LONDON: The Horse Hospital

Monday 27th March, 2023

6:00pm

Event information

TICKETING INFORMATION: This is a durational performance and capacity in the space is limited. As such, we cannot 100% guarantee entry at a particular time for anyone without a booking, though we would still encourage you to come along as long as you are comfortable potentially being asked to wait a short while for space to free up, if the gallery happens to be full! Those with a ticket for a particular time slot are guaranteed entry within that time slot.

The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin) continues Martin O’Brien’s exploration of mortality, considering the act of ‘waiting’ as a mode of survival.

The coffin is sealed shut; the faint sound of coughing can be heard from inside, ringing out through the night. In another place, a group are meeting. The Last Breath Society gather to breathe together, to mourn their own life and rehearse for the inevitable.

Martin has gathered a society of sick queers, old queens and others thinking about death, to wait together in a room full of coffins. The performance will develop over three hours to explore how we wait for death. This is the second version of the work, with the first taking place over eight days at the ICA in summer 2021. In this version, O’Brien will work with the remnants of the coffins from the original work, in a growing and changing installation.

The work was originally commissioned by Waiting Times, a research project at Birkbeck University and the University of Exeter, exploring the relation between time and care in contemporary thinking about health, illness, and wellbeing. It is being performed again to mark the opening of their end of project conference ‘The Time of Care: A Waiting Times Conference’. Come and join the Last Breath Society and resist the loneliness of decay.

We all know the last breath. It is in our lungs, we haven’t felt it yet. None of us here have felt the air move through our throats for the final time, but we all will. We know what it feels like, somehow, because we know what it is to breathe. In the final moments of life, something known as the death rattle occurs. The person is unable to cough or clear their throats, so mucus builds up. Breathing is transformed. Each breath sounds crackly, wet. Fluids build up in the chest and throat. Then eventually comes the last breath. The final moment of life and consciousness. The lungs empty of all air. There is no final inhale of breath, just an agonising silence. In the end, flesh cannot resist decay.

Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2020, and the ICA (London) in 2021. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. He is writer in residence at Whitechapel Gallery throughout 2023. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency. His work has been featured on BBC radio and Sky Arts television. He is currently senior lecturer in Live Art at Queen Mary University of London.

www.martinobrienart.co.uk