Saturday 19 September

10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Free Workshop with Greig Burgoyne
Location: The Duncairn, Duncairn Ave, Belfast BT14 6B

Greig Burgoyne is a Glasgow‑born artist whose practice uses drawing as an expanded, site‑responsive investigation into space, perception and the limits of the body. Working across performance, installation, film, sound and text, he employs rule‑based, endurance‑driven processes to test the anomalies of a given site and reveal what is usually invisible. His immersive works often appear precarious or absurd, yet open new dialogues about flux, vulnerability and how we experience space.

Greig is Head of Fine Art at University of Creative Arts, Canterbury and partner in NI Office Connect programme of developing an NI-GB performance art network with Bbeyond and others.

Networking event
5:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Location: The Ledger Studio, Ground floor, 109 - 113 Royal Avenue, Belfast, BT1 1FF

Rainer Pagel

Tim Martin Jones

Madison Agnew

Ash McNaughton

Helen Davison

Bronagh Lawson

Earlier in 2026 Bbeyond secured funding from the Northern Ireland Office to develop a NI-GB Performance Art Network. This was funding to work between east and west across the Irish Sea.

Over the year we have engaged with artists from Performance Platform, tactileBOSCH, SITE, Other, and Spill your Tea.

To celebrate 25 years of Bbeyond we are bringing old and new together to share news about the project, look back on the past, look to the future and cement the connections that we have made.

Please register for this event so dietary requirements can be considered for catering.

Speaking at the event will be

Rainer Pagel – Signatory of original Bbeyond Articles of Association, 2001

Tim Martin-Jones – Cyfarwyddwr Cynorthwyol, Assistant Director, tactileBOSCH // SGÔR

Madison Agnew – Bbeyond, New Commission, 2025/26

Ash McNaughton and Helen Davison – SITE, Kent

Bronagh Lawson – Bbeyond, Project Manager update on NI-GB Performance Art Network

Rainer Pagel was born in 1948, he lives and works in Belfast. Pagel’s art practice developed from the 1970’s in Hamburg and Belfast, very much under the influence of Bazon Brock, Max Bense and Joseph Beuys while in Germany, and Alastair MacLennan, Adrian Hall, Tony Hill and Dr Slavka Sverakova in Northern Ireland. 

After an absence of 21 years from the public arts scene, during which Pagel engaged in “social sculpture” as per Beuys’ definition, he became a co-founder and the first chairperson of Bbeyond, the performance art collective in Northern Ireland in 2000. He has been a member of Bbeyond ever since.

Pagel’s art comments on and at times berates belief systems, societal events, political developments, absurd ideas and conventions of communication and human interaction. Performance as a medium allows him to use process to illustrate how the world in which we live changes while we’re not looking, and how we then misinterpret what we have not seen but assume we know intimately and accept as unassailable truth.

Tim Martin-Jones is an emerging performance practitioner, director, and writer, whose work is concerned with bodily matters; the socio-corporeal, lived experiences of unruly embodiment and desire, and the transmutation of faith and grief through and across the physical plane.

Throughout the course of his practice, he has explored themes of illness and disability, bodily chaos and precarity, faith and its absence, joy and extremity. His work is rooted in the staging of live, in-person performance, both solo and collaboratively, with a curiosity as to how sites influence and shape the creation of live work.

Born and raised as a devout Christian in a lower socio-economic midlands town, his research work has been angled towards investigating the echoes of faith, and how they are enacted across the body. Tim is increasingly engaging with sites of ecological climate precarity, situating the body there as an equally precarious occupant, one that is an equal partner with the implications and consequences of environmental presence and rupture. Working often alongside deep research into the histories of site, Tim aims to bring all of these elements to bear upon the work, thinking through how the past weight of history can inform the precarious present, and how the two can coalesce to make way for affirmative futures. 

Madison Agnew (b. 2002) is a multimedia artist, integrating both painting and performance art to develop work which centres on the body, and its relationship to natural elements such as water and land. Agnew’s work also touches on the interplay between these natural forces and interpersonal feelings. 

Agnew works with painting and performance concurrently, to fabricate a non-representational way to paint and perform using conceptual ideas surrounding memories and feelings of being around these natural elements.

The Irish Coast, particularly the North and West Coast of Ireland, are a strong focal point within Agnew’s work. 

Ash McNaughton is an action-based artist currently situated in Folkstone, UK. Their practice is a process-led exploration or materials, gesture, movement and sound. Site-responsive, durational and ritualistic in nature; Ash implements methods of endurance, repetition and resistance to access altered states of being while reaching out into the spaces.

This practice is an attempt to articulate that which escapes us.

A poetics of a fluid presence in a fixed world.

Ash is an independent artist and producer. They are co-organiser of SITE - a platform for collective site-responsive art interventions and a member of the international Anam Cara Collective.

Image credit: https://ashmcnaughton.com/

Helen Davison is a process-led Performance Artist whose practice explores the moments where communication fails, leaning into action, gesture and sound as a way to share experiences of otherness. Through the palpable qualities of the voice and the resonances of the body, Helen seeks moments of connection outside of self, with a desire to reach cathartic transformation.

Within their solo practice and as part of art collective SITE (in collaboration with artists selina bonelli and Ash McNaughton) Helen often works directly in response to public sites of architectural, ecological and socio-historic interest that hold traces of conflict as an attempt to divest these sites of power, and as offerings of protest. 

Helen’s use of the voice stems from their research into sound, deep listening, and an ongoing practice of vocal improvisation as an extended form of touch. Helen uses everyday materials and objects that hold personal significance, investigating their inherent sonic qualities and resonances, moving through a slow transition and (dis)integration of images, actions and sounds.

Credit for photo is: The Time I Set My Heart By, Gathering, Bidston Observatory, 2026 photo by Ian Whitford.

Bronagh Lawson is a socially and spiritually engaged artist, writer, curator. With a focus on art as a key transformation lever in the on going transformation of our traumatised society. Her resent performance art work at the Conflict Textiles Symposium at Ulster University and Performance Art Bergen in 2025 her piece ‘Honouring the women’ was based on a performance to be done at the death of a women’s co-coalition member. Lawson stood as candidate for the Peace forum for the NI Women’s Co-alition in 1998.

She wrote a weekly art column for the Andersonstown news 2020-2025 and has contributed to Fortnight Magazine and Art UK.

She has co founded Art is Collective a pop up studio weekly art group for adults with disabilities, learning difficulties and mental health issues.