The QUAD in Derby currently shows a retrospective of the late British artist Ian Breakwell.
Breakwell presented a number of performance pieces in Wales in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including UNWORD 4 at the Swansea University Arts Festival in 1970. A film documentation of the seminal UNWORD series, made with film-maker Mike Leggett, is on show at the QUAD.
Ian Breakwell: The Elusive State of Happiness
QUAD Gallery, Corridors and Digital Screens
13th February 2010 – 18th April 2010
http://www.derbyquad.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/ian-breakwell
For information on UNWORD 4 go to:
http://www.performance-wales.org/english/archive/1970/1970.htm
Locating the early history of performance art in Wales, 1965-1979 www.performance-wales.org
- It was forty years ago today
- The project aims to 1. compile a comprehensive record of performance art events that were created in Wales between 1965 and 1979, and reveal an important but hitherto neglected aspect of Welsh art history. 2. chart the manner in which performance art as an international artistic movement was negotiated in response to a specific localized cultural context during its formative years in the 1960s and 1970s, and advance our knowledge and understanding of the origins and early developments of this art form. 3. trace the ways in which knowledge of past performance events is transmitted in both documentation and verbal recollections, and examine the evidential potential of documents and testimonials for the construction of performance art histories. 4. make freely available to other researchers in the field not just the analysis of the research findings but the following additional resources: a comprehensive, fully searchable online database of performance art events in Wales 1965–1979, which also indexes the current location of available documentation on these events; and a range of related oral history recordings and transcripts, deposited in key archives in the field.