Fragment Mouth: Performance documentation

This selection of photographic documentation comes from a series of live performance art works being developed as a key component to my PhD research, investigating representations of perpetrators in performance art fromIreland. The performance works are created through a range of methods common to the practices of performanceart, including durational, contextual, improvisationaland material processes.

The images are presented here as extractsand not intendedto offer a full accountof live work; rather to signal certain embodied and representationalqualities inherent in performance artactions addressing atrocity and resulting traumas, including perpetrator trauma.Centralising the artistsbody and presence,the research examinesthe artist's own position in relation to perpetration - particularly when proposingperpetration as a broad spectrum of actions and proximities in relationto violence, conflictand abuse; for example, directand indirect perpetration,silence as a form of complicity and identity as a form of implication.

A central tenet of the burgeoning field of perpetrator studies isa recognition of the necessity toacknowledge experiences and identities of perpetrators, as well as victims, to better understand and respond to violence, conflictand abuse. This practicebased research aims to identify how performance art can contribute to sustainable responses to atrocity, and inso doing also speaks to wider research across a range of relevant areas, including memory,violence, ethics, and trauma.