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'Fossils’ is a short play in three acts by Pil and Galia Kollectiv. The play will be staged on the following dates:

23 May 2025, Friday 7:30pm
24 May 2025, Saturday 7:30pm
31 May 2025, Saturday 7:30pm
1 June 2025, Sunday 7:30pm

Booking is essential due to limited capacity.
Tickets are free through Eventbrite, here.

‘Fossils’ maps the interlinked logics of extraction at work in ecological collapse and the exploitation of human capital across three short live vignettes. It seeks to challenge both the fatalism of seeing capitalism as a force of nature and the vitalism of imagining nature without humans. The monologue of a decaying skeleton attempting to unionise his undead comrades reflects on class (de)composition. Two decoy trees, echoing the arboreal observation posts of the first world war, reflect on the way humans project meaning onto their natural environment. A many-headed oil spill mediates these perspectives: it is legion, a multitude at once demonic and pathetic, declaiming market values and anticipating their apocalyptic end. Together, these scenes from the near future explore the ways in which value extraction is intensified as new sources of growth become scarce. They examine the relationship between acting and actants, between theatre as a space for representation and performance as a site of action. Deploying Brechtian performance strategies, they stage a demand for collectivity and solidarity in a diminished public sphere.

Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London-based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their work interrogates the organisation of labour and the manifestations of ideology in late capitalism. They have had solo shows at Centre Clark, Montreal, Te Tuhi Center for the Arts, New Zealand and The Showroom Gallery, London. They are the authors of Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and Sound Strategies: Music as Ideological Apparatus (Strange Attractor | MIT, 2025). They work as lecturers in Art at University of the Arts London, the University of Reading and the Royal College of Art.

Featuring:
Casper Dillen
Anouska Manion
Allan Struthers
Eleanor Tennyson
Kerttuli Uusimies
and Frank Wasser as Mr. Skeleton

Live music by Will Fraser

Fossils has been made possible with kind support from the UAL Staff Research Fund.

Kasper Kovitz - The Lessons

Kovitz's art constantly redefines the boundaries. In The Lessons, he offers not only insight into his method, but also a profound meditation on the fundamental principles and mysteries of art making. The Lessons documents a series of paintings inspired by the dynamics of art education and the artist's creative process. Kovitz takes on the roles of thirty-four fictional art students who are asked to visualize concepts from a spiritual encyclopedia, beginning with standardized lesson sheets. These six black and white line drawings depict themes of art education, historical phenomena, and reactions to art, such as iconoclasm and appreciation. The result explores the tension between the systematic and the personal, as well as the role of imagination and visualization in our lives and in the production of art. Kovitz's works blend genres, and several paintings in this series have a deliberately unfinished quality that emphasizes the artwork as a residue of action and the artist's eternal question, “When is a work finished?”. Understanding art education as both method and metaphor, the book presents the process as a dialog between systematic approaches and the unpredictable emergence of expression. The underlying lesson sheets, reminiscent of pages in a coloring book, anchor the project, while the overpainting adds spontaneity. These layers - structured and impulsive - create a poetic tension and embody Kovitz's navigation between discipline and freedom. With its conceptual depth and experimentation, and texts by Chris Kraus, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, and Matthew Poole, it is an important contribution to contemporary art discourse.