This Must Be the Place – Cement Fields
Ben Judd: Visualisations to support proposed work for This Must Be the Place. Please click on each image to enlarge it, then click ‘back’ to return to this page.
The Push & the Pull (2022)
The Push & the Pull, participatory durational event (5 hours), 2022 The Push and the Pull was a new site-specific work by Ben Judd, for Whitstable Biennale 2022. Created in partnership with local community groups the new work developed themes of…
The Absolute (2021)
The Absolute enriches the world previously developed for Judd’s exhibition at De Montfort University in 2018. Drawing on Leicester’s rich history, including the 20th century immigration of dispossessed groups, the exhibition explores a fictional lost community, the Welfarers, that once…
The Origin (2019-21)
The Origin is the outcome of Judd’s Stanley Picker Fellowship in Art and Design, Kingston University London. The project culminated with an installation at the gallery, a boat on the River Thames and a series of performances, workshops and…
Nothing Human is Strange to Me (2018)
Nothing Human is Strange to Me, exhibition and performance (30:00 min), 2018 For his fig-futures commission at The Gallery, De Montfort University, Ben Judd presented a performance, costumes, images from the university’s archives, objects based on artefacts excavated locally, and a…
From the Ground to the Sun (2018)
From the Ground to the Sun, participatory site-specific installation (2018) For London’s Art Night 2018, Judd presented a participatory site-specific installation in the heart of an existing community. Five temporary, re-usable domes were built on a public square in Doddington Estate, Battersea….
The Part Versus the Whole (2018)
The Part Versus the Whole, exhibition and performance (25:00 min), 2018 Combining an eclectic mix of materials from the Victoria Gallery and Museum’s collections and archives, including historic magic lantern slides and the archeological photography of John Garstang, with new objects,…
The Natural Order (2017)
The Natural Order, performance (10:00 min), 2017 Five young gymnasts performed a series of movements, shifting from simple to complex, and from individual to group. At the same time, a group of singers sang phrases which shifted from solo to choral. The…
It Grows Like a Strange Flower (2017)
It Grows Like a Strange Flower, participatory durational event (36 hours) and video (45:00 min), 2017 An offsite commission for Bloc Projects, It Grows Like a Strange Flower created a temporary, re-usable geodesic dome (the structure famously reinterpreted by Buckminster Fuller and the utopian…
Stories in the Dark (2016)
Stories in the Dark, 2016, The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Canterbury Stories in the Dark was a co-commission by the Whitstable Biennale and the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. The exhibition focused on the magic lantern, a projection…
Who Shall Separate Us Now? (2016)
Who Shall Separate Us Now? performance and video, 30:00 min, 2016 A commission for Radar / Loughborough University Arts, in a 1,200m2 space with gymnasts and singers. The performance considered the university as an institution that encourages and requires students to…
Apart, We are Together (2015)
Apart, We are Together, performance and video, 30:00 min, 2015 This performance and video, which was part of fig-2 at ICA, London, was a direct development of A Deep and Tenebrous Unity, and employed the ‘pose slide’ genre of magic lantern…
A Deep and Tenebrous Unity (2015)
A Deep and Tenebrous Unity, performance, 25:00 min, 2015 A performance at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, which further explored themes of closeness/distance and revealed/hidden. Performers used text taken from conversations with Icelanders during Judd’s residency in Seyðisfjörður in December 2014. Seyðisfjörður…
Texts and Interviews
2012 Pandora Syperek, Ben Judd: Ethnographies of Modern Magic, or, Am I Imaging This? 2011 Ben Judd and Sidsel Christensen (eds), The Edge of Reason 2010 Dan Smith, New Maps of Heaven, Art Monthly, July/August 2010 Interview with Ben Burbridge…
Vast as the Dark of Night and as the Light of Day (2014-15)
Vast as the Dark of Night and as the Light of Day, performance, 30:00 min, 2014-15 Taking place at sea on an historic Thames sailing barge as part of Whitstable Biennale 2014, this performance formed a temporary, and fragile, community…
We See Nothing Truly Until We Understand It (2014)
We See Nothing Truly Until We Understand It, performance, 40:00 min, 2014 A performance and live broadcast at Flatford Mill in Suffolk (Constable country), in response to an invitation from Field Broadcast: http://fieldbroadcast.org/projects/FB-pressrelease.pdf Performers were on boats on the River Stour….
I Am On Top of the World (2013)
I Am On Top of the World, five-channel video, 21:08 min, 2013 A video shot on an island on a boating lake in Epping Forest, London. Performers, on boats, gradually converge on the island, singing broken chords that are traditionally…
Assemblage (2013)
Assemblage, performance and single-channel video, 15:49 min, 2013 A performance that took place in the bandstand of the Arboretum, Nottingham. Audience members were seated in the dark with a choir, who sang broken chords, increasing in volume as the shutters…
Ensemble (2013)
Ensemble, 2013, 10:18 min A performance that took place during the opening of Ensemble (an exhibition which Judd co-curated with Dave Charlesworth). Singers, embedded in the audience, sang an arpeggio, which increased in tempo and volume. Dancers, also embedded in…
Going into Raptures (2013)
Going into Raptures, 2013, 180:00 min Judd’s performance with the musician Denise Boyd, in response to the work of Traci Kelly When Judd was approached by the artist Traci Kelly to respond to her work he started thinking…
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (2011)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 2011, 45 min A performance produced while on residency at the Wassaic Project, upstate New York. Actors used text from American political speeches, from which political references had been removed, as well as from…
Mysterium (2011)
Mysterium, 2011, 45:00 min A performance at James Taylor Gallery, London, loosely based on the unrealised and unrealisable opera of the same name, by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Influenced by his condition of synaesthesia – the intermingling of different sensory…
The Island of Lost Conceits (2010)
The Island of Lost Conceits, 2010, 30:00 min A performance at La Galleria, New York City, as part of the exhibition To Believe. Actors, embedded in the audience, used text from literary sources that describe an island utopia (Washington Irving’s…
Conversations With the Other Side (2009)
Conversations With the Other Side, 2009, with Sidsel Christensen Conversations With the Other Side was a collaborative performance with Sidsel Christensen. From their study of traditional forms of mediumship, hypnosis and religious rituals, the artists developed a playful and open…
Parallelism (2009)
Parallelism, 2009, 6:37 min Produced at the same time as The Symbol (on residency at the Banff Centre, Canada), Judd invited a psychic to respond to the centre and its site.
Persona Non Grata (2007-08)
Persona Non Grata, 2007-08, One in the Other, London The artists in Persona Non Grata reinvent themselves and adopt different personas as a method for producing work that is rich in narrative, whether true or false. These videos and films…
