About

The work of hancock & kelly live is an aesthetic tour-de-forces that transforms the repulsive into the beautiful.
Jennie Klein, Dance Theatre Journal

hancock & kelly is the collaborative project of artists Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly. Since 2001, they have collaborated on a series of works questioning and provoking the gaps between subjects.

Through an internationally acclaimed body of work spanning performance, choreography, video, photography, installation, and text, they have continually asked questions of where the limits of the body may be drawn, and separated from the knowledge and questions with which they are enmeshed.

Issues of materiality, value, and embodied knowledge have been pivotal to the complex critical and aesthetic dialogues they undertake. Their practice moves fluidly between 'live' and 'object-based' work, and the resulting pieces have been a series of visceral and queer encounters, both moving and spectacular.

hancock & kelly have performed and exhibited at venues and events such as the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Russia (2015), the National Review of Live Art, UK (2005, 2007, 2009), the SPILL festival, UK (2007), Performance Space, Australia (2007), Museu de Évora, Portugal (2009), and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Germany (2010).


Biographies

Richard Hancock
Working with diverse forms of image-making, including movement, photography, video, and text, Richard Hancock performs embodied investigations and gestural interventions into disciplines of philosophy, politics, and pedagogy.

His current research project, „An Empire“, is a collaboration with Litsa Kiousi (GR/DE). Departing from European identity and its complexities, the artists endeavour to explore the histories, atrocities, presents and futures of empire building. Together they ask how these practices may be identified, articulated, subverted and resisted.
(w) www.richardhancock.info

Traci Kelly
Traci Kelly's practice slips and knots between performance, visual and textual languages. Her poetic and visceral imagery opens up a space for doubt and the questions the status of the body. The spacings between touch and untouch in performance exchanges are utilised to consider subject invention. Current activity revolves around skin as a site of encounter and writing.

Kelly has a doctorate from the University of Reading gained with a project investigating intersubjectivity and collaboration in live art practice. 2014 saw the publication of her book Feeling It For You Perspective with Seers in Residence, an innovative model for a decentralised approach to research dynamics, published by Nottingham Trent University.

With hancock & kelly, and also solo, Kelly presents work internationally and has performed and exhibited in Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and the Americas.
(w) www.tracikelly.co.uk

 

Traci Kelly and Richard Hancock, Herdla, NO (2011) Photo credit: Nisa Ojalvo

Traci Kelly and Richard Hancock, Herdla, NO (2011)
Photo credit: Nisa Ojalvo