Florence Peake's FACTUAL ACTUAL: Ensemble tours to Towner this Spring

A major interdisciplinary installation by internationally renowned choreographer & visual artist Florence Peake will conclude its tour at Towner Eastbourne. Peake will present a monumental painting installation in the gallery using her distinctive gestural, movement-marking techniques and a series of special live performances.

FACTUAL ACTUAL: Ensemble is co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London and Towner Eastbourne, in partnership with Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. The performance toured to Fruitmarket in October 2023 and will be presented at Towner Eastbourne in May 2024.

FACTUAL ACTUAL: Ensemble will be showcased across Towner’s ground floor spaces from 9 May to 16 June 2024, with live performances of FACTUAL ACTUAL at the Welcome Building, Eastbourne on Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 June 2024 at 12pm and 2.30pm. Admission is free, tickets required for performances (bookings will open on 15 April). Towner is open Tuesday - Sunday from 10am - 5pm.

A 50m long frieze-style painting, Ensemble, envelops the gallery’s walls and surrounds the viewer at Towner Eastbourne. Respected for her queer approach and non hierarchical process, Peake often works with a multitude of collaborators. This new painting was created through a series of workshops held at Southwark Park Galleries in November 2022. Working with some of Southwark Park Galleries’ regular community groups – over 55s, young people and families – participants were invited to mark the canvas with Peake through their collective movements, which Peake then further developed in her studio over a period of three months.

Peake is developing a special weekend of live performances in Eastbourne on Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 June 2024. Re-interpreting and expanding on a performance at the National Gallery in 2021, FACTUAL ACTUAL presents seven towering paintings on unstretched canvases that levitate above a gloss dance floor. The canvases will be draped like carcasses, waiting to be animated. Six dancers using a rig and pulley system will hoist, lower, collapse, fold and drag the paintings throughout the performances. Shifting between flat and sculptural forms, the paintings create a cacophony of sound, a sea-like sonic soundscape live in the gallery.

Known for her often radical and joyfully irreverent work, Peake’s exhibition will interrogate what a painting can be, resisting a classical tradition and the idea of the white cube space as the static frame. Painting is brought vividly to life through the physical movement of the body and its chaotic relationship to material objects.

‘My performance practice will often take the methodologies, gestures and actions of artmaking as a subject and material for the generation of the performance work. With FACTUAL ACTUAL: Ensemble I want to take some of this thinking in relation to the actions behind the surface of painting.’ – Florence Peake

This touring commission is made possible with thanks to Arts Council England, Cockayne - Grants for the Arts and The London Community Foundation, The Paul and Louise Cooke Endowment and Ada’s Circle.

This exhibition is sponsored by Harlequin Floors.

Development supported by Somerset House Studios, La Becque Résidence d’artistes and Wainsgate Dances.