Monday 20 July 2026, 7.30pm
Para-Phrase is a performance series for works that sit between disciplines and resist a single mode of attention. Curated by Zhuo Mengting, the series brings together artists working across sound, words, voice, body, image, object and action, creating encounters where different practices remain in tension, overlap, interrupt and reshape one another, and unsettling how audiences are invited to look and listen.
This edition features the UK premiere of Diana Lola Posani’s growling performance SCREAM AS IF YOUR ORGANS WERE MADE OF GLASS, the UK premiere of Jamie Man’s live electronics and film projection set WHEN THE RAINBOW BECOMES SKIN, and a new collaboration between Mengting Zhuo and Jiaying Kou.
An evening of feminised, marginal and non-normative forms of voice and presence, with the artists’ bodies producing unstable forms of address through extreme vocal technique, embodied action and noise in electronic and unamplified forms:
— Vibrant matter rising from internal darkness — voice given to a suspended body — signal and meaning lost and found at the threshold —
Trigger warning: the event contains images of flesh-hook suspension and full frontal nudity
Diana Lola Posani (b. 1994) is a sound artist, independent curator and Deep Listening facilitator.
As a performer, she has presented her work at the MADRE museum in Naples, the MAO in Turin and the Hangar Bicocca in Milan.
For years she has been promoting the importance of listening among both music professionals and non-professionals, holding seminars at the Master’s in Performing Arts at the IUAV in Venice, at the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, at the Academies of Fine Arts in Bologna and Marseille, and at the Italian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
As a curator, she founded the AKRIDA sound art festival in 2022, as well as contributing musical events to the programmes of Atelier Casaforte and the MANN Museum in Naples and the Milan Triennale.
The publishing house Timeo has published her translation of Pauline Oliveros’ book Deep Listening – A Composer’s Sound Practice, her translation of Quantum Listening (P. Oliveros), for which she also wrote the afterword, and her translation of Sound Meditations (P. Oliveros), for which she wrote an essay in addition to the translation.
Jamie Man/ 文珮玲 uses the forms of opera, live performance and dark room installations to create works primarily concerned with music and the poetic mystery of the transtopian body.
Mengting Zhuo is an artist based in London, originally from Guangzhou, China. She composes situations with site, sound, body and time, in the forms of performance, participatory installation, and concerts. Often minimalist, subtle and intimate, her work invites the audience to reflect on themes of connection, transmission, contingency and distance.
Recently, she is exploring the politics of listening through a series of happenings predominantly using non-instruments, unwanted noise, found objects and the body.
As a performer and director, she has made encounters with audiences in theatres, galleries and other spaces, including a park, a beach, a karaoke club, a flat, and online. Her work has been presented internationally, including the UK, China, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Jiaying Kou was born in Xi’an, China, and now lives in south-east London. Her work is shaped by the encounters made possible through curation, publishing, performance, and community organising. She is intermittently an editor and translator. She manages the library and curates public programmes at Asymmetry, a non-profit art organisation based in East London. She is a persistent slow walker and a stubborn cook.
