Lily McMenamy + Bernardino Femminielli
Program
- 8:00 p.m.: Lily McMenamy presents the performance "A Hole is a Hole"
- 8:45 p.m.: Bernardino Femminielli presents the concert pot-pourri
In resonance with Mike Kelley’s exhibition Ghost and Spirit, the Bourse de Commerce has curated a programme of concerts and performances that echo Mike Kelley's work. This programme draws on his influences, close collaborators, and a generation of musicians and performers who have been inspired by his burlesque musical explorations.
The artist Lily McMenamy will premiere her latest solo theatre piece “A Hole is a Hole”. The piece presents audiences with the construction of a female performer as a metamorphosing and multiplying vessel. Inviting viewers into a cyclical psychic odyssey, her swarm of personae traverse the wound from the Isle of Seen towards the sublime and unsightly. The piece asks us who or what is subject to our aesthetic and erotic drives, when the relations between artist and model, or monster and maker, are mutated beyond recognition.
Lily McMenamy is an artist and model born in 1994 in the United States. She holds a diploma in physical theatre from L'École Jacques Lecoq and a Masters in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London. In her solo theatre works, McMenamy appropriates and transforms languages, archetypes, and gestures in order to disarticulate the performance of marketplace femininity and to celebrate the grotesque as a vehicle for freedom. Her current research is focused on the development of an embodied theory of modelling, as well as the dramaturgy, histories, and dissemination of solo performance. McMenamy’s work has been presented at the Serpentine Gallery, Cabinet Gallery, Schinkel Pavillon, KW Berlin, and the Volksbühne Berlin, where she was a resident artist in 2018. Her writings have been featured in CURA magazine and she is a regular contributor to Marfa Journal. She was recently appointed an associate artist at London Performance Studios (2024–2025).
Bernardino Femminielli 's work is an amalgam of music, performance, poetry, and film, all in the guise of a hypersexual, nostalgic provocation. From French anti-chanson to brutal italo-disco, from mutant industrial music to armoured cosmic drone, his sonic undertakings are the image of his multiple alter egos in a myriad of mysticism, transgression, danger, and pleasure. Much of his poetry and lyrical subconscious is arranged using the cut-up technique and composed like transgressive works of fiction. The whole blends learned and popular music, ballads and complaints in a joyous fusion of revue and cabaret.
Like a snake charmer subduing his cobra, Bernardino Femminielli is performing "pot pourri" at the Bourse de Commerce, a seductive and experimental concert that perfectly transcribes the beautiful, the bizarre, and the baroque, with the addition of a series of improvised talk-overs. He is accompanied on stage by the musicians Paul Prier, Vincent Taeger, Julien Gasc, Adrien Belkout, Kristian Emdal, and Jakob Emil Pedersen.
In resonance with Mike Kelley’s exhibition Ghost and Spirit, the Bourse de Commerce has curated a programme of concerts and performances:
- On 14 September, American artist Will Benedict presents the musical performance Pandemonium
- On 14 October, a concert by the Japanese group Marginal Consort
- On 15 October, a concert by the American trio Dick Slessig Combo
- On 20 October, a concert by Sun Ra Arkestra and by American musician KESSWA, with an introductory lecture by French journalist Joseph Ghosn
- On 21 October, Loris Gréaud and Lee Ranaldo present Cortical: Soundtrack for a Monograph
- On 16 February, on the occasion of the closing of this exhibition, the Bourse de Commerce and New York label Blank Forms are hosting a final evening of performances that combine poetry, noise, and extreme rock music with John Sinclair, Junko, Cannibal, Lizzi Bougatsos & Marc Edwards