Ant Hampton is a British-German performance maker and writer. His work has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations and interactive relations, using automated devices. His three collaborations with Tim Etchells are participative experiences for two at a time, combining audio with different engagements with the page: text and silent reading (The Quiet Volume, 2010); archive photography (Lest We See, 2015); and mark-making or erasuring (Not to Scale, 2020). With Christophe Meierhans he made The Thing – An Automatic Workshop in Everyday Disruption, about risk-taking. Many of his works continue to tour internationally in over 60 language versions, some of them without anyone needing to travel – a paradoxical outcome for an art committed to liveness and presence, which in turn informed his 2021 research project ShowingWithoutGoing.live – an Atlas. Together with David Bergé, he co-founded Time Based Editions in 2023, a series of ‘live-books’ that combine print and audio.
Photo credits: Sanem Su Avci