Jane Frances Dunlop and Mira Loew

put into the movement of things: navigations & positions for the Whitworth is a performance about the ways we are forever exchanging ideas. Forever navigating and positioning ourselves in spaces, choosing to take space where there wasn’t any and arrange spaces that forgot to make room. It is a performance about the labour of caring for each other’s presences as we take space or leave it. It is about a preference to quietly trespass. Histories move in ways that forget to announce themselves. Certain fabrics are made, seeming totalities constructed out of different lines.

JFD navigates the Whitworth Gallery. It is before the performance, she is there to make something of her navigations of the space and leave it behind for ML. ML collects them when she arrives to perform. She is herself: a woman dressed in black and her camera moving through the gallery as she positions herself in relation to the space, in relation to prior navigations of the space.

Two particular bodies put their history and practice of relation in this museum, this gallery. In front of faces of varying interest and importance (these things to do necessarily line up), in front of the repeating patterns of domestic decorations that become art, in front of conflicts that are located in a less complicated past (but for whom). This performance is an exploration into histories, counter-histories, their accumulations. It is one particular relationship, our particular relationship, inside the assembled parts of a history of art-making that does and does not include bodies like ours, written by people like us and unlike us. About histories that do include us, but forget others.