About
Tuesday 25 November 2025 - Sunday 30 November 2025
10:00 am - 4:30 pm
Performance Art Land (PAL) 2025 is an IVAE (International Visual Arts Exchange) project, specifically curated and produced for a chosen region in Wales, by engaging with its landscape, heritage and culture, for its local communities and audiences.
Through the PAL, we support the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary communication through creative practices, to promote site-specificity and site-sustainability and stage the global situations of climate emergency and environmental instability through art practices, and within our artistic and curatorial innovations.
PAL 2025 invites artists from Wales, Japan and China – Angela Davies, Tsubasa Kato, Li Binyuan and Anushiye Yarnell – to conduct performance art on natural and heritage sites. These newly commissioned works will be thereafter disseminated through screening events at international institutions, including Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff) in October 2025, Fotografiska Museum Shanghai (Shanghai) and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery (Swansea) in November 2025, and Mori Art Museum (Tokyo) and Busan Art Museum (Busan) in 2026.
IVAE
IVAE (International Visual Arts Exchange) is a UK-based non-profit art organisation. It acts as a unique bridge to support and celebrate cross-cultural exchanges between the East and West in the context of contemporary art. It is a laboratory to innovate curatorial strategies and diverse methods for artistic practices through acknowledgement of cultural differences, perspectives of understandings, and approaches in translation.
Angela Davies (b. 1977, Wales)
Moon Rising, 2025
Site-specific performance, Porth Ysgaden (herring harbour) and Porth y Cychod and Ty’n Tywyn beach, Llanbedrog, Wales. Single-channel video, 14 minutes and 22 seconds.
With themes of return and renewal, hope and regeneration, Moon Rising considers our place within and outside of time. Intertidal rhythms move with the body of the performer, surges of life bound by celestial influence, speaking of our shared connection to the sea through rhythms and cycles: of breath, of fertility, of the emergence of life and death. The work engages in a material and symbolic relationship with salt, which holds the power to preserve, heal and transform, present in both the body of the performer, and in the waters of the Llŷn Peninsula, Wales.
Reflecting on the etymology of place, the work emerges from stories of the historic labour of this region – including past fishing practices in Porth Ysgaden (herring harbour), Porth Cychod (boat harbour) and salt smuggling at Ty’n Tywyn (in or on seashore). The continued practice of fishing for herring in the lead up to a full moon, is known locally as moon rising.
The choreography is informed by the contrasting disciplines of Ballet, where the core principles of balance, coordination, and poise are fundamental, and Butoh, embodying the elemental, resistance to tradition, and cycles of transformation. A collection of paleo-tidal source data from Bangor University drives the sound composition, with vocals by Emma Daman Thomas, who performs the 18th century Welsh Folk song Tra Bo Dŵr Y Môr Yn Hallt (While There’s Salt Within The Sea).
Bringing the struggle of aquatic life in the context of climate collapse into dialogue with the struggle of feminine bodies throughout history, the work asks what we can learn from these watery relations and primordial intra-connections (Karan Barad).
Performed by: Melissa Pasut, Directed + Produced by Angela Davies, Vocals by Emma Daman Thomas, Sound Design: Angela Davies
Cinematographer: Jamie Quantrill, Underwater filming by Angela Davies, Edited by Mark Eaglen + Angela Davies
Li Binyuan (b. 1985, China)
The Progress of Stones, 2025.
Site-specific performance, Castell Dinas Brân, Llangollen, Wales, 2025. Single-channel video, 14 minutes and 45 seconds.
As one of the oldest castles in Wales, Castell Dinas Brân is believed to have been built in the late thirteenth century. It served as a strategic fortress during a time of intense conflict with the English until being destroyed in 1277. The same time in China marks the final stage of Han resistance against the Mongol invasion, leading to the fall of the Southern Song dynasty in 1279. Li Binyuan collected four pieces of heavy rock along the mountain path, bound them respectively to both of his legs and forearms, and crawled through the castle ruins. Those few hundred metres of expedition construct an arduous moment in which fragility contrasts with permanence, and the ephemeral merges with the enduring. What Li strove to carry is not just a collection of randomly found stones, but perhaps the missing fragments of the ruins, a revived past, or a reference point to envision our future. In Li’s performance, Castell Dinas Brân embodies the evolution of a nation and the spirit of its resilience, not necessarily any specific one, but rather, a shared human nation, whether in the East or the West in this temporary world.
Li Binyuan was born in Yongzhou, Hunan Province,China in 1985,and graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. Now he lives and works in Berlin and Yongzhou. Li explores physicality, substance, environment, conceptual cognition, and social values through physical actions, video works, and performances, which serve as the portal to the social fabric of everyday society.
Tsubasa Kato (b. 1984, Japan)
O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau / May the Language Endure for Ever, 2025.
Site-specific performance, Sarn Helen, Brecon, Wales. Single-channel video, 8 minutes and 37 seconds.
Tsubasa Kato invites four Welsh musicians to play the national anthem of Wales with a range of traditional instruments, include harp, crwth, tabwrdd, and pibgorn. The performance was site-specifically produced in a mountainous landscape in Wales, around the legendary megalith Maen Llia. When these players are tied together by ropes within a calculated distance, the movement of one individual will create a tension between each other – a tension that can intrude their playing of instruments. Being connected and controlled with and by ropes, the usual musical performance has been turned into unfamiliar forms of bodily expression. Each performer’s intended motion – to play and sing the right note, or to hit the right beat – may be restricted unexpectedly by a fellow team member, and at the same time, it can unintentionally become an obstacle for the others. The piercing sound of the hornpipe, the rustic, buzzy resonance of the lyre, crystalline tones of the harp and the angelic voice of the singer strive to come together to form the song – Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers). Through the mechanisms of performance, it is interrupted and fragmented, suppressed and distorted, yet, unified in sprit, and lifted by their collective power.
Tsubasa Kato is a Japanese contemporary artist who produces video, photographic, and other works involving performances in which multiple participants are prompted to engage in collaboration. He is highly acclaimed for the numerous studies and projects he has conducted around the globe. His projects and installations challenge the viewer to reconceive their sense of distance, resilience, balance, and connection between individuals.
Anushiye Yarnell (b. 1976, Wales)
Our Lady Blodeuwedd
(the nine waves), 2025.
Site-specific performance on multiple sites including Dyffryn Ardudwy and Cors y Gedol and Tomen y Mur in Wales. Single-channel video, 16 minutes.
Different myths arise from different cultures; they travel and evolve through time and space. As a second-generation migrant from Sri Lanka, Anushiye Yarnell finds this land to be both home and foreign. Through her interdisciplinary performance, she reinterprets the Welsh tale Blodeuwedd – the love story of a hybrid creature, and connects fantasy and our everyday reality. Multiple locations in Wales chosen to stage this performance were carefully considered as one single theatrical site. The artist is dressed in white, wearing a flowered mask that simultaneously reveals and conceals the different aspects of the feminine archetype, a figure who seems to be hesitant or anxious, unwilling or determined, performing human dilemmas of freedom and demarcation, desire and temperance, innocence and sensuality. In addition to the bodily movements, the female voice in the background, reading the poetic verses adds an indispensable dimension of the visual narrative. These artistic reflections are expressed through her dreamlike approach, and delivered in an intimate manner. Rooted in the Welsh context, Yarnell revisits the notions of romance, love and morality through the interaction between body and site, exploring something sorrowful yet precious, illusory yet truthful, and local yet internationally recognisable.
Anushiye Yarnell is an interdisciplinary performance artist whose work spans movement, sound, voice, text, drawing, participation and alternative pedagogies. Her work congregates in symbiotic, anti-segregative ways of being. She examines the intersections of dream and fantasy realms with ordinary life to find connections between day-to-day experiences of the world and anthropological, philosophical, poetic, and artistic frameworks. She works with tactile presence, reviving sensual intelligence through temporal, ongoing bodies-biographies-mythologies, attempting regeneration despite the rifts and ruptures imposed by colonial civilisations.