Live with Zadie Xa and Amy Budd

20 May 2020

Artist Zadie Xa speaks about her performance practice, including her approach to collaboration and audiences with Amy Budd, Curator, Projects and Exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford.

Live is a series of online conversations, co-hosted by us and Performance Exchange in 2020. The webcast talks feature artists, curators and other cultural practitioners engaged in live work.As organisations both being dedicated to performance and event-based art practices, this collaboration is born from the need to keep supporting these practices, perhaps now more urgently than ever. In creating this platform together, we want to share artistic projects and ideas with our audiences, whilst thinking through different cultural infrastructure that works for performance in times of social isolation.

Roberts Institute of Art

Zadie Xa, Grandmother Mago, 2019. Performance part of Meetings on Art, 58th Venice Biennale, 2019.

Courtesy the artist and Delfina Foundation. Photo: Riccardo Banfi

Zadie Xa

Zadie Xa was born and raised in Vancouver on the unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and is now based in London, UK. Her work is informed by her experiences within the Korean diaspora, as well as the environmental and cultural context of the Pacific Northwest. Her work often features garments, including cloaks and masks, used for live performance and within installation or moving image. Throughout her practice, Xa uses water and marine ecologies as metaphors for exploring the unknown, whilst also alluding to abstract notions of homeland.

Xa’s practice is highly collaborative, and she has developed ongoing exchanges with dancers, musicians and actors. Since 2006, Xa has worked closely with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo. Together they have staged live performance, moving image, installations and painting.

Zadie earned an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2014 and a BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2007.

Performance Exchange

Performance Exchange is a dispersed performance project across commercial galleries in London, some of which will also be hosting performances from international galleries in July 2020.

Highlighting the work done by commercial galleries to support multi-disciplinary and performance practice, Performance Exchange will create new forms of support for collecting performance art through a three day programme of presentations combined with detailed acquisition information for each work on an innovative digital platform.



Amy Budd

Amy Budd is a curator and writer based in London. She was Associate Curator of Art Night in 2019 and is co-organiser of the artist-run space Piper Keys, London. She was Exhibitions Organiser and Deputy Director at Raven Row and has previously held curatorial roles at Chisenhale Gallery, OUTPOST Gallery and the ICA and has published writing in Art Monthly, Frieze, Mousse, Afterall, This is Tomorrow and Kaleidoscope. She is co-founder and co-editor of the peer-led publication A-or-ist, and co-edited with Dr Amy Tobin and Naomi Pearce the publication '14 Radnor Terrace: A Woman’s Place' for the exhibition 56 Artillery Lane at Raven Row in 2017.

Her text 'On Lunar Thinking' was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2019. Forthcoming projects include curated events for the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery and an archival display at Arnolfini, Bristol in September 2019.