Up Late Friday: Common Salt – Performance Art

POSTPONED
Please see our Coronavirus page for more details

Join us on the last Friday of every month from 5-9pm to experience the Museum free after-hours (Grayson Perry exhibition is ticketed). Immerse yourself in an eclectic programme of pop-up talks, art demos, installations, performances, DJ-sets and cocktails.

Garden Cafe serving drinks until 8.45pm

Common Salt Performances at 5pm and 7.30pm (Please note: seating is limited. Pre-bookable tickets are available from Eventbrite A limited number of seated tickets will be released on the night)

Common Salt is a 70-minute performance around a table – a ‘show and tell’. It explores the colonial, geographical history of England and India taking an expansive and emotional time-travel, from the first Enclosure Act and the start of the East India Company in the 1600s, to 21st century narratives of trade, race and culture. Common Salt is a reckoning that exposes the interconnectedness between history and global power, artefact and trade, race and memory.Please note: Performances of Common Salt are free, but seats are limited so booking on the night is advised.

“Beautiful, intriguing and mesmerising performance unpicking the layered entanglements of…the East India Company.”

“one of the most thought-provoking artistic encounters I’ve had in a long time.”

Leading the audience through a maze of historical connections, artists Sue Palmer and Sheila Ghelani activate insights into our shared past. Common Salt lays out a ‘home museum’ of objects and stories on the surface of the ‘nature table’; the Great Hedge of India, the naturalist Eliza Brightwen, global trade routes, species and money, borders and collections – all accompanied by sung laments and a Shruti box. As we attempt to cut our ties with Europe, there is a current and keen public interest in hidden history, in colonial empire and global trade. We are being forced to re-examine our place, our relations – exactly the territory that Common Salt mines.