desire, get experienced and you'll get it,

while your enemies disappear. 

Higglety Pigglety Pop

Barbican

Maurice Sendak - Oliver Knussen

The Vivisector

Broken Dolls:

dismembered and reconstructed bodies,

as a collective interest in transgressive figurative form:

Cindy Sherman

"Le temps extatique ne peut se trouver que dans la vision des choses que le hasard puéril fait brusquement survenir: cadavres, nudités, explosions, sang répandu, abimes, éclat du soleil et du tonnerre."

Georges Bataille
La littérature et le mal

Offenbach: The Doll Song

Talking Walls

Dance Macabre

Dance of Death unites all, while we dance along with the dead to the grave.

Dance Macabre

Wellcome Collection

Saint Saens

Eros and Thanatos

People's strange attraction to things at the outer limits of life and death, sexuality and pain:

the eternal conflict at the centre of human civilisation:

the instincts toward life (Eros) and toward destruction (Thanatos).

Freud

Wellcome Collection

Balint Zsako

Hands

British Museum

Egyptian death and afterlife: mummies

Nightingale

"A nightingale, the nearest one of a band which day and night offered themselves up in song around their well-stocked nests, drowned all the other voices, and Michel began to follow the pattern of the arabesque he was singing, waiting for the return of the long identical notes, each one reinforcing the other. He noted the "tz-tz-tz", which he compared to the sound of rings slipping down over a copper rod, the "coti-coti-coti" repeated as many as twenty times without a rest or a pause for breath... The waxing moon filled the long uncurtained window with powdery blue light, while the pink glow from the lamp reached the nearest stars on the syrings... In the silent countryside the loud-voiced nightingale was embarking once more on his night of trills, full fluted notes, variations of infinite range and isolated sounds which imitated the fallen pearl of some amorous toad." 

Colette: Duo

Balint Zsako

Stravinsky: Nightingale

Crisis

"...catching the midday sunshine that was starry with floating dust... a bunch of purple orchids stood in the thick little troughlike vase in front of her... the light from it was reflected onto her face, disturbing the grey-green colour of her eyes, which he used to compare to willow leaves.

A springtime upsurge of new leaves, unpruned shoots and long rose suckers, flushed by the apoplectic sap, brought the neglected groups of shrubs closer... on the poplars the gold and bronze of the new leaves still wrongfully occupied the place of the green. A crabapple tree, its white petals lined with bright red, had defeated the somewhat sickly Judas tree, and the syringas, in their attempt to escape the destructive shade of the shiny aucubas, extended their slender branches and their butter-white stars through the broad grasping leaves, which were mottled like snakes."

Colette: Duo

Old Soviet Heroes

 Bear

Aurora

Red Flag

Study, Son!

Komar & Melamid, Alexander Kosolapov

Saatchi

Fading Memory

Janis Avotins

Saatchi

New Russian Heroes

of the

Criminal Government

Gosha Ostretsov

Saatchi