Performance-Lecture (Festival)

Harold Offeh will present a performance lecture whilst in a reclining or lounging pose. The lecture will explore the history, cultural context, power dynamics and politics of adopting this pose. Drawing on the structure and conventions of ancient Greek Symposium as described by Plato, the audience will be invited to recline and lounge on matts and cushions.

The Lounging Lecture takes as its starting point Harold Offeh’s ongoing research into the politics of representation and posing the body. Over a number of years Offeh has used images of popular Black male singers like Luther Vandross, Teddy Prendergast, Lionel Ritchie and Billy Ocean. Each singer adopted a reclining or lounging pose on their album covers released in the mid 1980s. Through performative re-enactment Offeh has explored how these poses by black men contribute to conversations and thinking about the representation of othered or marginalised subjectivities and bodies. In order to challenge the patriarchal model of the symposium that excluded women and the enslaved, Offeh wants to recruit a diverse set of participants.

Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. He has exhibited widely including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark.

He studied Critical Fine Art Practice and completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. He lives in Cambridge and works in London. He is currently the Head of Programme in MA Contemporary Art Practice and a visiting lecturer in MA Print at the Royal College of Art

The event is part of the festival "Horizontal – Practices and Politics of Lying Down", taking place on 12 and 13 September at the Berlin Museum of Medical History. The festival is supported by the Stiftung Charité through a Science x Media Tandem and by the British Council. Information on accessibility can be found here.