On the occasion of Andrea Illés' performance, no rock, no flower (West Space, 6 September - 25 October 2025), her collaborator Tom Denize reflects on the ungraspable nature of Illés' work. Illés is a performance artist whose work has been featured at SOFT CENTRE, Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (NZ), Visual Diary, and more. Her exhibition was commissioned by West Space, and is the 'culmination of West Space's multi-part investment in the artist's practice.'
had me on edge but like not on the edge of a cliff more like on the edge of saying something scary to someone I care about
like im anticipating something - like my body knowing something my mind doesn’t yet
by her holding our gazes she’s interpolating us into the performance and we become another mechanism in it, indistinguishable from the monitor, loop pedal, light bar or microphone
neither participants or volunteers or audience anymore
her gaze challenges us and the comfort we have while so casually casting our gaze unto her so willingly and without consequence, but her coming up and looking in everyone’s eyes, holding my hand on the floor, it makes the assumption we all bring with us feel troubled and complex like by looking I am touching her in a way that im not even paying attention to, but I am now
Above are notes I wrote in my journal after seeing Andrea Illés perform for the first time. It was an impromptu crit held in a random tute room in the VCA photography building. Titled You make me (Feel), the performance began with Illés creating a clearing in the group of people gathered in this small room, she then gifted handy-cams to audience members, which fed two monitors with live video, before proceeding to sprint back and forth across the room's longest edge, holding a light bar until she reached a point of exhaustion. Once in this state, Illés created a loop of her heavy breathing on one of her pedals and began to strip. Clad only in a white g-banger and pink mid-calf boots, her gaze moved across the room and settled on different people, the meeting of gazes precipitated a series of repetitive choreographies, getting faster the longer someone held her eye. This pattern later dissolves as Illés picked up a microphone and moved in front of every person in the room, stating ‘you make me feel’ while staring into their eyes, letting the chasm of knowing open up between her and whoever was parallel to her body. The performance ends with Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman playing on top of her breath loop, and she leaves.
In the milieu of performance art being made in Naarm / Melbourne – alongside artists like Alexander Powers, Ari Angkasa, Mara Galagher and Gabriella Imrochova – Illés’ performance practice challenges, troubles and alchemises the complicated relationships between author, myth, self, audience and being in a body. None of these buzzwords feel adequate for her expansive and ever-shifting practice. In the lead up to her first major solo show no rock, no flower at West Space, a lot of what Illés and I have discussed is the flattening of performance that occurs post-factum — whether that be through the documentation, conversation or writing (as I am now doing) — there is something that seduces us in that room that simply cannot be carried outside of it. No rock, no flower is an endurance performance piece that will continue for eight weeks in-person during gallery hours and 24/7 on a continuous livestream. Regardless of how many images or videos from all angles are put on Instagram stories with @purple_stars_expleting tagged, there is always going to be something beyond image and language that happens there. You will know this too if you’ve ever seen her perform, she leaves the room, you clap, look at other people's faces and know that something has been shifted inside of you.
Since this first encounter with her work two years ago, after multiple collaborations and a friendship that only deepens with each time I see her, I still, in many ways, don’t know how to talk about Illés’ work in a way that does it justice. Writing about performance is a kind of dullening, a mere translation and an inevitable betrayal of the work’s a/liveness. Anne Carson gestures to this impossibility in ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’: ‘in the presence of a word that stops itself, in that silence, one has the feeling that something has passed us and kept going, that some possibility has got free’. Just as certain words resist being carried over into another language, performance resists being carried over into documentation. Post-factum words and images capture not the performance itself, but its residue: what remains once the moment has already moved on. What Carson makes clear is that this remainder is not simply absence, but evidence that the performance has always already escaped. It is in this structural impossibility, this constitutive gap between act and account, that the problem of performance writing emerges.
This failure is not incidental but constitutive of performance’s power — it’s what keeps the work alive, what preserves its difference from its representation. This inherent failure is a key exploration in Illés' practice. During Piss Perfect (My Heart Stops) (2024), mid-performance, she approached boys in the audience and whispered in their ear to take a picture of her. Naked, she returns to a mass of train-track gravel on the ground and poses directly for their lens, letting her image be taken freely and fractured, now encased in this boy's phone for him to do with what he pleases. In sorry I was so hungry (2024), Illés gazes directly into the eyes of the problem of subject-agency through a three-week-long durational performance and livestream conducted in her West Space studio. The stream watched as she performed, ate, scrolled on her phone, read, had friends over and slept. Of this work, Illés says,
My research originates from an inability to hold or move my body in positions and alignments that make images that reflect how I understand myself. I search for figurations that hold a glimmer of my self-image and try to replicate them in front of audiences. This is an impossible task, I can never posture myself into the grace of Daphne or Hermaphroditus, even if my body position is accurate. You can never fully understand how I am feeling or vice versa. Both the failure and the faithful attempt are important to me.
Illés’ sentiment here echoes Carson’s in that some things ‘do not intend to be translatable,’ but in their resistance exists a space of productivity. In The Utopian Body, Michel Foucault makes a similar observation about embodiment: the body is at once the most familiar and the most ungraspable of things. To represent the body — to write it, to capture it in performance — becomes a Sisyphean task, always rolling back into incompletion. In our conversation, Illés tells me that she's attracted to the Sisyphean not just because it’s tantalising, but because it’s compulsive.
Ocularly, my self-image has always been deemed as a failure, whether it's one I've produced for transmission or the image seen of me walking down the street. For the most part, my body has been designated as failure. So the impossible task of making a true representation of myself isn’t foreign or just because I’m intoxicated by the impossible, it's a compulsion of my existence - maybe I’m searching for something. Maybe I’m trying (and failing) to control interpretation. Maybe neither.
Yet for Foucault, this fact is not despairing but utopian: the body’s un-representability is precisely what allows it to remain open to projection, fantasy, and becoming.
Illés' work reminds us that the failure to fully capture performance or the body is not a shortcoming of language or art but their condition of possibility. What her failure in ‘accurate’ self-representation achieves is not a closure but an opening. Her incomplete task preserves the body’s strangeness and the performance’s liveness as sites of inherent refusal. ‘The body is the zero point of the world,’ Foucault insists. ‘There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere.’ Writing fails the performance, the performance fails the body, the body fails its own image — and yet in this cascade of failures something else opens: the shimmer of a possibility that can’t be pinned down, only glimpsed in passing.
It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine… My body is like the City of the Sun. It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate.
Foucault’s words sketch the body as both nowhere and everywhere, the centre point in a mess of lines crossing over from which all paths lead. Illés turns on this core, inhabiting the body as a site of refusal and of potential, a place that resists capture even as it invites it, facing an audience with overflowing overtures. To dwell in such a body is to accept incompletion not as a failure but as a promise: that something will always exceed us.
At the opening of no rock, no flower last Saturday, I watched Illés suspend her limp body from a rolled-up tube hanging from the ceiling; she was choking on an endoscopic camera inserted down her throat as it fed a livestream to three seventy-two-inch screens behind her. Her insides were made outer as she lightly convulsed on the silver floor made of roofing insulation. It's Monday now, and I watch her make breakfast and eat it silently in bed via a Twitch stream, occasionally staring into what I assume is her own reflection mirrored in her laptop screen, contemplative as she puts spoonfuls of oats into her mouth. To me, these two encounters encapsulate not the triumph of transcendence but the insistence of remainder, the parts that normally escape the frame, the gestures that will not settle. Illés dissolves the stage and rehearsal room into one another, letting them coagulate into something that is both and neither.
Her work circles this congealing of states, neither trying to resolve it nor to turn it into pure spectacle, but to let it remain active, proliferating. In this light, her practice reads less as an account of what slips away than as a commitment to staying with what persists: the awkward, the partial, the untranslatable. Her performances refuse closure, not to mystify, but to keep open a space where a body can be encountered in its incongruousness rather than its legibility. This is the terrain her practice occupies, not the rapture of transcendence but the discipline of refusal, the generative labour of keeping the body uncontained.