This year's Peopling the Palace Festival gives you opportunity to discuss Martin O'Brien's recent work with the performance artist himself in a midday online lecture. Martin is a performance artist and scholar concerned with the representation of illness and disability. His own experience living with cystic fibrosis has inspired his creative process and he employs physical endurance, hardship, disgust, long durations, and pain-based practices to challenge common representations of illness and examine what it means to be born with a life-threatening disease. Through his perfomances Martin not only celebrates his own body, but his work forms an act of resistance to illness, an attempt at claiming agency. A form of sufferance in order to survive.

This talk is part of an ongoing programme conducted by the Queen Mary School of Drama that enables staff to discuss their research during a series of online lunchtime lectures. 

Martin O'Brien has been commissioned and funded by the Live Art Development Agency, Arts Council England and the British Council. His work has been written about in several books and journals including Access All Areas: Live Art and Disability and Performance and the Medical Body. 

1pm: Online via QM's Virtual People's Palace

We are hosting this talk at 1pm in the Queen Mary Virtual People’s Palace via this link https://spatial.chat/s/qmul-airsupplycollective

Virtual doors will open at 12.55. Feel free to drop in early to have a chat and a drink in the foyer before moving into the theatre for the talk.

A computer or laptop will give you the best experience, but you can also join by phone or tablet. We recommend using Google Chrome, however any browser will work. The first time you enter the space, you’ll be asked to register your email. When you join the space, a pop-up window will offer a tutorial. In the Virtual People’s Palace you can enable live captioning through Google Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10538231?hl=en-GB