Guest Curated by Lucy Grubb

​​REHEARSING BODIES is an exhibition curated by Lucy Grubb taking over CCA’s bathroom with artworks by Lucie McLaughlin, Ebun Sodipo and Francis Whorrall-Campbell. The exhibition reimagines the WC as a space for remaking, practising and rehearsing. Bringing together collage, drawing, and writing, this exhibition interrogates ideas of spatial justice while exploring how we continuously practise existing through rehearsing movement, reclaiming autonomy, and navigating the politics of visibility.

The starting point for REHEARSING BODIES draws from José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of the stage as a “space of potentiality”, considering how we can rehearse, fail, and practise our future selves. In the context of social and political change, this exhibition aims to highlight how systems have historically denied affordable housing, jobs, and pleasure to marginalised bodies while suggesting ways we might remake ourselves in response.

The works by the artists inhabit the bathroom in fragmented, layered forms, echoing the disjointed, nonlinear experience of queer life and navigating how we approach the city. By drawing parallels between the hidden, transient nature of queer bodies in urban spaces, the works occupy and reimagine the toilet as a site of both visibility and resistance. This space becomes a site where queerness can be pieced together, claimed, and reimagined.

Lucie McLaughlin’s work, ‘quite distant, flat, but surging‘ combines fragments of text and drawing gathered in response to exhibitions visited during one calendar month. Exploring the atmosphere of art spaces and the resonances felt when encountering art, the work questions what comes to the surface during the performance of ‘looking’. Amplifying a sense of observation, lines of writing contribute to the unfolding sounds, dissonances and silences reciprocated between viewer, art, and the site in which they are found.

Ebun Sodipo‘s work reveals how queerness and the ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype intersect across generations through linking work that spans over two decades. The artist links Goldie Williams, a 19th-century American arrested for sex work, with Amanda Seal in 21-st century America. In doing so, Ebun captures defiant expressions between two public-rehearsing bodies that resist and perform disgust, and reveals how a persistent trope can become a powerful act of resistance, binding their strength through repeated performances of defiance.

In ‘Promise of a Better Perversion,’ Francis Whorrall-Campbell engages with transmasc aesthetic theory through the precise imagery of a dart flight. Hand-drawn stills from a 1990s top surgery gif, explores the tradition of representing the human body, using the nude as a ‘ground zero’ subject. The dart’s trajectory embodies the tension between fixed paths and the fluidity of transmasculine expression, reflecting both the resilience and vulnerability in asserting one’s identity – marking a new point of departure in self-representation.

By reframing the toilet as a space of futurity, desire, and bodily resistance, this exhibition challenges the erasure of our rehearsing bodies – walking, running, and remaining unseen. Acknowledging the harsh reality that even today, queer, trans, and marginalised people continue to live in secrecy, continually rehearsing their existence for survival and pursuit of peace.

This project has been supported by Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry~Lononderry, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Derry City & Strabane District Council and Jerwood Foundation.