Come and move your body until the early hours at the Uncensored Party. With performances from Bishop Black, Marnie Scarlet and Becky O'Brien.

Read the Run-Riot Interview with Lidia Ravviso, Artistic Director, UNCENSORED Festival.

This is an event for all, so come, let's celebrate ourselves and one another, party and dance, catch performances and sway to the Uncensored selection of DJs.

Performances:

Bishop Black: Eight Swords
23:00
This card is typically known in Tarots as the one of restriction and interference. Swords are a suit in the deck that relate to the mind and mentality, logic and thinking. Bishop‘s performance uses this theme to address the restrictions and interferences that sex workers experience due to laws like FOSTA-SESTA or the Age Verification Act, the prevailing whorephobia and the policing of their bodies in social media. The piece addresses the idea of victimisation, stigma and rescue mentality, through metamorphosis, crisis and catharsis.

Bishop Black is a Berlin-based sex worker, porn performer and performance artist, originally from London. Bishop has been a prominent member of the queer alternative porn scene for more than five years and has been working in commercial porn on and off since his first film at the age of 23. Bishop is interested in sexual expression and fluidity, confronting the stereotypes that operate within pornography and exploring his own identity as a queer black man. In his neo-burlesque cabaret performances, Bishop plays with gender roles and expectations using the stage as a cathartic outlet where ritual, sex, sensuality and absurdity come together to challenge political structures - and make a few people go WTF.

Marnie Scarlet: Total Banker
01:00 - 01:30
Scarlet brings her fetish cabaret performance to the Uncensored stage. Do bankers wank? Scarlet wonders in her signature uncanny and queer style, exploring the relationship between masculinity, today’s economy and the nature of finance capitalism. Total Banker is a genderfuck performance with all the elements that characterise Scarlet’s work: absurd and dark but at the same time flamboyant, pop and unapologetically sexy.

Marnie Scarlet is a unique multimedia artist, creating bold and often unclassifiable work that spans from performances and wearable art to fine art pieces. Her preferred medium is latex but she also uses recycled items and fabrics in her shows, such as hypodermic needles, used make-up wipes and ring pulls from soda cans. Part of Scarlet’s practice consists of taking self-portraits of herself in her trademark masks and colourful, surreal outfits, against a sombre backdrop. Her work is strongly influenced by feminism, surrealism, absurdism and pop art.

Scarlet explores the grotesque and the distorted, using her body as a means that blurs the outlines of gender and sexuality as well as the boundaries between different art forms and traditions. Scarlet is part of Art Society Soho and has displayed her work at Cultivate, StopJectify, Modern Panic, BSMT Space gallery, Sweet Art exhibitions, and She and Game Face; most recently she has had a solo exhibition at ITS clubhouse in Mayfair and has had two of her pieces featured at Turner Contemporary for POW. She is a renowned artist of the UK fetish performance scene, having performed in numerous fetish events in the UK and internationally.

Becky O'Brien: No Humans Involved
22:00
O'Brien presents No Humans Involved. A performance based on the criminalisation of sex work and its often fatal implications for the people providing it.

The sentence ‘No Humans Involved’ was reputed to be in use during the 1980s by the police in L.A when referring to the murders of prostitutes, gang members and drugs addicts –people that constitute society’s less desirable members, whose bodies were dehumanised and lives not grievable.

Nowadays, the risks that prostitutes and other sex workers face have been extended to the digital sphere due to laws like FOSTA/SESTA that take away the possibility to advertise services or screen people over the internet. No Humans Involved will explore the dangers sex workers face from police, clients, and the general public when they are silenced, censored, and unable to exercise their job within a legal, safe context.

Originally from Ireland, Becky O’Brien is a London-based choreographer and dance artist. Her practice varies from body-based performance art to choreographed dance work around the themes of gender, identity and sexuality, always with a queer/feminist approach. Becky uses her body as a political force to question the construction of her own identity and investigate where her female body lies in relation to art and to society.

O’Brien is interested in new online communities and in the possibilities that emerge when real-time technologies and social media are brought together with live physical performance. Her work on cam sites approaches theinternet as a medium that gives the opportunity to perform to new audiences as well as explore the performativity of these online cultures, their new languages, sexualities and codes of humour. Bringing the public into private and the private into public, she focuses on how the internet effects our desires and changes the way we interact socially and sexually with others.