Performance Art

Pharmacy is Kat Henry's performance art and durational theatre experimentation lab. It furthers her research into the possibilities of long durational performance art and durational theatre to investigate time and temporality. 

Pharmacy creates temporal experiments that put the mind and body into extreme and divergent physical circumstances that interrupt colonised rhythms. 

Pharmacy seeks to partner with the fields of philosophy, psychology, chronobiology, and architecture and design to create public, structural spaces that allow for the suspension of everyday life and test alternative temporal possibilities. 

The Ends

Temperance Hall, South Melbourne, development, 2023

Set to a electro-acoustic, 60 minute composition by SS Sebastian, The Ends investigates the effects of late-stage capitalism on this Western, colonised lives.

Testing Grounds, Melbourne, 2017

For 240 hours (ten days) in October 2017 at Testing Grounds art space in Melbourne, I entered and remained in a temporal isolation chamber called the TimePod. TimePod was soundproofed, had no natural light, and was otherwise devoid of any way to tell the time. Without any contact with the outside I remained in the TimePod for ten days in order to investigate how performance art might interrupt colonised temporality and possibly discover new ways of thinking about time and temporality.

TimePod

Deliverance

For 240hours (ten days) in 2012, hosted by Berlin’s Platoon Kunsthalle, Kat Henry, William McBride, and Penny Harpham stepped into a 5x6m space with nothing - no shelter, no provisions, no clothes. From there, they issued an invitation to the audience - the general public - to interact with the artwork in any way they would like, and in doing so enable their survival. From there the artwork unfolded in multifarious ways as the artists relinquished any expectations and habits. This time-based experiment investigated many things - shelter, eco-waste management and late capitalism, and the discoveries of extreme long duration and the refusal of colonised temporality.