Sheffield Fringe

Helen Benigson

Helen Carmel Benigson is an artist and rapper who lives and works in London. Her working method is interdisciplinary; recent projects take the form of performance, video installations, printmaking, text, sound, music and collaborating. Her current practice has an emphasis on performance within the space of the screen and the negotiation of identity and body within cyberspace. Her aim is to create highly visceral environments, concerned with current biology / technology and sexy images and sounds. These are played out in psychedelic digital carnivals, which repetitively enact the blurred boundaries between performer, producer and spectator, innate to on-line video sharing and real-life performance.

Benigson’s work has been shown nationally and internationally. She has performed at Frieze Art Fair (2011), and in 2013 was an Associate Artist at LUX. Exhibitions in 2013 included Videonale 14, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Museum, and Meantime Project Space, Cheltenham. Residencies, solo exhibitions and presentations in 2014 include Weightless Utopias, Site Gallery, Sheffield, Late Night Supermarket Shopping Live, Tenderpixel, London (forthcoming) and Breathe Harder, a site-specific performance at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (forthcoming).

The Future Queen of the Screen

The Future Queen of the Screen | UK 2011 | HD

The Future Queen of the Screen is set in the Dead Sea, Peckham and a cyber desert. The story centres on 2 hip-hop girl dancers who engage in real and online dance battles. The girls both ‘practice’ for the dance competition but also perform live, within the narrative of the video. Notions of performance become visually divided into super-slick HD moving image and bad-quality phone video footage, referencing body language and every-day performances and gestures. In a parallel territory, a girl has cheated on her boyfriend and is floating in the Dead Sea.

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