Candida Powell-Williams creates sculptural installations, which function as platforms for performance. Seeking to understand how we construct identity through objects and memory, she merges historical narratives with GIF documentation exploring the cumulative effect of storytelling in the digital age.

For Frieze Live 2017 Candida Powell-Williams premiered Boredom and its Acid Touch, a performance using characters from illuminated medieval marginalia (manuscripts). The performers pause in yoga-like contortions inviting the viewer to photograph them. By changing the costumes and characters daily, the artist builds on her established language of cyclical, repetitive and mesmerising gestures.

The artist reflects our changing relationship to idleness, lived through our phones, and on social media – where this project will eventually be resolved as a series of GIFs, exploring what contemporary marginalia might be. The work also deals with the marginalisation of performance within the context of the art market. Dancers: Joel O’Donoghue, Marta Masiero and Chiara Favaretti

Evening Standard