'Activate' Quilla Constance Performance Art Workshop

Quilla Constance leads a performance art workshop at New Art Exchange on Saturday 16 January 2027, from 3pm to 6pm. It's called Activate, and it's the live closing of her solo show Activating Intersections, which she describes as her most ambitious presentation to date. The exhibition is built around a series of monumental oil paintings that contest the colonial interiors of British stately homes.

During the workshop, you'll help dismantle her costume installation The Grenadiers: New Regiment 2026, put on the garments, and perform in them. From there, the work moves out of the gallery and into the streets of Nottingham. It's a hands-on way of taking the show from the walls of the New Art Exchange and out into the city.

Constance, who also goes by QC, is a British interdisciplinary artist of Black Jamaican and White British heritage. She works across live performance, painting, costume, photography and music video, staging her work in galleries, lecture halls, theatres, clubs, on the street and on television. Drawing on a working-class Birmingham upbringing and her time at The Ruskin, University of Oxford, she reworks the categories that often marginalise BAME, female, LGBTQ+ and working-class identities, mixing anarcho-punk feminism, carnivalesque play and absurdist humour. The practice is supported by New Art Exchange and Arts Council England.

Activate runs from 3pm to 6pm on Saturday 16 January at New Art Exchange, 39-41 Gregory Boulevard, Nottingham NG7 6BE. It's free to attend.